The disadvantage of NFTs is a continuation of their advantages. Everybody loves NFTs because they are expensive, but this is also a problem. It’s difficult for an everyday person to enter this wonderful world, good tokens cost much, one inevitably feels too greedy to pay this much for a ‘mere image file.’
Fractional, the American startup of the day, lifts this obstacle. It offers NFT creators to divide their treasures into an infinite number of bits and instead of selling the whole token, sell fractions of its ownership. Then, users buy them and resell to each other, each transaction costs a reasonable amount, the capitalization of the original NFT may rocket into space.
It’s amusing to think of the physical essence of owning one seventeenth part of a token. I mean it was difficult for me to understand what it meant to own ‘that very tweet’ even before, but it’s even less clear to me in fractionated form. It’s a separate amusement to remember that the first two letters in ‘NFT’ mean ‘non-fungible.’ Because here we have a perfectly functional fungibility, one hundredth of a tweet is identical to another one hundredth of this tweet.
Nevertheless, regardless of my ‘amusements,’ the project actually works, found its audience, and successfully brings in investments. It got as much as USD 20M in its latest round. What’s more, Fractional isn’t alone in the field, the startup has several competitors with similar products.
Alexander made his career in Russian internet companies including Mail.Ru, Rambler, RBC. From 2016 to 2018 he was Chief Strategy and Analytics officer in Mail.Ru Group. In this position, he worked on M&A, investments, and new project launches. In 2018 he became Deputy CEO in Citymobil, a Russian Uber-like company that was invested by Mail.Ru Group and Sberbank (the biggest Russian bank), then he left the company to launch his own projects. Now Alexander is a co-founder of United Investors – the platform for co-investments in Russian early-stage startups. His blog #startupoftheday (#стартапдня) is one of the most popular blogs about startups in Russia.
