The crypto and real estate worlds have become increasingly intertwined as both sectors have grown dramatically in recent years. “Crypto kings'' are real estate’s newest whales, and real-estate startups are figuring out ways to mint NFT mortgages and allow the newly rich to use their Bitcoin as collateral, bypassing a traditional down payment. 

Now, a cryptocurrency that claimed to "democratize" real estate with the blockchain appears to have cashed in on the buzz by vanishing immediately after launching and dumping their tokens on investors; what's commonly known as a "rug pull."

Realux pitched itself as making "real estate open to everyone, at a very low cost in a very easy way" using a complex system of tokens backed by real estate investments. It would "resolve, once and for all, the wealth gap by removing all barriers, costs, middlemen, social background, and other limitations," its white paper claimed, by tokenizing real estate, or creating blockchain tokens that represent the value of owned buildings. All investors had to do to start was buy some RLX tokens, which launched on Monday backed by hype from viral tweets and YouTube videos published by influencers promoting the coin.

Source: Google

By Tuesday morning, Realux's Twitter account, website, and Telegram channel were all gone, and the price of RLX had taken a nosedive, as spotted by independent blockchain researcher zachxbt. The token's price reached an apex of around $0.0026 and is now sitting at $0.000329 after a massive sell-off that occurred mere hours after launch. According to blockchain records, it was the creator of the token contract that dumped 70 million RLX tokens at once for a profit of just under $24,000. 

Motherboard sent an email to an address listed on the website’s now-defunct site, but did not immediately hear back. 

One Twitter user with 60,000 followers, @AltcoinSara, told Motherboard that Realux had approached her to ask if she would promote the launch. She was paid $350 for doing so, but was not involved in the scheme and felt deep regret about her decision.

“I feel absolutely shitty about this whole thing,” @AltcoinSara wrote in a direct message to Motherboard. “I’d love to help get to the bottom as this rug has damaged not only investors but also makes me look like I rugged - and I’ve never ever done this.”

“The damage is done, I’m owning up to it,” she added. 

Another user who tweeted out a similar promotion, @Thecryptomist, similarly told Motherboard that she “didnt even know it happened until I understandably got abused in my DM's.” 

“Never was my intentions for this to be the result,” she added. 

Such personalities helped to make the company appear legitimate, spamming the internet with claims that people must buy in before it was too late. One YouTube personality, Jim Crypto, posted a six-minute video hyping up the company, saying that the supposed “blockchain-based technology” fractionalizes and “tokenizes real estate assets'' and lets people benefit from the booming real estate market from the “comfort” of their home. 

“All you have to do is buy the cryptocurrency and you get all the benefits of real estate. So it’s almost like an ETF or a mutual fund,” Jim Crypto said in the video. 

To provide validity to the company, Jim Crypto pointed to the LinkedIn page of the purported CEO of the company, “Doreen Curry,” which listed Curry’s supposed qualifications as including master’s degrees from Cambridge University and London Business School and time in Goldman Sachs’ asset management division. Developers being "doxxed," or having their real identities made publicly known, is a popular way for cryptocurrency projects to shore up investor confidence. Motherboard sent messages to the LinkedIn page, but did not hear back. 

Jim Crypto eventually did after the publication of this article.

“It's a sponsored video,” he wrote in an email. “They just DM me on twitter and asked for a video within 3 hrs. I made their video upon request about their fair launch. I don't know much than what is in my video. Obviously those are scammers if their site id down now unfortunately. People say even Bitcoin is a scam as it down 50% in the last few months. I have no further info.”

Source: LinkedIn

Realux’s website and white paper have been taken down, but Motherboard was able to view a version of both using the Wayback Machine. Together, they made clear that the scheme preyed on the hopes of people who wanted to benefit from the gains in the real estate market but didn’t have the necessary money to do so through traditional means.

Source: Realux.estate

The scheme had been pitched as a transparent “community project,” in which those involved would have voted on real estate acquisitions and reaped the financial benefits. The website claimed that the group—“a multidisciplinary team with several skills in real estate, finance, blockchain, development and legal”—had already proved there was a product-market fit, created a founding team, and assembled a network of lawyers and real estate agents.

On the website, Realux called the idea a “transparent win-win,” in which people could avoid real estate taxes while still entering the market. 

