NFT Market Is Like Gambling in a Casino: L’Atelier BNP Paribas CEO
Scott Chipolina, 25 March 2021
The NFT boom has seen a lucky few make fortunes overnight—but, according to the CEO of L’Atelier BNP Paribas, buying them is akin to gambling in a casino.
“I think it’s probably akin at this stage to going into the casino,” said John Egan, CEO of L’Atelier, in an interview with BNN Bloomberg. “You know you’re going to spend money, but maybe you’re doing it for the enjoyment, for the experience. If you win, you’ve got lucky.”
BNP subsidiary L’Atelier, which focuses on identifying trends in emerging markets, released a report in 2020 which highlighted non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as a key area of the emerging virtual economy. Their predictions appear to have been borne out, with the market for NFTs exploding in the second half of 2020 and early 2021.
Recently, renowned digital artist Beeple sold an NFT collection of digital artwork for $69 million, in the third-largest sale by a living artist. Even tweets are being sold for large sums of money. Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter and payments company Square, sold his tweet—the first-ever tweet in history—for almost $3 million.
Egan argued that NFTs are an alternative digital emerging asset and that, “I don’t think we could find many more risky categories of assets at this point.” However, he said, they will play a key role in the economy of the future, with the cryptographically-unique tokens providing the “bedrock economic infrastructure within the virtual economy.”
