Sabrina Sato

The timing of this deal is the context

This partnership was struck in late 2021, which was close to the peak of the NFT and metaverse investment cycle. Capital was moving into digital-collectible and virtual-world ventures at a pace that was not sustained: through 2022 trading volumes in NFT marketplaces fell sharply, a great many projects launched in that window were abandoned, and corporate interest in the "metaverse" as a product category cooled considerably.

That is market history rather than a claim about this specific company, whose subsequent performance is not public. But the date on a deal is information, and a deal announced at the top of a cycle deserves to be read with the cycle in view.

Licensing a likeness is not the same as investing

The arrangement made Sato the face behind a digital persona built by the company. That is a structure worth pulling apart, because it can involve very different things: a person can license their likeness for a fee, take equity in the venture building it, or both.

The distinction decides who carries the risk. Licensing a likeness pays regardless of whether the venture works. Holding equity means the value of the position depends entirely on whether it works. Announcements of this kind routinely blur the two, and where the terms are not disclosed — as here — the honest position for a reader is that it is not knowable from the outside.

If this made the sector interesting rather than the celebrity, start with how to begin investing — and, if private companies are what caught your eye, how angel investing actually works.