Another supposed benefit listed by the site of getting in early: “Peace of mind.” 

This post has been updated to include a comment from Jim Crypto.

Coinbase and its CEO Brian Armstrong entered this year with ambitious plans. After earning a net profit of more than $800 million in the final quarter of 2021, the company—the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States—set out on an “extensive global expansion strategy.” It seemed as if crypto was taking over the world, and Coinbase was a key player, making waves when it ran a Super Bowl ad featuring a QR code bouncing around the screen, which proved so successful that it crashed the Coinbase app.

As part of the strategy, the company undertook an ambitious hiring push in order to triple the size of its staff by the end of the year, roping in people from some of the most successful technology companies and financial institutions in the world with what one hire described to Motherboard as “fucking absurd” amounts of compensation. One by one, people at Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Tesla, Google, Apple, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and other powerful companies bet their futures on the future of crypto—or at least on Coinbase.

And then it all fell apart. From the outset of the year, the broader cryptocurrency industry struggled to combat the flurry of news that was sinking tokens and share prices alike, and Coinbase wasted little time reversing course. Armstrong, an eccentric CEO who deplores political talk at work, made the decision to stop all hiring. This included people who had already accepted offers and were preparing to join the company in the coming days, weeks, and months. 

Have you worked at Coinbase? We want to hear from you. From a non-work device, contact our reporter at [email protected] or via Signal at 310-614-3752 for extra security.

The company said it had pulled “a number of accepted offers,” understating the true scope of the decision. In total, more than 300 people were suddenly left scrambling. The news blindsided the would-be hires, not least because many of them had received numerous reassurances that their offers would not be rescinded, according to interviews with 17 people who had job offers rescinded. (Motherboard granted the hires anonymity because they feared Coinbase revoking their severance packages and damaging their future job prospects.)

The decision felt rushed to those who had lost their jobs, who were told by those who had recruited them that they had received no forewarning about the decision either. Panicked, some begged for their old jobs back. Some, like those who had been offered jobs last year as college undergraduates and had stopped their job searches out of respect for their future employee, had no obvious options. Some worried about the leases they had just signed. And others worried they would have to leave the country if they couldn’t find a new job before their visa expired. 

One person called the way Coinbase handled the decision “reckless and negligent,” and another described it as “irresponsible.” 

Another put it even more bluntly: “This whole thing just kind of fucks me.”

In response to a request for comment, a spokesperson for Coinbase said the company had “nothing to share” beyond the company’s past public statements. 

The reasons that people had agreed to join Coinbase varied. One person appreciated the CEO’s desire for a lack of political conversation at work. Another described himself as a “Coinbase super user” going back years. Some liked the fact that they could work remotely, or thought Coinbase seemed more steady than the typical crypto company, allowing them a safer way into a high-risk, high-reward industry.

But most people had joined for the money. One hire said he had been offered more than $300,000—double what he was making at his current company, and an amount he described as “life-changing money.” He felt he couldn’t turn it down. “We just live in this fun capitalist hellscape where you kind of have to say yes,” he said.

Another person who was planning to work for Coinbase’s back-end team said the money had proven so alluring that he had signed on despite his own misgivings about the cryptocurrency industry. When he told his friends in software engineering and computer science that he had taken the job, they joked that he would soon start scamming those around him. 

“They kind of made fun of me,” he said. (Others told Motherboard that while they weren’t anti-crypto, it wasn’t their passion. “I don't really know anything about crypto,” admitted one software engineer. “I don't care either way,” said another.)

In recent months, the situation shifted dramatically and quickly as tech stocks and cryptocurrencies both plummeted, and the crypto sector suddenly found itself dealing in crisis. Gemini, a crypto exchange owned by the Winklevoss brothers, announced it would lay off 10 percent of its staff to survive the "crypto winter,” and The blockchain protocol Terra’s ecosystem collapsed after its “algorithmic” stablecoin depegged from the U.S. dollar, wiping out billions of dollars and prompting a SEC investigation.

The situation hurt Coinbase as much as almost any entity. In mid-May, Coinbase revealed it had lost more than $400 million in the first quarter, due in part to decreased trading volume, and the company’s share price dropped down near $50 after starting the year around $250. 

