January 18, 2022
Today at a client’s request, I gave a lot of thought to his negative opinion of crypto and so I wrote a bit about it earlier today in the blog. But, with market prices down at a time that I see investing in crypto is an opportunity, not a disappointment, I also then had a conversation with Andrew Kiguel the founder/CEO of Tokens.com to get his explanation and response to my client’s concern because Andrew is the reason that I have invested so much in his company for clients.
Let me start by saying that seldom in my life have I met an entrepreneur with the vision, knowledge, and chutzpah of Andrew Kiguel. He is the real deal. Just as in my first meeting with Robert Friedland about 38 years ago, I quickly realized that I had met someone who had the personal power to go from the undiscovered to a world leader in capital markets, which is my universe.
In my first meeting with Andrew Kiguel on September 25 at an upscale resort in Muskoka Ontario, a three-hour drive north from my home in Toronto, I have written about how negative and closed-minded I was as we began to talk, but that within five minutes he had changed my mind. Andrew is that good a communicator.
Then in November, after I had taken a small investment in his Company that trades as COIN on the NEO exchange in Canada and SMURF on the OTC market in the US, I met Andrew once again at an upscale resort. There in Fort Lauderdale Florida, he deepened my understanding of the metaverse, and so I bought more stock in his company.
Since then, the world’s leading media companies — Wall Street Journal, CNN, NBC, and CNBC — have called on him to boldly, but clearly, explain an important concept that somehow Facebook/Meta founder/CEO Mark Zuckerberg has not. At least not effectively.
Including links to three articles and videos, here is Andrew Kiguel’s defense of his business model, one that I have fully bought into personally, for clients, and for readers:
Bill
First, let’s establish that the metaverse is not a fad. Samsung, Walmart, and Facebook are already making moves to establish a presence. Every important brand in the world is also making moves to establish a presence. The user rate is growing very quickly.
Second, don’t think of metaverse real estate as ‘real’ real estate, but as a way to earn income. If you can understand how Facebook and Google make money, we are doing the same. We are selling digital advertising space.
The metaverse worlds in existence are finite in availability. The most popular metaverse, Decentraland, only has 45,000 available land parcels. As more people congregate in these environments, as visitor traffic increases into the millions and billions of users, access to those land parcels will become hugely valuable.
Consider Facebook.
Imagine you could go back in time and purchase permanent advertising space in Facebook when it only had a few hundred thousand users. So that every time someone scrolled on Facebook, they would see your ad placement. This is exactly what we are doing now. We are pre-purchasing advertising space in various social media and gaming platforms as their user base grows. Our business model is no different in the metaverse than what Google and Facebook do now. In fact, Facebook is converting their entire model to the metaverse because it is the next iteration of social media.
We are monetizing our virtual land purchases with a list of brands – soon to be revealed – that are paying us in order to use our land parcels in popular online neighborhoods. They just want to access this demographic of metaverse users that they would otherwise miss. The younger generation doesn’t watch TV or subscribe to magazines. They consume information on social media platforms. That’s why brands want to use us to access and establish their value amongst the younger generation. Since our land is unique to specific metaverse areas, we can use it to enter into advertising agreements with these brands. We are also charging these brands fees to build their presence – an additional revenue source.
That’s really it. If you don’t think that Facebook or Google have a good business model, then your client is right, and he shouldn’t own us. However, he should know that every company will need a presence in the metaverse just like they need a website, and they’ll have to deal with companies like Tokens.com.
Some videos are below:
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/12/investors-are-paying-millions-for-virtual-land-in-the-metaverse.html
https://twitter.com/firstmove/status/1483148828408791044
/Andrew
So, I say to my clients and readers, give Andrew the time and space to convince you that he is embarking on no different a voyage than people took to build Google, Facebook, Tesla, or even Walmart, Home Depot, and Costco.
Regardless of his critics, all of these companies are going to the same place, and we too have to be there. It’s called the Metaverse.