Maxwell Tribeca is a social club in New York, which differs in many ways from traditional nightclubs. Located in a well-known area (Watts Street), it has luxurious décor, privileges for its members and a founding team with many connections.
It should be noted that social clubs are a fashion of recent years in New York. They are nightclubs that one can enter only with a subscription.
The founder of David Litwak, however, wants to differentiate it in another way. To become a member you must have purchased an NFT.
NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) are digital certificates of ownership and authenticity, corresponding to unique items, digital or physical. Blockchain-based technology allows for the first time a digital file (eg a video or a photo) to have a certified creator and owner. In addition, a digital file becomes rare, since its creator, when issuing NFT, sets the number of copies.
So while many may see or have a copy of the file, one is the rightful owner of the original, he has bought the original from its creator and only he can transfer it – if he wants – the very next moment, earning money if the selling price is higher than the buying price.
NFT can be considered the digital equivalent of the label on the back of a painting, which has the artist’s signature and indicates the copy number. In NFTs the signature is digital and authenticity is guaranteed 100% by blockchain technology.
“Instead of ordering a drink at the bar, you’re going to get your own jeans out of your closet and serve a tonic gin,” Litwak told Bloomberg.
“We are trying to create thousands of second homes, not foreign spaces, where people will belong, and NFTs are a means to an end,” he says. “Web3 often takes them for granted,” he adds. Web3, which is based on decentralized technologies such as blockchain, aspires to become the successor of the internet today, but has also met with strong criticism.
Subscriptions to the Maxwell Tribeca start at $ 1,000 for shared drink boxes. Small drink boxes will cost $ 5,000 and large drink boxes $ 8,000, with a monthly subscription of $ 250.
“Social symbols and social status have always been an important part of society and culture. I think NFTs give us a different way of branding it as consumers and a different way of creating exclusivity as business owners,” says Nick Casares. product manager at PolyientX, a platform that provides rewards tools for NFT communities.
Litwak, who already has another NFT club in the works with professional footballer Kyle Martino, argues that a cryptocurrency technology contribution makes the experience more accessible than the more traditional mechanisms. Using NFTs as entry costs makes it “easier to democratize the fundraiser,” according to Litwak.
Buying and selling NFTs usually requires the payment of transaction fees, which can be a significant percentage of the sale, in addition to the complexity of the need to create and finance digital accounts and wallets.
Litwak intends to bypass these issues by creating a whole new market, called Maxwell Social, instead of relying on companies like OpenSea that act as a kind of EBay for NFTs.
“OpenSea is great at selling art NFTs to the highest bidder, we want to sell member NFTs to the right person,” says Litwak. “Communities take care of more than just finances. But OpenSea does not.”
Litwak said there would be no transaction fees for buyers, but there would be a 2.5% fee for their resale. Also, there will be no expiration date for the sale of their NFTs: “We will sell them for as long as it takes to find members for our social club”. Litwak says it targets about 600 members.
Litwak also plans to provide technical assistance to its members to familiarize themselves with cryptocurrency technology and to overcome any technical barriers: ‘community and will enable us to help them create NFT in person and resolve any digital wallet issues”.
But the Maxwell Tribeca will have to fight for the attention of New Yorkers interested in NFTs, because there is also the Flyfish Club. It is run by VCR Group, a hotel services and catering group whose partners include Gary Vaynerchuk, co-founder of the Resy online booking system.
Flyfish, which plans to open in early 2023, has so far raised just over $ 14 million, with members buying coupons directly from its website.
He has earned an additional $ 2 million in rights from OpenSea, where some of the people who bought one of these original 1,501 NFTs chose to sell their tokens (and related subscriptions) on the secondary market. FlyFish receives 10% of the revenue from these sales.
David Rodolitz, founder and CEO of VCR Group, told Bloomberg that to date, they have raised a total of about $ 21 million in secondary sales.
“Everything we do is the exact opposite of a formal subscription,” he says. “Ours is a one-time purchase of NFT which becomes an asset for the token holder, there is no recurring charge every year and this person is in control of the asset and can actually use it, or sell it or rent it “.
He stressed that people who buy at Flyfish have the option of turning their subscription into money, “something no other club in the world could do, because you own nothing. You’re just renting an experience from them.”
Litwak in turn claims that the Maxwell Tribeca will be a very different experience from Flyfish.
“Gary (Vaynerchuk) raised $ 14 million, well done, but sold his subscriptions to bidders. This club will probably consist of 90% crypto bros (terminology for cryptocurrency proponents),” says Litwak. . “It has proven its ability to raise funds. But it ignores why people are interested in a place they belong to. (In the Flyfish Club) anyone who can afford it can buy it and then pretend to be a community.”
Despite the recent volatility in the cryptocurrency market, which has brought wild fluctuations in the prices of digital currencies such as Bitcoin and Ether, Rodolitz is not affected. “We do not use NFTs as a form of for-profit investment strategy,” he says. “So whether Ethereum is up or down, left or right, it really does not affect our business model at all.”
Not everyone thinks New York needs NFTs though. “The technology behind NFT facilitates certain aspects: buying your coupon, marketing your coupon, subleasing your coupon, providing proof of ownership, etc. But these are not new economics, these are just convenient features.” says Scott Heimendinger, former head of innovation at sous vide device maker Anova, who was one of the first to adopt crowdfunding.
Heimendinger also disputes whether the prospect of spending time with people who feel comfortable investing thousands of dollars in cryptocurrency technology would appeal to most New Yorkers.
Source: Capital
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