In response, Coinbase executives undertook a series of dramatic actions. Armstrong, who had previously made it a point “not to discuss short term stock price fluctuations,” wrote to Coinbase’s employees on May 11 to say that while recent market news was “scary,” Coinbase’s balance sheet was strong and the company had “tremendous” amounts of money—$6 billion in cash “and equivalents” to be exact, as of its most recent shareholder letter. On May 16, Coinbase took a further step when it announced that it would “slow hiring and reassess our headcount needs against our highest-priority business goals.” Once again, the company said it was still in a “strong position” with a “solid balance sheet.”

Some of the hires felt reassured. But a number got nervous and asked their contacts at Coinbase if they had anything to worry about. 

Eight hires told Motherboard they had received reassurances in some form that signed offers would be honored—some the day they signed the offers, and others as recently as two days before their offers were rescinded. “Every time I reached out to everyone, they said everything was fine,” said one such person. “I had a conversation with my recruiter who told me not to worry,” said another. Another incoming hire, concerned by Coinbase’s dropping share price, said he reached out to ask about severance packages, in case offers were rescinded, and was told a contingency plan wasn't in Coinbase’s playbook.

Version of this note were sent to a number of Coinbase hires in May.

In late May, the company also sent emails to a number of hires telling them in no uncertain terms that the hiring freeze would not affect them, explaining that “this does not impact the offers of any employees who have already signed.” The line was bolded in various versions of the email reviewed by Motherboard. On June 2, though, only days after many people received written reassurance that they would be hired, Coinbase Chief People Officer L.J. Brock revealed internally and on the company blog that the company had decided to rescind the offers as part of a broader “hiring pause” at the company that would last for the “foreseeable future.” 

“All incoming hires will be advised of their updated offer status today by email,” Brock wrote.

Coinbase then started to email individual hires with messages that didn’t vary much outside of the hire’s name and the amount of severance offered, which ranged from one to three months of pay among people who spoke with Motherboard. In the email, Brock said revoking the offers was a “very difficult” but “necessary” decision. (One guy's summary: “Hello. Today, we shared an announcement. Regret to inform you: go fuck yourself. We're giving you two month’s salary. Goodbye.”)

 The news crushed the hires, who described themselves as shocked, disappointed, and in disbelief. One person described the feeling of reading the email as comparable to a breakup. 

“My heart dropped,” said another person who had already quit their job and cried after reading the email. “It was just shocking.” 

One software engineer said the news caught him off guard. He hadn’t seen the public blog post before he received the email, so when he originally saw the subject (“Update to your Coinbase offer”), he assumed it was another step in the onboarding process or maybe even news of a salary bump. Before he had begun to process that he had lost a job he had never even started, people started to reach out, which frustrated him. 

“I don't know why they would announce it to the rest of the world before I even knew,” he said. 

Not everyone who should have received the email originally did. “I thought, ‘Hey, maybe I’m in the clear,’” one such person said. The next day, a Coinbase employee contacted the hire asking if he had any questions regarding his job being rescinded. After he informed the person that he had not received any such email, he received a separate email from the “Coinbase People Team” that included the email he was supposed to have already received and informing him that he no longer had a job. “Apologies that this email did not deliver properly as originally intended. Please see the original email below and, if they haven't already, a senior member of our Talent team will be reaching out for a 1:1,” the company wrote. 

The recruiters and hiring managers who had assured the hires in the prior weeks that their jobs were safe seemed to be panicked, too. Three hires in different divisions said their recruiters told them they had learned the offers would be rescinded that day. One described the recruiters as “blindsided,” a second described them as “frazzled,” and the third said a third said his recruiter told him it was an “absolute shock.” A number of hires felt bad for the recruiting team.

“I honestly don't think the recruiting team had any idea,” said a fourth hire.

The news left the hires in horrible situations. Some had already quit their jobs in preparation to start at Coinbase and were preparing to start as soon as the following week. One person who had been reassured that their job was safe said that by the time Coinbase rescinded the offer, her current employer had filled her role; she is now without a job. Another person who had also told their boss about the Coinbase job was able to claw their job back, but said it tarnished their relationship. “We're not best friends at the moment,” he said.

One incoming Coinbase software engineer said he had opened his company computer and was trying to complete the onboarding process the day his offer got rescinded. 

Another said he had declined a job at a prominent tech company hours before Coinbase rescinded the email. “I was honestly confused more than anything—confused at the recruiter offering me to sign a contract literally … days before they were going to reject it,” he said of Coinbase. He then frantically emailed the recruiter at the other company.

