The Winkelvoss Twins, Bitcoin Billionaires and Foes of Facebook, Are Launching a New Blockchain Art Marketplace

Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss,
the identical twins and crypto-entrepreneurs who once alleged that
Mark Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook from them, have
launched a new online marketplace to sell limited-edition digital
art. 

The rebranding of the website Nifty Gateway—a startup that the twins’ cryptocurrency
company Gemini Trust Co. acquired last year, marking their
first-ever acquisition—allows artists and collectors to buy, sell,
and track ownership of digital art through blockchain
technology. 

The relaunched Nifty Gateway
will enable artists to issue limited-edition works and, if you
believe the site’s pitch, take better control of the market for
their work. Duncan and
Griffin Cock Foster, who founded Nifty Gateway—and who, we kid you
not, are also identical twins—compare the site’s goods to
“digital Air Jordans.” 

“If I own a pair of shoes and
Nike shuts down, I don’t expect that my shoes would just
disappear,” Duncan Cock Foster told the Intelligencer in a profile earlier this month. “We expect our
items to behave a certain way, and past digital items have
not.”

Until recently, the best-known
objects sold on Nifty Gateway—grouped under the umbrella term
“Nifties”—were digital breeding cats from the popular novelty
CryptoKitties. But the
relaunched site encompasses a wide range of digital artwork. (New
“exhibitions,” or groups of work, are released every third
Thursday.)

Michael Kagan, an artist perhaps
best known for his collaboration with Pharrell Williams’s
Billionaire Boys Club clothing company, has contributed
a quintet of
space-themed digital paintings that range in price from $3,000 to $5,000. Lyle
Owerko, whose image of the Twin Towers exploding famously graced the cover
of TIME’s 9/11 issue, is selling different-colored graphics of
boomboxes. A brass-colored boombox goes for $20, while the gold one
goes for $2,500.

“I haven’t done anything like
this before, which is all the more reason to do this now,” Owerko
told Bloomberg about the opportunity. 

Of course, Nifty Gateway isn’t
the first enterprise to try to tap into the market for digital
art—but it is perhaps the best capitalized. Upstart companies with
names like R.A.R.E, DADA, Snark, and ARTBLX have previously branded themselves as the go-to
marketplaces for digital art, though none have made a splash beyond
the niche world of crypto-investing. (After its launch, ARTBLX
later pivoted its business model to selling fractional-ownership
shares in “investment-grade” artworks.)

The Winklevoss twins predict,
loftily, that the market for “Nifties” could become as large as
those for art, collectibles, and gaming digital items combined. One
hopes that the venture has a better outcome than their last
art-related investment. In 2014, the twins announced with fanfare
that they had invested in the online auction house Paddle8.
Yesterday, Paddle8 filed for
bankruptcy. 

The post The Winkelvoss Twins, Bitcoin Billionaires and Foes
of Facebook, Are Launching a New Blockchain Art Marketplace
appeared first on artnet News.