Fungible Slices of Non-Fungible Tokens
Also URL due diligence, greenium, recycling symbols, ESG shorts, buyback taxes and banking-job YouTubers.
We talked yesterday about some people who bought an online pointer to a digital picture of a dog (a non-fungible token, or NFT) for $4 million and, a few months later, “fractionalized” it into 16,969,696,969 tokens1 and sold 20% of them for $45 million, giving the picture of a dog a total market value of about $225 million. (It doubled the next day, though it later came down a bit.) I do feel like, when I started in the financial industry in 2007, this would have been easily the craziest and most important financial story of the year, and now it is just Thursday in NFTs.
Anyway I made some jokes and expressed some exasperation about this yesterday, and then I got a brilliant email from a reader, who wrote: