Poetry Just Became Profitable for the First Time in Human History

TL;DR

• Maria Caballero’s “Cords” poem was just minted as a Bitcoin NFT (aka Bitcoin Ordinal), then sold by Sotheby’s for a tidy $11,000.

• Being able to prove poetry as scarce — and at the same time, turn it into a globally tradable asset? That’s only possible with Web3 technology.

Full Story

You know those ‘Oh, yep, we’re here to stay’ feelings that you’ll get every now-and-then in Web3?

(Similar to the ‘we are so back!’ feelings, but more permanent).

Yeah, well – we’re having one of those moments rn.

Maria Caballero’s “Cords” poem was just minted as a Bitcoin NFT (aka Bitcoin Ordinal), then sold by Sotheby’s for a tidy $11,000.

But that’s not what’s pushing the ‘oh, yep, we’re here to stay’ sentiment…

And it’s not the fact that Bitcoin Ordinals, which only became a ‘thing’ this time last year, is already being embraced by a centuries-old institution like Sotheby’s…

Instead, it’s that — and this is going to sound like a tongue-in-cheek quip that you’d hear from your stuffy uncle (but it ain’t):

Whoever heard of making money from poetry??

Being able to prove poetry as scarce — and at the same time, turn it into a globally tradable asset? That’s only possible with Web3 technology.

And yeah, we agree:

Wheatus’ 2000 hit ‘Teenage Dirtbag’ was poetry in its purest form, and it sold 5M copies worldwide – so to say ‘poetry hasn’t been profitable in the past’ is a stretch…

But the point we’re trying to make is:

The sale of Maria Caballero’s “Cords” poem is a reminder that a whole range of things that rely on scarcity to denote their value can now be digitized and traded (globally) – where they couldn’t be previously.

Which means there’s a whooole bunch of new opportunities waiting to be discovered/proven out in the Web3 space.

(‘Oh, yep, we’re here to stay.’)