Au contraire, Ms Lagarde
Christine Lagarde made the following remarks in an interview on the Dutch television program “College Tour,” according to Politico:
“I have said all along the crypto assets are highly speculative, very risky assets,” Lagarde told the program.
“My very humble assessment is that it is worth nothing. It is based on nothing, there is no underlying assets to act as an anchor of safety.”
Well, that is most certainly not the case with the FIX00 project/offering. It is 100% backed by real-world collectibles which are historically verifiable stores of growth and noncorrelated hedges.
Our digital offerings (F-NFTs) are a transmogrification of those assets.
With regard to utility tokens of course that is true (they have no substance), BUT the SEC has made that part of the rules of the road for such tokens, to ensure they are not defined as securities by the SEC.
In the case of our utility token we have gifted a ruby with an appraised value of $290m to the company issuing the tokens, but of course, no ownership or voting rights exist for the gem by the token holders as specified by SEC rules.
The ruby is there to demonstrate our (verifiable) procedure for securing and "freezing" in place the collectible in the real world so that it can be legitimately reconstituted and issued in the digital world.
It also demonstrates not only our product but our methodology and our commitment to the project - we would agree with Ms. Lagarde in the sense that no other project in the cryptoverse offers that transparency, real-world backing, and commitment.
We do offer a safe asset Ms. Legarde, one that exists in your and our world. Gems have for centuries been a store of value.
Calls for compliance are growing ever louder, not just in the bureaucratic corridors of EEC/ECB but in the US too:
“I think a lot of these tokens will fail,” SEC Chair Gensler told reporters after a House Appropriations Committee panel hearing on May 18.
“I fear that in crypto … there’s going to be a lot of people hurt, and that will undermine some of the confidence in markets and trust in markets writ large.”
So with the desire to regulate crypto markets growing, we'll happily lay out our stall on why our offering is not a compliance issue as it stands.
Gems, Rubys in this case, are SEC-defined collectibles and always have been. They are as such not regulated.
When gemstones are refined into jewellery (which is the same as fractionalisation) they are sold to the public WITHOUT regulation.
The entire process with regards to gems and jewellery is a wholly unregulated business. And has been for centuries.
It would be the mother of all double standards to change that ONLY in the cryptoverse.
If the argument is we are creating a market for trading that needs to be regulated, as Mr Gensler has suggested in the past with regard to F-NFTs then we would simply say when we come to issue our digital versions of the rubies (effective jewellery) we will be doing so in an auction format.
The FIX00 project will have no involvement or investment in any aftermarket sales/ purchases or usage in other ventures related to the products. We will not initiate our own market or social coins - we will remain a pure vendor/auctioneer with no other vested interests beyond that.
This we believe is going above and beyond any perceived regulatory standards, either in force now or forthcoming.
Moving back to Ms. Legarde's comments on the lack of viability of the cryptoverse, we would first point to the Raoul Pal tweet on adoption rates which is to say it's happening faster than anyone thinks:
A more salient and pertinent point is offered by this Roger Ver tweet:
We and clearly the authorities could not agree more.
So let's get to the heart of the matter - the need for utility - what NFTs could be, and what our offering might be useful for:
For this we turn to Prof Scott Galloway:
"As we ended 2021, NFTs were white-hot. Forty-one billion dollars hot, and everywhere. Twitter beat Zuckerberg to the NFT punch, letting tweeters use an NFT as their profile picture, Spotify is hiring for NFTs, and brands from Budweiser to Louis Vuitton are producing them. You can even buy a virtual NFT of the McDonald’s McRib. But there are signs the hype is fading. Trading is down, Google searches are down, scams and frauds are (still) up.
The sun may have passed midday on the hype cycle, but NFTs (or something similar) have real potential to be an unlock for a fundamental aspect of the digital economy.
So … WTF is an NFT? Technobabble aside, it’s similar to the deed to a house. A digital document that identifies one true owner of a digital product. Real estate deeds rely on an ecosystem of paper and electronic records, legal standards, and institutions staffed by experts. It’s worth the expense, as real estate is valuable. NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are deeds rendered in the world of bits, not atoms. Digitally native, NFTS are (theoretically) lower cost than real estate deeds — thus they’re economically practical for digital items and lower-value property. Deeds … for anything. As private property and ownership are central to capitalism, and economic activity increasingly moves online, NFTs may become central to our economy.
Scarcity and Authenticity
NFTs offer digital commerce something the Internet lacks: scarcity and authenticity. A scarcity mentality is built into us at an instinctual level. Our cravings for sugar and fat (historically scarce) have resulted in an obesity crisis, because our instincts haven’t kept pace with industrial food production. Authenticity’s virtues are practical (we like to know where our food comes from and who we can sue if it makes us sick) and philosophical (if we buy music, is some of the money going to the artist who made it?).
Limited options for credible scarcity and authenticity have rendered digital commerce chaotic. Napster broke the barriers of scarcity that were inherent to physical distribution of music on plastic discs. The pirating of digital goods of all kinds reduces both tech profitability and long-term innovation. Google put the news media into intensive care by reproducing its content (ending scarcity), and Facebook drove another nail in the coffin by de-emphasizing the source (neutering authenticity).
Enter blockchain. Bitcoin became a trillion-dollar asset class because it cracked this code. A dollar bill is worth $1 because only the U.S. Treasury can make it (authenticity) and we trust Uncle Sam to mint a limited number (scarcity). Bitcoin’s “proof-of-work” system likewise ensures scarcity (there will only ever be 21 million bitcoins produced) and authenticity (all are tracked on an immutable public ledger).
NFTs offer the promise of scarcity and authenticity for digital goods. NFTs aren’t the only way to create scarcity and authenticity online — trusted, centralized entities such as banks (and platforms such as Twitter and Apple) do it within their verticals, and blockchain tech is evolving to address myriad environmental and security concerns. So the current implementation of NFTs may not be the best way, or even a good way (many reasons to be skeptical). But they’re … a way. A potentially widespread, inexpensive way to offer credible scarcity and authenticity online, opening up new vistas of digital commerce."
We believe our F-NFTs offer the potential key to opening that door.