Motion: NFTs are dumb (Edmund Schuster vs. Andrew Steinwold, co-host: Maria Shen)

Guests:

Edmund Schuster (twitter.com/edmund_schuster)
Andrew Steinwold (twitter.com/andrewsteinwold)
Host:

Richard Yan (twitter.com/gentso09)
Special co-host: Maria Shen (twitter.com/mariashen)

Today’s motion is “NFTs are dumb.”

Non Fungible Tokens have taken the world by storm. A transaction in NFT is a transaction in some sort of digital ownership. Or as the Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine put it, “digital ostentation.” As the new owner of the NFT of a song or a jpeg, you don’t have exclusionary access to the 0’s and the 1’s that make up the digital object. But there is still scarcity ascribed to the thing you’re buying, because the seller promises to only do this transaction a small number of times.

So as a buyer, you may feel good about a special bond you have now formed with the seller - in general an artist. Or you can signal to the world that you have deep enough pockets to have made such a transaction.

In our debate today, on one side, we have a London School of Economics professor who is both a staunch no-coiner and an NFT bear. On the other, we have a founding partner of a NFT dedicated fund that started in 2019. Our cohost is from a renowned crypto fund, an NFT advocate and a collector herself. So this will be interesting.

If you would like to debate or want to nominate someone, please DM me at @blockdebate on Twitter.

Please note that nothing in our podcast should be construed as financial advice.

Listen-along transcript: https://share.descript.com/view/NnA9YEyInkE

Source of select items discussed in the debate (and supplemental material):

• Edmund Schuster: http://edmundschuster.com/
• Andrew Steinwold’s podcast: https://twitter.com/zima_red
• Andrew Steinwold’s NFT & Metaverse newsletter: http://andrewsteinwold.substack.com
• Maria Shen at Electric Capital: https://www.electriccapital.com/team/maria-shen
• NBA Topshot: https://nbatopshot.com/
• Opensea (NFT sale platform): https://opensea.io/
• Beeple’s $69M NFT sale: https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/11/22325054/beeple-christies-nft-sale-cost-everydays-69-million
• Twitter thread questioning whether NFT is true un-censorable: https://twitter.com/jonty/status/1372163423446917122

Guest bios: 

Edmund Schuster is an Associate Professor of corporate law at the London School of Economics and Political Science. In October 2019, he published the paper “Cloud Crypto Land” that discusses inherent obstacles in the legal system that prevent blockchain systems and smart contracts from being truly useful. He is a self-declared no-coiner.

Andrew Steinwold is a managing partner of an NFT-focused crypto fund named Sfermion. He also publishes content about the NFT world via his newsletter and podcast, both named Zima Red. He thinks “NFTs are eating the world.”

Maria Shen is a partner on the investment team at Electric Capital, a well-known crypto fund. NFTs are part of their scope of investment. She is the author of the well-followed crypto developer report.