16 newyork| march2–15, 2020
intelligencer
145 minuteswith...Duncan andGriffinCock FosterForecastingthefutureof art collecting
with the newblockchaintwinsin town.
bybenjaminwallacePhotographbyVictorLlorentelessbuoyant hair than his brother, “is that a
niftyis a fundamentally better digital good.”
Thisis helpful if you already understand
whata digital good is: a virtual object made
ofonesand zeros that you can see only
whenit’ s rendered onscreen. Based on the
sameblockchain technology as cryptocur-
rency,nifties are a departure from that.
ShortforNFTs (non-fungible tokens), they
areunique digital objects you can buy, own,
andsell.The brothers’ go-to analogy is
thatnifties are like “digital Air Jordans.” “If
I owna pair of shoes and Nike shuts down,
I don’t expect that my shoes would just dis-
appear,”Duncan said. “We expect our items
tobehave a certain way, and past digital
itemshave not.”
TheCock Foster twins started Nifty Gate-
waytomainstream what had been a highly
technicalsubculture by, among other things,
allowingcivilians to buy nifties (on the Nifty
Gatewaywebsite) with credit cards. Last
summer,when they sold the company to
Gemini,the Cock Fosters’ lives underwent
a dizzying change. Their company was less
thana year old, and they were suddenly
abletomove from a small apartment in San
Francisco, in which they shared a bunk bed,
toa spacious two-bedroom in Manhattan,
whichthey have nicknamed Cockfosters.
“It’sa canonical Soho loft,” said Duncan,
gesturingat the high ceilings, scuffed wide-
plankfloors, and dangling Edison bulbs in
theliving room, which overlooks Mercer
Street.“I love the word canonical,” he added.
TheCock Fosters see big things ahead
fornifties. The brothers’ stated mission is to
have1 billion people collecting them. They
talkabout how nifties could one day be
pairedwith physical assets, so you could use
a digitaltoken to prove your ownership of
a pieceof, say, real estate. But in these early
days,theuse cases can seem generationally
exclusionary. The first nifty to go viral was
CryptoKitties, a game featuring a digital
felineyou can collect and breed. A single
CryptoKitty has sold for a record $170,000,
andventure capitalists including Union
SquareVentures and Andreessen Horowitz
haveputmoney into the company behind
thegame. “CryptoKitties was the thingthat got my attention,” Duncan said. “The
amount of money people were spending on
CryptoKitties was remarkable.”
Moving to New York made sense for
the Cock Fosters for a couple of reasons.
Becoming part of Gemini, which has its
headquarters in the Flatiron District, gave
them instant access to the heavy-duty
technology required to safeguard users’
digital assets. Equally appealing was the
fact that New York is the center of the art
world, because the brothers see nifties’ first
mainstream application being rare digital
artworks and collectibles. MLB has already
launched Champions, a line of bobblehead-
like crypto-collectibles, and the NBA has
a similar collection in the works.
This month, the brothers are launching
what they call Nifty Gateway 2.0, which
includes a marketplace to buy and sell
nifties along with several nifties by noted
artists with whom they’ve partnered. The
brothers sketch a vision of a fully niftified
world: “We want Supreme making nif-
ties,” Duncan said. “We want some Crypto-
Punks”—a popular early nifty—“in the per-
manent collection of MoMA.”
It’s a world, in their sunny view, where
nifties could one day be more valuable than
physical art. “If you critically rate what
makes art valuable as an asset, which is
authenticity, liquidity, and longevity,” Dun-
can said, “then nifties blow traditional art
out of the water in all three of those catego-
ries.” The room we were sitting in was hung
with a handful of spattery, Jackson Pollock–
esque oils on canvas, and I pointed out that
nifties would never be able to offer the phys-
ical textures of real-world art. “We’re actu-
ally working on a 3-D nifty display screen,”
Duncan said—an app to run on existing
hardware, which would enable creators to
make holographic art. “I’m a big fan of my
friends’ art,” he said, “but I don’t know if
I want to display any more physical art from
a certain point going forward.”
Last June, the brothers toasted the sale
to Gemini by throwing a big dinner party at
their loft. They gave out party favors to their
34 guests, a QR code leading to a limited-
edition nifty they’d commissioned from an
artist friend. Starting at 7 p.m., it shows a
nighttime version of the apartment, and
at 7 a.m., it switches to daytime. (Exactly
what they could do with it beyond calling it
up online, to gaze at when the mood strikes
them, is one of the less developed areas of
niftydom so far.) “The only way to get it was
to attend that dinner party,” Duncan said.
“The dinner party was a proof of con-
cept also,” he added. “I like to think that
in ten years, everyone will be commission-
ing artists to create nifties to give away at
a dinner party.” ■W
hen Duncan and Griffin
Cock Foster met Cameron
and Tyler Winklevoss last
year, it was inevitable that
they would have a lot to
talk about. Both sets of siblings are twins.
Both had been rowers. Both had founded
companies to make money in the world of
blockchain technology. In other words, both
are literal, actual tech bros.
“We were telling them this story about
how we realized we could get a lot more
out of teaming up as twin brothers work-
ing together,” Griffin recalled of the Cock
Foster–Winklevoss summit. “And they were
like, ‘Oh yeah, we hear you on that.’ ”
The Winklevosses—Mark Zuckerberg’s
Harvard schoolmates, immortalized in The
Social Network, who famously sued him for
stealing Facebook and later became bitcoin
billionaires—were then about to buy the
24-year-old Cock Fosters’ start-up, Nifty
Gateway, through their own cryptocurrency
company, Gemini. Part of the acquisition
payment was to be, naturally, in bitcoin.
“The funny part,” Duncan added, “is [in
high school] we went and saw The Social
Network, and everyone was like, ‘Wow, you
guys kind of look like those twins from that
movie; you guys should row too.’ And that’s
how we started rowing. I mean, we didn’t
make it to the Olympics.”
It was a recent morning, and the broth-
ers, 25, were sitting in the Soho apartment
they share. “We were, like, okay at rowing,”
Griffin added.
“I was pretty good,” Duncan said.
We are now at the stage in the internet’s
evolution when the low-hanging disruption
fruit has been plucked. Coding prowess and
world-beating ambition may no longer be
enough. The remaining opportunities may
be lucrative, but they can be dauntingly eso-
teric. The brothers, who grew up in Seattle
with parents who knew lots of people at
Microsoft, began coding in sixth grade.
“Most of what we do these days is explain
‘nifties’ to people,” Griffin said, as he and
Duncan tried to explain nifties to me.
“The elevator pitch I always give,” offered
Duncan, who wore glasses and had slightly