In preparation for their new jobs, a number of people had already put down a significant amount of money on new apartments—Coinbase is a "remote-first" workplace, it should be noted—and to ship their belongings. 

“The severance package will definitely be extremely helpful in paying off some of that,” said one recent graduate who leased a San Francisco apartment.

Ashutosh Ukey had been choosing between a job as a backend software engineer at Coinbase and starting a doctoral program in computer science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, one of three Ph.D. programs he had received offers to join. He had considered a number of other roles in the technology industry as well, but stopped looking elsewhere after accepting the Coinbase role. 

When the offer was rescinded, he felt panicked. Ukey, who is from India, had been counting on the job to allow him to stay in the United States, and he now finds himself on the clock to find a new job before his visa runs out later this year. “If I'm unemployed for more than those allowed days, my visa would no longer be valid. And I wouldn't be allowed to stay here in the U.S.” he told Motherboard. “I would have to go back to India.” 

Ukey wrote about his situation on LinkedIn, where the post received more than 12,000 likes. Days later, Brock, the chief people officer, acknowledged in a series of tweets last week that the company had put hires with work-related visas in “particularly difficult” situations and said Coinbase would provide such people with legal services.

College students were left in a frustrated place as well. Many engineers had agreed to join Coinbase as far back as last year during an aggressive recruiting process, and turned down opportunities with other top companies out of respect to the company. “In November, I could only see upside,” said one of them. “I didn't want to accept the Coinbase offer and keep looking elsewhere. I wanted to be ethically responsible in not lying to them.” They were now left without jobs at the worst possible time. One person had graduated the week his offer was rescinded.

There have been signs of frustrations from inside Coinbase too, where some employees reportedly were “circulating” a since-deleted anonymous petition purportedly written by a Coinbase employee arguing that “the executive team has recently been making decisions that are not in the best interests of the Company, its employees, and its shareholders,” which listed the aggressive expansion plans and rescinded offers among the complaints. 

Armstrong lashed out in response to the post through Twitter on Friday, calling the post “really dumb,” in part because “if you get caught you will be fired,” and “unethical because it harms your fellow co-workers, along with shareholders and customers.” (“Quit and find a company to work at that you believe in!” he added.)

To help those affected by the company’s decision, Coinbase established a “talent hub” to help them find new jobs, which included “job placement support, resume review, interview coaching and access to our strong industry connections.” As part of that effort, the company created a website that listed the contact information of more than 300 people whose offers had been rescinded with the aim of helping them find their “next great role.” 

“We aim to help create a career-defining moment for these folks — just not the one we had originally intended to,” Brock wrote in a post about the website.

A few people who spoke to Motherboard said they understood Coinbase’s decision considering the broader economic climate and would consider working there if the opportunity ever presented itself again. “We have no duty to Coinbase. They have no duty to us,” said one such person. Many more people, however, said the way it was handled has forever changed their opinion on the company. 

“I think they’re gonna have a hard time getting any talent in the door in the future, if they do survive this,” one person said, reflecting the feelings of many of the hires. 

Amid the turbulence within the broader crypto space, most of the hires who spoke to Motherboard said they would also steer clear of jobs in the industry more broadly. “I'm not gonna look for any crypto jobs,” said one software engineer. Another said as the country sits on the brink of a potential recession, he’s now searching for security over anything else. “Inherently as a concept, crypto would be the least secure industry that I could pick,” he said. 

After her offer had been rescinded, one hire reflected on what she had thought about crypto before the Coinbase offer. She had never been willing to invest much of her own money in the crypto space, which she saw as too volatile for her risk tolerance. And here, tempted by an unbelievable paycheck, she had put that concern aside.

“Shame on me for taking the leap with Coinbase,” she said. The lesson, in her eyes? “If it sounds too good to be true, it is.”

For the last few years, it’s been easy enough to look smart when picking stocks. That’s how things are when "stocks only go up." The combination of that confidence-inspiring ease and a surplus of cash related to various pandemic forces has led to a huge number of everyday people, known as retail traders, piling into various fashionable stocks, most famously GameStop and AMC, and feeling like geniuses. Robinhood, for one, saw more than 10 million people open accounts over a single recent yearlong period. 

