‘To the Verge’ had an insightful conversation with Oliver Sharp, Co-Founder & Chief Operations Officer at Metaphora, the world’s first and premier platform to specialize in tokenized physical art as NFTs and CEO at Sharpy Fitness. He offered his understanding of how to tokenize physical art as NFT. He also discussed the impact of emerging immersive technologies on digital art.

About Metaphora 

Metaphora is the world’s first and premier platform to specialize in tokenized physical art as NFTs, enabling a new metaverse of high-profile digital assets with built-in launch value.

Oliver shares, “Metaphora is creating the world’s most advanced platform for tokenized physical art NFTs, ushering in a new era of premium digital assets with intrinsic market value. Scarcity gives traditional and trash art NFTs their value. These NFTs, like pebbles on the seashore, are all distinctive yet have little or no intrinsic worth, only the value determined by the market.”

Rather than value allocation based entirely on market economics, the organization’s NFTs will gain value via affiliation with tangible artworks made by recognized artists and approved by prominent worldwide galleries. The company will also provide a pathway to explore and purchase artworks on their platform and Metaverse AR smartphone app.

Oliver acknowledges the Metaphora development concept facts, including the website, app mockup, and white paper. But, he says, “Lockups and vesting percentages have been given to most metaphor tokens. They serve as a technique for regulating volatility by ensuring that tokens are delivered to the market on time.” 

Lockup restricts the sale of a holder’s token for some time, and vesting is how the tokens are released from hold.

Tokenizing Physical Art As NFT

The company came up with the idea of tokenizing physical art as NFT through natural progression. According to him, If you look at the NFTs’ technical progression rather than their natural progression, you’ll get higher-quality artwork, the intangible, physical art. These works are well-known in the art world and have significant artistic merit.

He says, “It’s a fairly straightforward procedure if you just join these elements together. It requires little work from the artists, yet it is legitimate because additions are already a conventional structure for traditional art. As a result, by following this simple act, you boost the art’s worth, launch value, and quality.”

In between the discussion, Oliver introduced us to one of his teammates, Susan Lee, Co-Founder and CLO (Chief Executive Officer) at Metaphora. She shares how Metaphora enables users to visualize the art and purchase it through the platform. She says, “You may not buy the tangible form, but you can have the digitized version of it.” 

Oliver also shared the tactics of engaging more people on the platform. He says, “We focus on campaigning through social media, marketing and PR Blitz to crypto and art communities.” He also elaborated on the varied forms of marketing, i.e., Search Engine Optimization (SEO). In addition, some websites help to promote NFT projects.

“There will be a lot of opportunities to get the brand out there. Building our communities and encouraging them to engage and seek the endorsements like the traditional access so that when we launch our branded galleries on board, we can fulfill the demands of communities of people like NFT collectors, artists etc.” 

Meta4 Tokens

Meta4 Tokens are the utility tokens that help people to transact. These tokens are part of the ecosystem. For example, he shares, “As crypto, when we are in a crowdfunding space, a Meta4 token is also a part of the art treasury, we sell them at a discounted rate in the early stage so that people can keep them and decide whether they want to sell them on an open exchange or purchase artists as a power-packed ecosystem.” 

They are like miniature cryptocurrencies used within the network or can be exchanged for other cryptocurrencies.

Whitelist And Tokenizing Digital Art

One of the stages of the investment cycle is the Whitelist. The list invites individuals to join and invest in the company. In addition, it offers early investors a substantial and long-term discount.

Olives explained that NFTs arrived as a potential reality so people could monetize their hobbies. The Metaphora enables artists to transition into full-time art production sooner. Many artists are producing high-quality art but cannot transition into art production. So part of the platform would be to support and be able to transit digital art.

Augmented Reality (AR) In Metaphora

Oliver shared that the main platform itself has a metaverse, AR or VR, to it; therefore, Metaphora, in a way, uses Augmented Reality. Metaphora is developing an Oculus app, the main provider of Meta and the main hardware provider of VR. The company is developing this app for people to interact differently with AR (Augmented Reality) , which will also work for small firms to turn any room into a gallery space.

He says, “There are so many new metaverse third-party applications and systems and metaverse platforms, where we can buy retail spaces and set up our own gallery spaces.” 

Enrollment Of Emerging Artists On Board

According to Oliver, the company’s initial strategy would be to approach galleries because it’ll provide the company a brand association and legitimacy in the traditional art world. However, the organization will also approach artists directly on their platform through networking.

Oliver says, “To enroll new and emerging artists; we will promote our brand to various communities and social media. For example, platforms like Instagram, which is popular among artists, is an important marketing aspect.” 

Challenges Encountered By Metaphora During Its Development:

With the initiatives, Oliver addressed a variety of issues. Branding was one of the factors that had a significant impact on their projects. He shared, “We couldn’t go ahead with one of the initial brands we developed. Some other organization seized the copyright before us.”

The organization discovers these challenges as the positives for their accomplishments. Oliver says, “The complications eventually worked out better for the company as the original branding was somehow much better and advanced than the previous one. Some of these things happen for a reason because sometimes they’ll come up with great outcomes.”

According to Oliver, every day is a challenge because challenges prompt you. In addition, the challenges are the best way to create and capture opportunities.

Oliver explains how pacing up with immersive technologies is the biggest challenge. He shares, “ When we first started, there were no curated spaces for NFTs. So, keeping pace with the technologies is mind-blowing.” 

Oliver’s Take on Metaverse and Metaphora’s Contribution To It

According to Oliver, Metaverse is central because there are fewer individuals in the space right now; there aren’t many actors here to contribute, there’s no surplus supply, and demand is low.

“As there are so many aspects of our lives, we see ourselves as a product that will fit into it very well once the demand starts picking up.” 

Oliver shared, “The first thing we are launching is not a metaverse aspect; we will be building platforms and AR apps straight away, which although lends itself to the metaverse. So the metaverse has a little bit of a way to go.” 

He claims that the metaverse is segmented, and the integration will take 15-20 years, but people will be increasingly interested in this domain in the next 2-3 years.

Conclusion

Our interaction with Oliver Sharp was insightful and full of validities. He talked about Metaphora being the first premier company to tokenize physical art into NFT, drawing people’s attention toward immersive technologies. Oliver endeavors to create a space where individuals would be more involved in full-time production and will have access to digital art.

Guest Profile

Oliver Sharp is the Co-Founder and Chief Operations Officer (COO) at Metaphora, the world’s first and premier tokenized physical art NFT platform and CEO at Sharpy Fitness, a sports retail brand selling fitness equipment through the Amazon platform. Also, a VC for crypto startups. Oliver has completed three critical theory university degrees researching the future of art and just started his fourth. He has been collecting NFTs since 2018 and trading cryptos since 2016.