White Star Capital Digital Asset Fund - Backing Exclusible

Aug 31, 2021

The strong growth experienced by the NFT market in the last 6-12 months happened without much infrastructure and tools in place, leading to a massively fragmented market where brands looking to leverage NFTs as part of their digital strategy are left with a plethora of options, none better than the last. This unique context has led many brands to either move too quickly with the wrong launch partner, yielding poor initial results or drastically reduce their program development velocity.

Brands and rights holders today cannot commercialize NFTs and engage customers with an owned experience without spending a significant amount of time and money on building the solution from scratch.

Several notable brands have launched their own NFTs, including the likes of Coca-Cola and Mattel, both of which had to build out their own proprietary platform geared towards their NFT assets.

What’s interesting about the recent Coca-Cola NFT is that it isn’t just another NFT art piece or collectible, it was described as “a custom Coca-Cola Bubble Jacket Wearable, which can be worn in virtual world Decentraland”. This is following a recent trend of extending traditional brands and clothing into the metaverse.

Another recent example of bringing well-known brands onto an avatar in the metaverse was with a Gucci handbag. The digital item was sold for over $4,000 on Roblox – more than the physical item costs in a retail store!

The metaverse refers to a convergence of physical, augmented, and virtual reality in a shared online space. Recently, The New York Times wrote about how companies and products including Epic Games’ Fortnite, Roblox and Animal Crossing: New Horizons increasingly had metaverse-like elements. In January 2020, an essay by Matthew Ball set out to identify key characteristics of a metaverse. Among them: it has to span the physical and virtual worlds; contain a fully fledged economy; and offer “unprecedented interoperability” — users have to be able to take their avatars and goods from one place in the metaverse to another, no matter who runs that particular part of it.

We have been thinking about the future of the NFT & metaverse landscape for some time now and have seen a significant whitespace that has yet to be addressed – a luxury NFT marketplace.

Enter Exclusible, a premium marketplace for digital collectible assets in the luxury sector. The platform enables a brand’s digital assets to be designed, minted and shared in a trusted environment. Buyers can purchase these digital assets directly from the brands when initially minted or on the marketplace in a secondary transaction. Buyers & holders can then withdraw their NFT from the platform and either store them in a non-custodial wallet or use those items in the metaverse.

We’re happy to announce our investment alongside Tioga Capital, Indico Partners and other phenomenal investors in Exclusible’s €2.2m seed round! We have seen how much thought and energy Thibault, Olivier and the entire founding team have put into Exclusible and we’re excited to join them on this journey.