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Informationen zum Autor Steve Kaczynski and Scott Duke Kominers Klappentext "A Harvard Business School professor and a16z crypto research partner and a career marketer and Web3 entrepreneur demystify the coming digital revolution, showing how NFTs will transform our online and offline interactions. NFTs aren't just pictures on the internet, or a fad that has come and gone. Rather, they're a new technology for creating digital assets and providing irrefutable proof of ownership. NFTs open up markets that have never before existed, and are already revolutionizing commerce and brand-building at everything from hot startups to Fortune 500 companies. Kominers and Kaczynski have created a framework that explains what NFTs are, why they're valuable, and how businesses can leverage them to build highly engaged and intensely loyal communities around their products and brands. Through original research and industry experience, Kominers and Kaczynski describe the possibilities of this new digital frontier with clarity and rigor. The Everything Token is the essential primer on this innovation that has the potential to transform all aspects of business"-- Leseprobe 1 Introduction Planet of the Apes In March 2022, one of the then-hottest startup companies on the planet raised $450 million in an oversubscribed investment round valuing the company at $4 billion. Investors were champing at the bit to fund Yuga Labs, a unicorn startup whose premier product was . . . digital pictures of cartoon monkeys!? The pictures weren't made by a famous artist. In fact, while their individual visual features had been hand-drawn, the images themselves were created by a computer process. An algorithm randomly combined features like fur, clothes, and facial expressions into an image looking something like this: Popular sites like Quora and Reddit were flooded with people asking versions of "Why would anyone pay real money for a random picture of a monkey?" Some commentators pointed out that the pictures technically weren't of monkeys at all-they were of apes, which are a different kind of primate-but that didn't do much to clarify why anyone would think they might have value. Even more baffling, in a world where most consumer startups race to acquire as many customers as possible and tout their "total addressable market," Yuga had only created ten thousand of the images, and committed to never produce any more. The whole premise seemed ridiculous. But even more absurd on its face was that the pictures weren't quite the product at all. Indeed, they were publicly available for anyone to view or download on the internet. What Yuga had really "sold" was just a series of digital records-non-fungible tokens (NFTs)-which associated specific people (or rather, their computer accounts) with specific images in the collection. That's right: investors put hundreds of millions of dollars into a company that had sold ten thousand digital records linking computer accounts to public primate pictures. Moreover, while Yuga had created these digital records, it didn't even control them. Unlike the tech platform behemoths that closely guard every bit of their data, Yuga's NFTs were stored on a public decentralized computer network called a blockchain, so once they were created, the NFTs were in effect out of the company's hands. Yuga couldn't control who bought, sold, or traded them-much less the market price. And the public nature of the blockchain meant that wherever the images went was tracked for the whole world to see. The whole phenomenon left many observers scratching their heads. The images weren't much like the type of art that people often paid millions of dollars for-and again, to the extent that anyone "bought" or "owned" one of these images at all, what they actually got was the digital record, i.e., the associated NFT. People could buy and sell NFTs just as they migh...
