{"version":"https://jsonfeed.org/version/1.1","title":"Mondoir Insights","home_page_url":"https://mondoir.com/insights","feed_url":"https://mondoir.com/insights/feed.json","description":"Long-form writing from Mondoir on digital ownership, AI and the art market, and building AI-native products from Dubai. By Amir Soleymani and the team.","language":"en-US","authors":[{"name":"Amir Soleymani","url":"https://mondoir.com/#founder"}],"items":[{"id":"https://mondoir.com/insights/do-you-really-own-your-nft","url":"https://mondoir.com/insights/do-you-really-own-your-nft","title":"Do You Really Own Your NFT?","summary":"You paid for the art and the blockchain proved the sale — so why might you not own what you bought? A plain-language look at the gap between a token and an artwork.","content_text":"When you buy an NFT, you are promised something that sounds absolute: permanent, verifiable, on-chain ownership of a digital artwork. The payment is real, the token is real, and the blockchain record is genuinely tamper-resistant. But underneath that promise sits an uncomfortable question the market rarely answers honestly — ownership of what, exactly?\n\nThe token and the artwork are two different things\n\nA blockchain is extraordinarily good at one narrow job: keeping an immutable, public ledger of who holds which token. That job it does brilliantly. The problem is that the token lives on-chain while the artwork almost never does. What you actually receive is a record that points to an image — and the image itself usually sits on a private company server or a decentralised storage network that somebody has to keep paying to maintain.\n\nSo the blockchain's celebrated guarantees — immutability, verified scarcity, transparent provenance — apply to the pointer, not to the thing it points at. The token has those properties. The artwork attached to it often has none of them.\n\nFour things that quietly undermine ownership\n\n1. The smart contract is controlled. Whoever deploys it can frequently change what the token points to — without the holder's consent.\n\n2. The asset is not stored with the owner. The artwork lives on corporate servers or decentralised storage that depends on a third party continuing to pay for it.\n\n3. Access to the blockchain is centralised. Nearly all consumers reach the chain through a handful of commercial gateway providers who can restrict access at any time.\n\n4. The asset cannot exist without infrastructure. A digital artwork needs electricity, a device, software, and the internet just to be seen — constraints a physical painting never has.\n\nWhy this matters for collectors\n\nNone of this means NFTs are worthless or that digital art is a scam. It means the language of the sale has run ahead of the facts. A collector who is told they are buying permanent, guaranteed ownership deserves to know that what they are really buying is a token whose linked artwork can move, change, or disappear if the people running the infrastructure stop showing up. That is not a hidden catch buyers should have to discover later — it is the headline fact of the transaction.\n\nWhat honest digital ownership could look like\n\n1. Honest marketing — prohibit the unqualified use of \"own,\" \"permanent,\" and \"sale\" where the underlying facts do not support those words.\n\n2. Point-of-sale disclosure — a standardised label telling buyers, in plain language, where the artwork is stored, who controls it, and what happens if the platform closes.\n\n3. Service classification — treat dependency-bearing NFTs as service transactions for consumer protection, attracting the same disclosure and continuity duties as a subscription.\n\nThis piece summarises a longer position paper by Mondoir founder Amir Soleymani, \"The Illusion of Ownership in Digital Art.\" You can read the full overview on our research page, where the complete paper is published and free to download as a PDF.","date_published":"2026-06-18T00:00:00.000Z","date_modified":"2026-06-18T00:00:00.000Z","authors":[{"name":"Amir Soleymani","url":"https://mondoir.com/#founder"}],"tags":["Digital Ownership","NFT","Digital ownership","Consumer protection","Blockchain","Digital art"]},{"id":"https://mondoir.com/insights/how-ai-is-reshaping-the-contemporary-art-market","url":"https://mondoir.com/insights/how-ai-is-reshaping-the-contemporary-art-market","title":"How AI Is Reshaping the Contemporary Art Market","summary":"AI is no longer a novelty in the art world — it is becoming the infrastructure. How machine intelligence is changing the way art is discovered, priced, and sold.","content_text":"For most of the last decade, artificial intelligence showed up in the art world as a gimmick — a generator that made strange faces, a headline about an algorithm selling at auction. That phase is ending. AI is quietly becoming the plumbing of the contemporary art market: the layer that decides how work is found, how it is priced, and how it reaches the people who want it.\n\nDiscovery: from keywords to meaning\n\nThe old way of searching for art was a tyranny of tags. You typed \"blue abstract\" and hoped someone had labelled their work that way. Modern semantic search uses embeddings — mathematical representations of meaning — so a collector can describe a feeling, a palette, or a reference and surface work that genuinely matches, even when nobody thought to tag it. For emerging artists this is transformative: discovery stops depending on who can afford the most metadata and starts depending on the work itself.