How to find investible NFTs - Business Times SG interview

Floor is Rising

10-03-2022 • 42 mins

https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/lifestyle/nfts-finding-the-diamonds-among-the-duds

Interviewed for the article in Business Times above, full interview below

https://www.floorisrising.com/diamonds-among-duds/

NFTs: Finding the diamonds among the duds

10/03/2022 - 18:25

EXACTLY one year ago, a non-fungible token (NFT) artwork sold for US$69 million to a Singapore-based technopreneur. Since then, the NFT space has ballooned from a US$2 million market into a US$25 billion one, showed figures from market tracker DappRadar.

With millions of cartoon apes and pixellated characters to choose from, how do you find the best NFTs to hold or flip? Are there tools to select investment-grade NFTs? Is there even such a thing as investment-grade NFTs when many cultural establishments, such as museums, steer clear of them?

We speak with three experts who have been watching the space from the beginning:

Clara Che Wei Peh is an art curator best known for curating the groundbreaking NFT exhibition at Fine Art Storage Services in Le Freeport in 2021. She is also the founder of the Discord group NFT Asia, a community for Asian NFT artists with over 3,600 members.

Kizu (not his real name) is a Singapore art critic who has written for Wall Street Journal, ArtAsiaPacific, and other titles. While he's well-known in Singapore's art circles, he prefers to use the pseudonym Kizu when he co-hosts the NFT podcast Floor Is Rising.

His fellow co-host, Sabretooth (also not his real name), is a serial technopreneur who calls himself "a professional NFT collector". His publicly accessible NFT wallet contains over 1,000 NFTs.

(The interviews were conducted separately. But in the interest of brevity and clarity, they are merged here and edited to reflect the range of responses.)

Q: How does one pick investment-grade NFTs if one intends to hold them for long or flip them quickly?

Clara: Everyone has different criteria for buying NFTs they wish to hold. Some people would look at the reputation of the creative team and the artwork itself, whether the project has the potential to scale up and deliver value over time. Value can come in different forms - it could be, for example, a game that's really enjoyable; it could be further airdrops or tokens that can bring utility.

I think a lot of people would agree that you should look for projects you genuinely like. But if you're looking to flip something, you probably have to look at the hype that project has built for itself on the various media platforms.

However, what I've just described are the criteria for collectible NFTs. It's also important to state the distinction between collectible NFTs versus fine-art NFTs, because the markets for these look different. For fine-art NFTs, it's really about artists that you believe in and want to invest in over time.

Sabretooth: NFTs are such a new investment category that there is no consensus on what is an investment-grade NFT. There are huge portions of the population who think every NFT is a bubble or scam. And it's tough to call something investment-worthy if it has not been through multiple bull and bear markets, and survived.

And so, I look for things that have shown some kind of longevity in the market, even if the...

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