Over that time, stock-picking has become fashionable as people were drawn in by screenshots of unbelievably large increases in the value of other investors' portfolios. On TikTok, enthusiastic influencers gave exceedingly questionable investing advice, like “I see a stock going up and I buy it and I just watch it until it stops going up, and then I sell it, and I do that over and over.” According to one recent poll, as much as half of Gen Z is getting financial advice from the algorithmic platform, and they are getting a similar amount from Instagram.

By and large, investing is a good way to make sure that your savings keep up with or even exceed the rate of rising prices, particularly when compared to stuffing your money under a rug. And luckily, stocks have generally gone up in price in the years since the world’s last major financial crisis. The problem is, picking single stocks—as opposed to depositing your money into a diversified index fund that includes hundreds of them—quickly becomes much harder and more dangerous for everyday people when stocks broadly stagnate or, worse, fall off a cliff. In such moments, hedge funds, rich people, and professionals with Bloomberg Terminals, etc., are often able to quickly dump falling stocks unsophisticated investors (i.e. you and me), who are often left holding a lot of the increasingly less valuable bag. Suddenly, those people switch from feeling like geniuses to feeling like they’ve made a huge mistake. 

Seeing questionable financial advice on social media we should know about? Contact our reporter at [email protected] or via Signal at 310-614-3752 for extra security.

The question right now lots of people will ask is if the party will soon stop, and whether it’s already started to happen. The reason is that stocks are looking a little shaky, to say the least. Particularly technology stocks, perhaps best represented by the recent declines in value of the many various “pandemic” companies, like Zoom and Peloton, which all enjoyed an unpredictable boost in value when COVID-19 enveloped the globe and locked people inside.

 But the nervousness isn’t simply limited to a bike company here and a video app there. In recent weeks, the stocks that comprise the Nasdaq Composite have struggled to keep pace with recent years of gains. The index is made up of a lot of technology stocks, and people have started to question if some of those stocks are appropriately valued, which has led the portfolio to drop 10 percent from an all-time high it hit in November, enough to be labeled a correction. “The public software sector is weathering the second deepest multiple contraction in the last decade,” Redpoint VC Tomasz Tunguz noted in a recent blog post, pointing as a reason why to indications that the Federal Reserve might end the decade of quantitative easing, low rates, and easy money as inflationary fears heat up.  It’s enough to spook the professionals. 

“It used to be fear of missing out, now it’s fear of bag holding,” Danny Kirsch, the head of options at Cornerstone Macro, told Bloomberg. “Investors are using any sort of rally to exit stocks, as opposed to chasing higher.”

 Corrections happen. The Nasdaq dealt with a similarly rough patch a year and a half ago, and people who are still bullish can try to make the argument that this is a blip caused by Omicron variant fears or the failure of the Build Back Better plan or short-term inflation or temporary supply chain problems. But the drop follows a growing chorus of prominent people expressing concern about the level of exuberance in the markets broadly. Here are some quotes from the last months: 

• Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon: “When I step back and think about my 40-year career, there have been periods of time when greed has far outpaced fear -- we are in one of those periods … My experience says those periods aren’t long lived. Something will rebalance it and bring a little bit more perspective.”
• SoftBank Vision Fund CEO Rajeev Misra: Private markets are “overvalued” and need to “rebalance.”
• Short seller Nathaniel Anderson, founder of Hindenburg Research: “There is a wild amount of froth … There are a tremendous amount of companies that are intrinsically worthless that are sporting multibillion-dollar valuations. It has become commonplace now.”
• Michael Burry of The Big Short: "More speculation than the 1920s … More overvaluation than the 1990s."
• Tiger Global’s John Curtius: "There is a bit of frothiness in the market, and not all companies are being appropriately valued today.”
• Berkshire Hathaway Vice Chairman Charlie Munger: “I consider this era an even crazier era than the dotcom era.”
• Rosenberg Research president David Rosenberg: “We have nutty, crazy, massive bubbles everywhere. In my professional lifetime, and probably going back further, I don't remember there being so many asset bubbles taking place at the same time." 
• Venture capitalist Fred Wilson on private market investments: “I think they are being delusional, comforted by the likelihood that someone will come along and pay a higher price in the next round. But it seems that person may also be delusional. Because when you model things out, the numbers just don’t add up.”

