Internet person Logan Paul, fresh off wearing a $6 million Pokémon card to Wrestlemania—a sentence I am reeling from having to type—has also this week opened a site called Liquid Marketplace. It claims to be selling stakes in physical collectibles, but in reality sounds like a disaster waiting to happen on every conceivable level.
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Teaming up with Ryan Bahadori and Amin Nikdel, and having raised $8 million to open, the site says:
Ah yes, an egalitarian rallying cry from technocrats, cool. The idea behind the site is that it will take collectibles, break them up into tokens, then sell a limited number of those tokens. Once the tokens are all purchased directly from the site, they’ll then be able to be bought and sold on a secondary marketplace.
They’re doing this with digital collectibles, like NFTs, but more interestingly—and much more precariously—they’re also doing it with actual, tangible collectibles. These must be shipped to their vault—whose name and/or location is not disclosed—and locked away, after which ownership will theoretically transfer to holders of the site’s tokens.
NFTs are dumb and worthless, but they’re also relatively easy to deal with on a conceptual basis, since they exist purely in a digital space. Trying to split up an actual thing into digital pieces and somehow reach a consensus on who owns it is a disaster waiting to happen. The site has rules for this, of course, but they’re fraught with loopholes for exploitation and/or peril, as The Block reports:
There’s only one way this is going to end, and it’s:
As we just saw yesterday with the licensed F1 game, this NFT/crypto/blockchain stuff always looks so utopian on paper. And every time the rubber meets the road in a real-world scenario, it completely falls apart. In this case, what happens if the actual collectibles in the vault are damaged (note: I’ve reached out to the site for more information on this)? Or stolen? Or the site goes bust and the physical items are lost while people still own their digital tokens? Or users have their tokens hijacked?
