I recently got a Samsung Frame TV to use as an NFT display at home. I had been looking for one for a while and I finally pulled the trigger last week. The way the Frame works is that it's a TV when it's on, and it's an art display when it's off. But I really don't care about the TV part. I just wanted a good looking art display.
There are a lots of purpose-built NFT displays on the market right now, including Tokenframe, Blackdove, Muse, and others. And I was very close to getting a Muse Frame.
But ultimately I decided on the Samsung Frame because it was (1) cheaper for its size (50"), (2) it looks cool, and (3) I was fine with just a simple high-quality display. I think there will be lots more software and dongles created in the future for people who want to showcase their NFTs on whatever they happen to have at home.
However, if you're a crypto and NFT purist, this maybe isn't the display for you -- at least right now. Out of the box, it doesn't connect with any crypto wallets. And so you're not going to automatically see the provenance of each art piece (more on this below). Instead, the default method is to just upload JPEGs to the TV from Samsung's SmartThings app (insert right-click-save-as jokes here).
Overall, I'm really happy with the display. Here are my initial thoughts:
I have it set to randomly rotate through my art every 3 minutes. There's also a motion detection feature that works reasonably well. If it doesn't detect any motion, the display will go completely to sleep. But for some reason, it occasionally gets possessed and the TV will randomly turn on. Last week it kept turning on old Baywatch episodes. Possibly user error.
Samsung's SmartThings app is bad. It's buggy and a pain to use. For example, even though I've given it complete access to my phone's photos, they never seem to show up. I have to limit access and then go and select the ones I want to use in my gallery.
I have found that I prefer when the art is full bleed versus within the Frame's skeuomorphic picture mat. This is a new form of art and so I like the idea of breaking past traditions. But unless your images are 16x9 and a high enough resolution (I have generally found > 3000px wide to work), then you're going to get prompted to insert and select a mat design.
I have solved this problem by manually cropping and editing the individual pieces. Some NFT collections, such as CyberBrokers, also give you vector files which allows you to play around as you see fit. Again, if you're an NFT and/or art purist, you're probably not going to like this. But I think of it as curating the pieces.
Most of my art is on Ethereum, Solana, and Tezos. Being able to upload whatever I want is helpful, because not all NFT displays support all of the chains. The Muse Frame, for instance, only supports Ethereum and Polygon right now.
PNG files and video files aren't supported natively. This is a significant drawback and so eventually I know I'm going to have to change up the software that powers this display. And there are options. Bright Moments offers display software for holders of its NFTs. Fred Wilson's venture firm USV created this setup. And I'm sure there are countless others. These can solve the provenance issue mentioned above by pulling directly from the various blockchains.
In the end, I knew what I was getting into with the Frame. I knew it wasn't a purpose-built NFT display and I was fine with that. It's still early days in this space. But it sure is nice to finally see my NFT art in large format.
As per tradition around here, I like to bookend the new year with two posts: a post that revisits my random predictions for the year and a post that talks about what might happen in the year to follow. Today's post is the former. So let's see how I did:
I thought the interest rate hikes would come to an end in Q1-2023. But that didn't happen until the summer. I also thought this would lead to a mild recession in Canada. Technically, we are not actually in one, but according to some, we kind of are.
I thought the real estate sector would start seeing some distress in the first half of the year, and that a new equilibrium would be found in the second half. This proved to be overly optimistic in terms of timing. A lot ended up being on pause for the entire year, and I now think that my forecast was at least a year too early. The sea change is still underway.
Given the overall slowdown in real estate, I felt that construction costs had to see some softening. This did, in fact, happen with some of the "earlier trades", such as shoring and excavation, and we did see some specific trade pricing, such as concrete formwork, come down by as much as 30%. The smart cost consultants we work with now expect to see overall hard costs come down by a further 5-6% next year in Toronto. This makes sense given construction starts are way down.
With me expecting the interest rate increases to stop in Q1, I thought that pre-construction condominium sales would return in a meaningful way by the spring. While we did see some buoyancy around that time, it was short lived. Sales remained nearly shutoff for the entire year, but for maybe a handful of projects. The more successful projects tended to be outside of the Toronto core and at lower price points.
