This NFT just sold for $117,000. Someone on my LinkedIn commented: “Emperor wearing new clothes,” implying there’s no value. That mindset is wild. Who are we to decide what has value? The confidence people have in dismissing entire markets is impressive. Right now, people are online buying cutlery sets, stamps, toy cars, and card collectibles for tens of thousands of dollars. It’s a truism but one person’s junk is another person’s treasure. What most people miss is the first real use case of NFTs is art. Art is upstream of wealth. There is a huge amount of wealth in crypto, but very few culturally accepted ways to express it. So capital rotates into expressive fixed-supply assets that carry history, status, and story (NFTs). Most NFTs will be bad investments ala internet stock. But the earliest, most historically or culturally significant pieces, are in a different category altogether. This collection (CryptoPunks) has outpaced the S&P 500, the Nasdaq, and Bitcoin combined since 2017. If this post gives you an allergic reaction, that’s useful data. Because somewhere, someone is having the opposite reaction. And your only real job is to ask why.