Fractional Ownership is Ownership (Part 2) — Creating Community with NFTs
Intro
The last 18 or so months have been tough on A LOT of people. Even as we return to some sense of normalcy, the impact of being at home — many of us alone — can’t be understated. As a big fan of live events and social gatherings, I can say with confidence that the little spark I get from meeting new people or making a meaningful connection for two mutual friends was missing for most of 2020 and well into this year. If you’re like me, you turned to digital tools and social media to fill the void as companies like Zoom found their ways into our personal calendars to see friends and families that we missed. For me, leaning into virtual communities and using technology to stay connected to folks really helped me create new friends, launch new business endeavors, and simply manage a lot of what I was carrying. Pouring into those communities helped me and I did my best to be helpful, too.
Creating Community
I want to say that I have always been a person that strived to create community. I hope that’s true and I hope that’s what folks that know me would say if you asked them. I want to be known for going out of my way to make sure that the person in the corner of the room is warmly invited into the conversation or for interrupting a speaker to create space for someone who hasn’t spoken yet to chime in when a discussion is being dominated by one or two people. It's something that I take pride in primarily because I think that deep down, I hate being left out. When it comes to my friend groups, they will tell you that I’m constantly the one bringing up some new technology, some random innovation overseas, or the latest and greatest concept that is designed to push our boundaries of what we once thought was impossible. As of late, my most consistent topic has been around this cryptocurrency and NFT space. Not because I believe I’m some kind of expert — trust me, I’m not and spoiler alert… no one is — but because as I’m learning about this stuff, I don’t want them to be left out. I don’t want us to be left out.
FOMO
FOMO or Fear of Missing Out is a phrase that is casually tossed around these days. As a person that grew up adjacent to some of these resources, wealth-creating events, and opportunities, I didn’t have FOMO. I was intentionally left out. I had no idea what I was missing. As I got older and found myself in different rooms and closer to this kind of information, I made it a point to quickly disseminate this information with two clear goals:
- Create space for more people like me (those who were once left out) to enter the room.
- Educate others so that they can create their own rooms because ownership should be for everyone.
I think about ALLLL the new people that I now know and have access to and all the stuff that I have learned. Whether it was from Clubhouse last summer or Twitter throughout this year, I am seeing people share more and more of their experiences and information that typically has been gatekept. As many of us learned about a little thing like Bitcoin, we likely ignored it because we didn’t understand it and no one made the time to explain how it works, what it can do, and how you could get involved. I don’t want that to happen again so that’s why I’m intentionally sharing my #NFT journey in hopes that this all becomes more accessible…for all of us.
Putting My Money Where My Mouth Is
FORTY-FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS! Yup, that’s right. $45k USD (for the homies) or 11.99 ETH for the crypto crowd is what tender 2128 is now listed for. As I mentioned in Fractional Ownership is Ownership (Part 1), me and a group of internet strangers came together to buy a piece from the 10,000 piece debut NFT collection by Damien Hirst titled, The Currency. Our goal for this experiment was very simple: acquire a blue-chip piece, fractionalize it so others can join in, educate them as a part of this process so that this can be their own ramp to the world of NFTs. We have already completed part one and part two and we’re on our way into part three. This NFT (as a whole) is likely more money than the average person would spend when they want to tip their toe into a new space. While this is not investment advice, I can’t imagine spending $45k to learn something… there’s a student loan joke there somewhere but I digress… Julia Lipton led this effort so that we can create an affordable entry point to this beautiful piece while hopefully creating a community that wants to continue to learn about NFTs and DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations). I got involved because this project checks off both #1 and #2 of my goals above. By acquiring the piece and fractionalizing it, we’re creating space for more folks to get involved. By documenting this journey through blogs, tweets, and audio convos that we plan to have in the next few days, we are intending to educate folks who are joining our party but also folks that aren’t quite ready yet and may want to do their own thing down the road.
Creating Community
This is an experiment. The hypothesis is that most of the stuff out there about NFTs is jargony and once the really cool projects start to “moon” (rise in value significantly), it is too expensive for you to “Ape in” (commit to the project and buy the NFT). This is the beginning. Everyone that joins the party will receive $OURDOTS tokens which is a fractional representation of ownership of the original NFT. I will be personally working with Julia and the rest of the folks in our community to provide more resources for you to learn about opportunities to buy more NFTs but also what the utility can be for them, how the market is moving, and tips & tools that we’re using to educate ourselves as well. I’m excited about this journey to help more folks learn about this space and I look forward to getting together IRL (in real life) with many of you. If this is something you’re interested in joining now, check out the Party and remember to DYOR (do your own research)!
