4K, a breakthrough peer-to-peer marketplace for collectibles and luxury goods powered by NFTs, announced a seed raise of $3 million led by Electric Capital, Crosscut Ventures, Collab+Currency, ConsenSys, and IDEO CoLab.
The funding enables 4K to create the next generation of StockX by leveraging the transparent and immutable power of blockchain technology. This initial round coincides with the launch of 4K.com’s provably fair drops and closed beta marketplace.
4K’s mission is to empower users to transact with more trust, more transparency, more speed, and a significant reduction in fees.
4K’s concept is as elegant as it is simple: customers send 4K a physical item, such as a Rolex watch, to be authenticated and stored in an ultra-secure storage facility. Once stored, the customer receives an NFT, which can be thought of as a digital version of the physical good. Redemption of the item is just as easy: upon returning the NFT to 4K, the physical good is sent to the address provided by the redeemer.
4K uses the benefits of decentralized finance (DeFi) to turn physical goods into NFTs. DeFi is a new set of payment rails and protocols that enable people to coordinate financial activity without intermediary institutions charging fees along the way. Through decentralization, users can transact with low fees, make collateralized loans, and earn a yield on their assets. By providing the service layer that bridges physical and digital worlds, 4K enables previously unproductive physical assets, such as watch or sneaker collections, to participate in this financial innovation that has previously only been accessible to digital assets.
By hiring world-class authenticators, fully insuring every item, and investing heavily in both technological and physical security, 4K allows customers to trust the authenticity and redeemability of its NFTs, and therefore trust the authenticity and redeemability of goods sold on the 4K marketplace.
“4K adds completely new dimensions to the market for collectibles and luxury items. For example, we give brands skin-in-the-game in secondary-market trading,” said Richard Li, CEO of 4K. “It also adds a completely new dimension to NFTs. The NFTs most people have heard about are for digital assets. We’re enabling NFTs for physical assets. As we spend a larger portion of our lives online, bridging the physical and digital worlds becomes increasingly important.”
For individuals seeking a community of like-minded sneakerheads, watch aficionados, wine connoisseurs, trading card experts, or collectors of any other investment-grade physical goods, the 4K community has an open waitlist to become a member of its distributed autonomous organization (DAO). The DAO will reward community members for curating and acquiring high-quality goods, growing the community, and other peer-to-peer activity that helps their ecosystem thrive.