Last week, Jeremy Grantham, the 83-year-old investor and co-founder of Boston asset manager GMO, also said he had determined that the U.S. economy had entered “the fourth superbubble of the last hundred years.” Housing, commodity, and bond prices are all too high, he said. But Grantham placed special emphasis on what he described as “the most exuberant, ecstatic, even crazy investor behavior in the history of the U.S. stock market.”

“The checklist for a superbubble running through its phases is now complete and the wild rumpus can begin at any time,” he warned. 

Grantham is notable, if only for the fact that he was one of the first people to develop a strategy known as index investing, a diversified strategy that is essentially the opposite of the WallStreetBets YOLO-heavy strategy that is so fashionable today.

A lot of people will look at Grantham and the rest of the names and rightfully scoff. These are wealthy people, and wealthy people have by and large figured out ways to exit every major financial crisis relatively unscathed. Others might see them as washed up rich people or exemplative of the Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt class or even trying to scare people out of reaping the same financial gains they have enjoyed for years. 

Those are all valid enough points. But while some in the retail class have had some success using apps like Robinhood to make big bets on individual companies during the boom, the level of confidence among traders who haven’t faced a long-term crisis is a cause for concern. “The U.S. market today has, in my opinion, the greatest buy-in ever to the idea that stocks only go up, which is surely the real essence of a bubble,” Grantham wrote in his note. 

At the individual level, the success rate of guessing that, say, Peloton’s stock will go up a few cents could potentially turn on its head, and quickly, should the FUD mentality be proven right sometime soon. Timing the top and bottom of an entire market is even harder, so much so that financial experts advise against trying to do it. 

So instead, please just stop taking investment advice from random people on TikTok.

A giant cube an artist claims is made of $11.7 million worth of gold was carted throughout New York City Wednesday, first being plopped  down in Central Park before later making a stop at a private dinner for Wall Street bigwigs. And, as if that display by German artist Niclas Castello wasn't tone-deaf enough, it's also an ad for a forthcoming cryptocurrency: Castello Coin (CAST).

The cube, which is supposedly made of 186 kilograms of gold, had been promoted with tag lines like “Never before in the history of humanity has such an enormous amount of gold been cast into a single, pure object.” Lisa Kandlhofer, a Viennese gallerist who was at the cube’s launch, described it “as a sort of communiqué between an emerging 21st-century cultural ecosystem based on crypto and the ancient world where gold reigned supreme,” according to Artnet News. Castello told Artnet News that he hoped to “create something that is beyond our world—that is intangible." A security guard taking a more objective look at the object told the New York Times that it was “pretty plain.” After all, it is just a cube.

The cube attends a Wall Street dinner. (Photo credit: Sandra Mika)

The cube, however, is only one part of the story. It's supposed to act as a "physical brand ambassador" for a cryptocurrency called Castello Coin which is so bizarre as to defy belief. 

First, Niclas Castello is not listed as being part of the team behind the coin or even an adviser to the project. The coin's purpose is to simply be a currency for "high value economic goods and art," and claims to be in compliance with Swiss regulations. The project's tagline is "The Art of Payment." That being said, the website says U.S. citizens are not eligible to participate despite the project being unveiled in the heart of New York City. 

The details get even weirder. The team behind the coin claims it has gone through a private pre-sale phase already, which funded the gold cube, and it's now in a public sale phase. To buy the coin, you have to use the website, which tells you how much the coins are worth (currently 0.44 euros), and input a figure above 1,000 euros, the minimum investment. 

Once you do that, you're taken to a Google form where you're asked to put in information and advised that the team will be in touch over email. According to the project's whitepaper, nearly half of all CAST tokens will be held by the team, their partners, and in a "reserve." Without speculating on CAST specifically, that kind of distribution is normally concerning for potential investors. 

Of course, there will also be an NFT sale of some sort in 18 days, which also requires a Google form to sign up for. The promotional video is even stranger.

A gold cube surrounded by security in a public park during a housing crisis and paraded to a Succession-like dinner, which doubles as a bizarre cryptocurrency play—is this an artistic gag and indictment of the commodification of physical materials and digital assets? Evidence of an artist selling out beyond all measure? Both? Neither? We're not sure anymore, but we’re also not sure it matters. It’s a tiny cube.

It's a cube. (Photo credit: Sandra Mika)