Digital currency trading platform eToro has just unveiled a new initiative to help bolster the intersecting worlds of art, brands, crypto assets, and the brilliant creators behind them. Aptly coined eToro.art, the program itself works as a digital gallery with NFTs of all kinds being showcased on display akin to a museum.
The company announced the new play on Thursday, April 7th, at the Miami-based contemporary art museum, The Bass. The digital gallery acts as the main piece for the eToro initiative, with $20 million going towards the purchase of said NFTs to broaden the scope of the asset integrity and aid in the advancement of talented creators.
To be clear, none of the NFTs on display can be purchased by individuals or even brands just yet. The point of the eToro.art gallery is merely to heighten interests both from outside and inside investors of the eToro ecosystem. The company is likewise setting aside an additional $10 million to increase support of newer NFT projects and aid still-emerging designers in their NFT machinations.
US eToro managing director, Guy Hirsch, explains to CNBC how this new push into crypto assets is only the very beginning of a new mainline strategy for the company to explore services in the NFT arena. From metaverse real estate to NFT-based music productions, the concept can be utilized in a ton of varied ways, which Hirsch sees as the next step in broadening the realm for investors.
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"Before, with bitcoin and ether, you had only the likes of Goldman Sachs or similar traditional financial players participating or looking at expanding into crypto. NFTs are essentially making any and every potential brand a participant in this market," says Hirsch.
The company hopes to only amplify the potential in NFTs beyond art and marketing purposes, as witnessed in myriad cases, including Gucci, Nike, Ferrari, and more. Through eToro and its newly designed online NFT art exhibit, the crypto assets can thus find even more exposure, value, and overall weight in terms of outward capabilities.
This is one of the main worries behind video games utilizing NFTs for gamers, as the art form could be abused if used in tandem with the likes of microtransactions. But, this isn't eToro's prerogative. The platform wants to rid the myriad questions behind specific values in NFTs, with most merely finding a dollar sign in terms of scarcity, or what Hirsch explains as a floor price, the collection's overall minimum amount for a single asset.
Specifically, in the case of varied digital art, eToro will coalesce both sides of the equation, connecting investors with artists to ensure valuations, concepts, and overall acceptance can all be made in tandem. Hirsch sees this as a pseudo-new-wave art form arena, wherein everyday collectors and investors, as opposed to the super-rich, can find and gather art on a whim.
Hirsch explains that today's field "needs to be more sophisticated" and allow for a more streamlined approach to NFT adoption, "akin to the appraisal of traditional art." He says:
"Within a year or two we'll have third-party services that will appraise individual pieces and give you an approximate price on what you're about to buy or what you own in a way that would be agreed on by market participants."
The white-collar reality of NFT trading has taken quite a while to gear up and gather momentum. Just recently, museums have adopted the new form of digital art exhibits, seeing not just the beauty but overall value in displaying such pieces for their visitors. And, sure, people will say that the hype is slowly dying off, but not when market values can see a potential of $80 billion by 2025.
Thus, eToro's angle here is to ensure that NFTs can still be imaginative and affordable, allowing for a larger pool of investors to buy-in. With typical concepts now reaching into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, oftentimes even exponentially more, a streamlined approach to evaluating NFTs across the board is certainly a worthwhile investment for the potential growing interest in crypto-asset collecting.
