📟The Pager: Cool Finance Era
Square, Jay-Z, 3Lau, Zora and Origin Protocol
We need a word, please. Real quick, tho.
So, NahRabbits started in late 2019. Our goal was to put our friends on to the not-so-obvious shit going on in what we called “Cool Finance”.
The road to putting ppl on to crypto and innovative stocks has been a slow progression, but we always knew crypto, in particular, would start kicking down financial barriers in sectors like the art and the music world.
The announcement of Square and Tidal pairing up, let us know that we have been right from day one. That there was always an intersection of finance and hip hop/pop culture that could be connected, once the barriers of entry to the traditional financial markets were brought down.
Say what you will about Robinhood, but they did make it possible for people who have been locked out of participating in investing, trading stocks, buying options, etc. In particular, marginalized communities, who are the architects of pop culture.
These communities have been largely ignored and one of NahRabbit’s goals was to shed light on opportunities for everyone. With this announcement, the goal of putting people on just got hella easier. So with that said, we are going to keep this thang pushing and let you know about some new stuff!
And, yes, we LaserEye’d this write up! Ha! ✨
-Nahrabbits Team
For the longest time, music artists in general, have always gotten the shitty deals from record companies. For example, TLC filed for bankruptcy after selling 11 million copies of CrazySexyCool in the United States.
TLDR:
TLC made .56 cents per album (split in 3 ways) while they were on LaFace records. They were entitled to $5.6 million dollars (CrazySexyCool) only, but that was reduced further, due to recouped record cost, taxes, etc. When the dust settled, they had roughly $1.3 million to divide amongst the 3 of them.
That’s $433,000 per member.
CrazySexyCool made over $75 million dollars for their record company.
These stories are the type of shit we hear all the time from the music artist. We believe Dapps (Decentralized Applications) built on Ethereum will enable all artists, very quickly, to reap the financial benefits of their hard earned efforts in the form of an NFT.
And the fun part is that the fans can get in on the action too!
“Pay us like you owe us for all the years that you hoe’d us” - Jay- Z
On Feb 28th, 2021, a DJ artist by the name of 3LAU ( BL-OUW) tokenized his 2018 album Ultra-Violet, enabled by an Ethereum based cryptocurrency platform, called Origin Protocol.
3LAU made over 11 million dollars in less than 48 hours.
We believe this is the first time an album has been tokenized, netting over $11 million.
Pretty revolutionary.
Looks like 3LAU is a self fulfilling prophecy! He did that!
3LAU is just different. He is a DJ with a background in finance. He studied Index Derivatives and worked for Blackrock, the world's largest asset manager, with trillions of dollars under management back in the day.
Here again, finance and music intersected organically and 3LAU was able to leverage the supply and demand of his album on the Ethereum blockchain via Origin Protocol.
Crypto’s fine-grained granularity lets creators capture a much larger area under the demand curve - Chris Dixon,a16z
3LAU allowed his fans to buy 1 of 33 NFTs redeemable for special edition vinyl, unreleased slap, and dope experiences like providing input to the artist on a new track, lifetime hall passess to any concert, his personal phone number, etc. He is able to essentially attach whatever perk he wanted to the NFT.
Product Scarcity
Only 33 of 3LAU’s “Ultraviolet” Vinyl NFTs will ever be minted. As you can see from the picture below, the top bidder paid 3LAU $3.6 million in $ETH currency for the Platinum package. The top bidder will get to extract the most value out of the package as a fan.
How, tho? It’s programmed via smart contract. It’s permissionless. This type of deal structure is unheard of in traditional music deals. Record companies just don’t have the tech to do it. But Ethereum/NFTs enable this!
An NFT can allow a fan to then resell that tokenized album back to the market, and make a profit. The brilliant part is the artist still gets paid over and over again on the resells of the album in perpetuity. 🤯
The Web 3 Model
This is a great snap at the shift that happening in the space. Essentially, with this new model, you only need 1 generous fan to make a dope living creating media.
This is exactly what 3LAU did.
credit to Neer
The Origin Protocol x 3LAU
TLDR: 3LAU used the Origin Protocol to put his shit out and he made $11.6 million in 48 hours. From what we heard on Clubhouse, this took hella months to organize.
The natural speculators in us assumes that if $11 plus million was made, then other artists could come to build on top of Origin to try and duplicate 3LAU’s success. It appears those new convos are happening more and more on Clubhouse.
“Every major label, every major artist are blowing up our DMs and our inboxes right now” - Matthew Liu, cofounder of Origin Protocol
“ Paris is flirting with NFTs”
listen to recorded ClubHouse call, start @ 09:35 below.
Clubhouse is Alpha!
One thing we always hear from critics of cryptocurrency “but where is the value in these platforms?” 3LAU’s historic moment is all you need, to see the potential of value that cryptocurrency platforms like Origin Protocol have.
Not Financial Advice… but
Origin currently goes for $.44 cents per coin. It can be picked up on various exchanges like Uniswap. Do your own research before buying. We are merely putting this on your radar as it appears this could be big if Origin continues to leverage its tech with other use cases and scales so anyone can do what 3LAU did.
✨Honorable Mention
Zora x Disclosure NFT
If you are not interested in buying some shares of Square, or Origin, then invest your time in creating some clean-ass NFTs yourself. One platform we mess with heavy is ZORA.
Per Zora, they are a universal market protocol for media ownership. The dope part about Zora is folks can set a perpetual ownership stake in their creations and get rewards whenever resell happens to a new owner. They take 0%. The maker only pay a minting fee.
Dance music group, Disclosure recently got in on the NFT wave after seeing 3LAU rake in millions in less than 48 hours.
Zora is another beast of its own that needs to be explored further. They are scratching the surface and creating “an internet renaissance” and we are so here for it!
Ends.
Thanks for reading, Fam! ❤️
Nahrabbits created The Pager to communicate a mix of frequent messages to people about the not so obvious shit going down in tech and cool finance
Giving you that real since 2019.
