16 new york | march 2–15, 2020
intelligencer
145 minutes with ...Duncan and Griffin Cock FosterForecasting the future of art collecting
with the new blockchain twins in town.
by benjamin wallacePhotograph by Victor Llorenteless buoyant hair than his brother, “is that a
nifty is a fundamentally better digital good.”
This is helpful if you already understand
what a digital good is: a virtual object made
of ones and zeros that you can see only
when it’s rendered onscreen. Based on the
same blockchain technology as cryptocur-
rency, nifties are a departure from that.
Short for NFTs (non-fungible tokens), they
are unique digital objects you can buy, own,
and sell. The brothers’ go-to analogy is
that nifties are like “digital Air Jordans.” “If
I own a pair of shoes and Nike shuts down,
I don’t expect that my shoes would just dis-
appear,” Duncan said. “We expect our items
to behave a certain way, and past digital
items have not.”
The Cock Foster twins started Nifty Gate-
way to mainstream what had been a highly
technical subculture by, among other things,
allowing civilians to buy nifties (on the Nifty
Gateway website) with credit cards. Last
summer, when they sold the company to
Gemini, the Cock Fosters’ lives underwent
a dizzying change. Their company was less
than a year old, and they were suddenly
able to move from a small apartment in San
Francisco, in which they shared a bunk bed,
to a spacious two-bedroom in Manhattan,
which they have nicknamed Cockfosters.
“It’s a canonical Soho loft,” said Duncan,
gesturing at the high ceilings, scuffed wide-
plank floors, and dangling Edison bulbs in
the living room, which overlooks Mercer
Street. “I love the word canonical,” he added.
The Cock Fosters see big things ahead
for nifties. The brothers’ stated mission is to
have 1 billion people collecting them. They
talk about how nifties could one day be
paired with physical assets, so you could use
a digital token to prove your ownership of
a piece of, say, real estate. But in these early
days, the use cases can seem generationally
exclusionary. The first nifty to go viral was
CryptoKitties, a game featuring a digital
feline you can collect and breed. A single
CryptoKitty has sold for a record $170,000,
and venture capitalists including Union
Square Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz
have put money into the company behind
the game. “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