With respect to home prices in more tertiary/fringe markets, my sense then, as it is now, was that these prices would remain below the peaks for many years. In addition to the upward momentum created by low rates, my view was/is that some of this pricing was the result of a bet on urban decentralization. I don't think that has played out as many expected it to, so that's why I think it will be many years before the pricing we saw in early 2022 returns.
The momentum around "expanding housing options" in our low-rise neighborhoods is many years in the making. And a lot of progress was made in 2023. Here in Toronto, we adopted new multiplex policies that now allow fourplexes plus an accessory dwelling (so 5 homes in total) on an as-of-right basis. I continue to believe that this momentum is only going to grow. I also think we will see the arrival of more mixed-use opportunities.
I believed that, broadly speaking, urban transit ridership would remain below pre-pandemic levels for all of 2023. This proved to be the case for most US and Canadian cities. But things are improving. For Canada as a whole, it looks like we'll see full recovery sometime in 2024 based on this trend line.
I thought 2023 was going to be the year I took my inaugural ride in an autonomous vehicle. Sadly, this didn't happen. The sector as a whole also saw some setbacks. Hopefully I'll get a chance next year.
I assumed that Apple would finally release its augmented reality device. And though they didn't technically release Vision Pro, they did announce it. So I guess that counts for something. I also thought that 2023 would be a big year for "phygital" goods. Maybe it was. Or maybe it was more of a building year. A lot of people are curious to see how Vision Pro does in 2024. It's not set up for the mass market, just yet, but I think it will do exactly what it is supposed to once it's out in the wild.
Finally, crypto. I know that a lot of you like to skip over these posts, but it is something that I feel strongly about. A year ago, though, I was pretty bearish on Solana. Boy was I wrong. Solana ended the year as the best performing major crypto asset -- up 933% at the time of writing this. Oops! However, Ether is also +91%, and I continued to dollar-cost average in all throughout the year.
Next up: What will, or more accurately, what might happen in 2024.
The US has tech and France has luxury goods:
The roots of French dominance lie in a luxury ecosystem that dates to the court of Louis XIV, and a culture of corporate raiding that began with Bernard Arnault. After gaining control of LVMH in 1989, he set out to build the first house of luxury brands through serial acquisitions. Rivals followed his lead. Increasingly, the global luxury industry is based on goods that are still made by small Italian firms but sold by big French conglomerates. Gucci, Bulgari, Fendi — all are Italian brands now under French owners.
While US tech firms overshadow all rivals, the same can be said of French luxury. Among the top luxury firms, the French have annual sales three times higher than the Swiss, more than four times the Americans and Chinese and 12 times the Italians.
One of the most interesting things that LVMH is doing, though, is a combination of tech and luxury goods. In 2021, they announced, along with founding partners Prada and Cartier, a new luxury goods blockchain called Aura.
The idea behind Aura (an appropriate name, in my opinion) is to create a kind of digital passport that proves authenticity and ownership, and also allows for traceability. So if you want to sell one of your luxury items or you need to service it, now someone can easily see the chain of ownership and determine that it's real.
This to me is a perfect use case for the blockchain technology and, as of March of this year, the group was reporting 24 brands on board. At the same time, they also announced a new feature that allows brands to participate through public chains such as Ethereum or Solana.
All of this is probably still very esoteric to most. But eventually the tech will recede into the background and most will probably just see it as, "I'm buying this expensive purse and along with it I get this digital passport thingy that lives on my phone. I don't know or care how the tech works, but it makes me feel even more special."
However, a big question remains: What does all of this innovation do to industry concentration? (Which is one of the main points of the above article.) One promise of crypto is that it will be a decentralizing force in our economy. And while I believe this to be directionally true, I obviously understand that LVMH has an empire to maintain here.
For those of us who deal in real estate, it is also interesting to think about this topic of brands and authenticity when it comes to property. And so we will talk about that later this week on the blog.