Crypto venture firm Paradigm invests in tokenized product marketplace Zora

Zora, the company behind an Ethereum-based marketplace for tokenized product drops, has received an investment from Paradigm.

Fred Ehrsam, the co-founder of the crypto VC firm, announced the news on Twitter Thursday evening. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Paradigm's investment comes one year after Zora first left stealth mode and debuted its marketplace. As The Block reported at the time, the marketplace employs a dynamic pricing mechanism, allowing for the rise and fall of prices depending on how much interest a particular work attracts. The underlying concept of Zora is for creators to be able to capture some of the value their work receives on the secondary market. 

In a blog post, Ehrsam effectively positioned Paradigm's stake as a bet on the future of non-fungible tokens or NFTs. NFTs are unique pieces of blockchain-based data linked to a digital product or creation. They're undergoing what could be described as a mainstream moment, garnering coverage in major newspapers and prompting a range of popular figures to jump in amidst the attention and hype. Data collected by The Block Research illustrates the jump in activity in recent weeks.

But according to Ehrsam, "NFTs are early in their evolution."

He went on to contend:

"Just as much of the best online media could hardly have been imagined in the early days of the internet (who would have thought watching other people playing video games would be such a big business?), the same will be true of NFTs, both as a form factor and as a foundation for new types of applications. Crypto is rapidly creating the infrastructure for the metaverse. Zora is a key piece of that infrastructure, enabling experiences and worlds that seem unimaginable today."