Upshot, a blockchain-based protocol that incentivizes experts to answer subjective questions honestly, today announced that it has raised $7.5 million in Series A funding co-led by Framework Ventures, CoinFund, and Blockchain Capital with additional investments from Slow Ventures, Mechanism Capital, Delphi Digital, CMS Holdings, Stani Kulechov, Kain Warwick, Ryan Selkis, and more.
“Upshot’s mission is to capture the value of truth and to give people novel ways to get paid for their unique insights,” said Upshot CEO, Nick Emmons. “Our goal with Upshot One is to create near real-time price feeds for NFTs through crowdsourced appraisals. In addition to creating value for the NFT market, Upshot will also unlock opportunities for a new generation of appraisers and catalyze powerful new innovations in the field of decentralized finance.”
Using a unique algorithm, Upshot analyzes people’s answers to questions and rewards experts who provide reliable and credible information for appraising a wide variety of digital assets. The company’s first product – Upshot One – is specifically designed to tackle the problem of NFT price-discovery by incentivizing a community of experts to provide trustworthy, efficient appraisals of NFTs. The protocol lives on the Ethereum blockchain.
UpshotOne can be used to:
- Resolve prediction markets
- Price NFTs in real-time
- Verify subjective insurance claims
- Coordinate decentralized government
- Predict the future
- Identify misinformation on social media
Jake Brukhman, Founder and CEO of CoinFund provides his thoughts on how Upshot will impact the NFT market: “For years, non-fungible tokens were thought of as an illiquid market. Through Upshot’s incredibly important work in peer prediction oracles, we will lay the foundation for financial services on the NFT asset class by providing on-chain appraisals and pricing for these assets. Upshot is a 0-to-1 innovation for both DeFi and NFTs.”
Stani Kulechov, AAVE CEO, describes his excitement for the launch: “Currently, NFTs represent a large reservoir of under-utilized capital. Upshot’s efficient pricing tools will enable DeFi to finally unlock the full value of NFT assets. I’m excited for a wave of new and interesting DeFi products designed and built to leverage NFTs.”
NFTs are a new digital asset class that suffers from inefficient price discovery. The existing approaches to improve NFT liquidity focus on fractionalization and similar market-driven tactics. Upshot differs from existing approaches because it uses more capital-efficient, non-market mechanisms and does not require the assets to change hands in order to be priced.
This round also includes investments from FlamingoDAO, Andrew Steinwold, Shayne Coplan, Cooper Turley, gmoneyNFT, Meltem Demirors, Tegan Kline, Tony Sheng, Andy Chorlian, and several other notable figures in the NFT space.
In a statement, Framework Ventures co-founder Vance Spencer said, “Upshot is critical for the broader NFT ecosystem to reach its full potential and in turn establish a reliable, metrics-based system for ensuring that end users can feel confident with the digital products that they are buying and selling. This is why we are so excited about supporting the Upshot team and their groundbreaking platform.”
