IOI
The non-fungible token charity Upshot raised $7.5 million Thursday for an initiative that rewards experts who are honest: Is a Beeple sculpture really worth $69 million? It’s a blockchain-based platform for experts who are offered incentives for their unbiased opinions.
According to Jake Brukhman, CEO of blockchain venture firm CoinFund, most digital collectibles cannot take part in rate discovery like Beeple’s “5,000 Days” did on Christie’s auction block. For this reason he’s betting on Upshot.
UpshotOne will showcase Upshot’s transition to NFTs in the Series A round. The protocol launched in 2019 as a prediction market focused on insurance; however, it saw more opportunity in pricing collectibles.
“There is this incredibly impactful space for peer prediction,”
Brukhman
A decentralized application will compare collectibles over time, using Upshot’s decentralized user base to generate real-time NFT appraisals. It rewards users for being honest by giving unbiased feedback.
“The more people that participate, the more accurate it becomes,”.
Brukhman
With the right combination of consensus and on-chain data, UpshotOne can build out a marketable application programming interface. UpshotOne also has a native incentives token on its blockchain.
Jill Carlson of Slow Ventures, who participated in this round of funding, said Upshot’s peer prediction and incentivization model could be applied to many other applications, though she said she was confident its new product would outlive current hype about neural network technologies.
“It’s always exciting to me when you see a fundamentally new primitive come along that not only serves a really important function within whatever is being hyped at the moment,”
Jill Carlson
