The world of NFTs is never dull — as long as the money never stops. While investors continue to pour billions into the sector, albeit at a slowing pace, more crypto buyers are spinning up funds to back NFT platforms, projects and the non-fungible tokens themselves.
While dedicated funds solely devoted to NFTs as an asset class are starting to pop up, it’s still a risky space for the bigger institutional firms. That’s not stopping those investors from becoming LPs in the NFT funds themselves, though. A number of prominent Silicon Valley crypto VCs have backed a new upstart NFT fund led by Andrew Jiang and Todd Goldberg.
NFTs are unique tokens that can be used to demonstrate ownership over digital assets. They’ve become a popular way for digital artists to showcase their talent and turn a profit, with billions now pouring into the NFT art world.
Last month alone saw more than $4 billion in NFT sales, according to DappRadar, on top of the $21 billion throughout 2021. Now there appears to be growing interest in the market among large investment funds, including billionaire tech entrepreneurs like Andreessen.
The $30 million fund called Curated is devoted to buying and holding NFT artwork. The fund is backed by a who’s who of crypto investors with LPs including a sizable chunk of a16z’s investing team (Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, Andrew Chen, Arianna Simpson and Jon Lai are all backers), as well as Alexis Ohanian, Justin Kan, Electric Capital’s Avichal Garg & Curtis Spencer and a host of other investors and founders in the space.
The fund plans to invest about half of the fund in so-called “blue-chip NFTs” including popular projects like CryptoPunks, Art Blocks and Bored Apes as well as works from popular artists selling singular NFT works. The other half of the fund is going into what Jiang and Goldberg deem as “high potential collections” from artists with smaller existing markets.
According to a Twitter thread by the Curated account, the fund is meant for high-signal collectors and is long-term focused. “We believe we’re still very early!” Curated wrote. “We will patiently wait for opportune times to buy and plan to hold most assets long-term—5-10 years or longer.”
“We want to become a top collector of culturally and historically significant assets,” Goldberg told Decrypt via Twitter. “Ultimately, we want our on-chain provenance to matter. Outside of pure collecting, Curated will be helpful to creators and builders,” he added.
Goldberg says other projects to which Curated plans to contribute include building open-source tools and helping creators with launch strategy and smart contract deployment. Smart contracts are programs that execute once specific criteria are met, and they’re what networks like Ethereum and Solana use to mint and trade NFTs.
