Jay Z and Serena Williams Invest $19m in Bitski NFT Platform

Sports, hip-hop and digital art have collided with Jay-Z and Serena WIlliams investing in Bitski, an NFT marketplace that aims to simplify creating, buying, and selling non-fungible tokens. Bitski, refers to itself as the

“Shopify for NFTs just closed its $19 million Series A funding round led by Andreesen Horowitz. With NFT sales up 55% since 2020 from $250 million to $389 million, the NFT market fancies a kinda digital gold rush for creators in the hip hop and sports industry alike.

The Breakdown You Need To Know:

Quick background on NFTs: the non-fungible token is one-of-a-kind and is being used as a digital collectible. Digital currency like Bitcoin or Litecoin is fungible, so if it’s traded for another, the end result is exactly the same thing. Not with NFTs though; once traded, an NFT is unique to its buyer.

These digital collectibles have become big business in the music industry this year, with tens of millions of dollars being generated by the sale of these collectible digital assets. The roughly $6 billion hip hop industry is going all in on the NFT arena.

New Wave Art Collectors:

NFTs boomed in 2020, though some warn that a bubble is forming and ready to burst, particularly in the market for NFT art. Historically, art trading was an exclusive, and mainly white, realm of investing. Black art was underrepresented due to the reliance on galleries, making it harder for these artists to live sustainably from their craft.

However, NFTs are changing this through waves that continue to shock economists, and shift the tide in terms of equity and profitability of digital artists. Blockchain allows them to sell digital artwork with fractional ownership: creating as many “fractions” as they want and selling to owners who buy only a fraction of the piece. Fractional ownership increases an owner’s chances for a meaningful return on investment.