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. The brothers’ stated mission is to have 1 billion people collecting them. The Cock Fosters see big things ahead for nifties. “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. 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. Last summer, when they sold the company to Gemini, the Cock Fosters’ lives underwent a dizzying change. The Cock Foster twins started Nifty Gateway 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. “We expect our items to behave a certain way, and past digital items have not.” 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 disappear,” Duncan said. Short for NFTs (non-fungible tokens), they are unique digital objects you can buy, own, and sell. Based on the same blockchain technology as cryptocurrency, nifties are a departure from that. 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. “The elevator pitch I always give,” offered Duncan, who wore glasses and had slightly less buoyant hair than his brother, “is that a nifty is a fundamentally better digital good.” “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 brothers, who grew up in Seattle with parents who knew lots of people at Microsoft, began coding in sixth grade. The remaining opportunities may be lucrative, but they can be dauntingly esoteric. Coding prowess and world-beating ambition may no longer be enough. We are now at the stage in the internet’s evolution when the low-hanging disruption fruit has been plucked. “We were, like, okay at rowing,” Griffin added. It was a recent morning, and the brothers, 25, were sitting in the Soho apartment they share. I mean, we didn’t make it to the Olympics.”
HORSE COCK YOU LIKE THAT GAY NIFTY MOVIE
“The funny part,” Duncan added, “is 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. Part of the acquisition payment was to be, naturally, in bitcoin.
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. “And they were like, ‘Oh yeah, we hear you on that.’ ” “We were telling them this story about how we realized we could get a lot more out of teaming up as twin brothers working together,” Griffin recalled of the Cock Foster–Winklevoss summit. In other words, both are literal, actual tech bros. Both had founded companies to make money in the world of blockchain technology. When Duncan and Griffin Cock Foster met Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss last year, it was inevitable that they would have a lot to talk about.