\n\nAppraisal: evidence guided by professional judgement\n\nPricing has always been one of the most opaque parts of buying art. Technology can support market research, but it does not replace professional judgement or turn an estimate into a universal price. Mondoir.Art no longer provides valuations or appraisals. All Mondoir appraisal assignments are handled exclusively through Artpraisal by Mondoir, starting from $400 depending on job complexity, with each written value opinion tied to identified artwork, a defined purpose, intended users, a value type, and an effective date.\n\nDistribution: the always-on gallery\n\nA physical gallery is open for a few hours a day to whoever happens to walk past. An AI-assisted platform never closes. It can write platform-appropriate captions, generate wall mockups, answer a buyer's questions about provenance and shipping in their own language at three in the morning, and publish to a dozen channels at once. None of this replaces the gallerist's eye — but it removes the operational ceiling that kept smaller galleries and independent artists from competing for global attention.\n\nWhat AI does not replace\n\nIt is worth being precise about the limits. AI does not have taste. It does not build the relationships that turn a first-time buyer into a lifelong collector, and it cannot stand behind a work's authenticity the way a trusted human can. The galleries and platforms that win will be the ones that use AI to handle scale and friction — and keep humans firmly in charge of curation, trust, and care.\n\nThis is the thesis behind Mondoir.Art, our AI-powered gallery and marketplace. You can explore how it works on our art page.","date_published":"2026-05-27T00:00:00.000Z","date_modified":"2026-05-27T00:00:00.000Z","authors":[{"name":"Amir Soleymani","url":"https://mondoir.com/#founder"}],"tags":["Art \u0026 Technology","AI art","Art market","Art appraisal","Semantic search","Galleries"]},{"id":"https://mondoir.com/insights/building-an-ai-native-company-in-dubai","url":"https://mondoir.com/insights/building-an-ai-native-company-in-dubai","title":"Building an AI-Native Company in Dubai","summary":"Dubai has become one of the most ambitious places on earth to build with AI. Lessons from building a multi-product company across art, education, and agents.","content_text":"Dubai has spent the last few years turning ambition into policy: national AI strategies, free zones built for technology companies, and a regulatory appetite that moves faster than most of the world. Building here is a particular experience. These are a few lessons from building Mondoir — a company that spans an art marketplace, an AI academy, an autonomous-agent ecosystem, and a secure document platform — from Meydan Freezone.\n\nStart where the regulation is clear\n\nThe temptation with new technology is to build in the grey areas first because that is where they feel exciting. The opposite is more durable. Anchoring a business in places where the rules are already legible — company formation, data handling, consumer protection — buys you the freedom to experiment everywhere else. The free-zone structure exists precisely to give that clarity early.\n\nBuild narrow, ship often\n\nAI makes it cheap to start ten things and finish none of them. The discipline that matters is shipping a narrow, genuinely useful product and then expanding from real usage rather than from a roadmap drawn in advance. Mondoir's products began with focused capabilities — Artpraisal's appraisal service, an AI course, a single agent behaviour — and grew only once people were actually using them.\n\nTreat AI as a team member, not a feature\n\nThe companies getting the most from AI are not the ones who bolted a chatbot onto an existing product. They are the ones who asked which jobs a tireless, fast, occasionally-wrong colleague could own end to end — drafting, tagging, replying, summarising — and designed the workflow around that colleague's strengths and its failure modes. The failure modes are the important half; you build the guardrails first.\n\nData residency is a feature, not a footnote\n\nFor anything touching regulated or personal data in the UAE, where the data physically lives is part of the product. Mondoir Vault, our document platform for professional-services firms, keeps data in-country with per-tenant encryption because that is what the customers and the regulators require — not as a compliance afterthought but as a core promise. In this region, in-country residency is increasingly the thing that makes a sale possible at all.\n\nThe compounding advantage of one roof\n\nRunning several products under one company looks inefficient until the parts start feeding each other: the academy teaches the techniques the marketplace runs on, the agent ecosystem stress-tests ideas the other products later adopt, and a shared brand earns trust faster than any single launch could. Building in Dubai rewards that kind of ambition — the infrastructure and the appetite are both there. The job is to match them with focus.","date_published":"2026-04-15T00:00:00.000Z","date_modified":"2026-04-15T00:00:00.000Z","authors":[{"name":"Amir Soleymani","url":"https://mondoir.com/#founder"}],"tags":["Building","Dubai","AI","Startups","UAE","Product"]},{"id":"https://mondoir.com/insights/what-nfts-need-to-actually-work","url":"https://mondoir.com/insights/what-nfts-need-to-actually-work","title":"Tools, Not Magic: What NFTs Need to Actually Work","summary":"The hype is gone and the technology remains. NFTs are tools, not magic spells — they will only last if they solve real problems. A look at where genuine utility lives next.","content_text":"The loudest years of NFTs are over, and I am glad. What is left, once the speculation drains away, is the part that interested me in the first place: a technology that can prove ownership and provenance. NFTs are tools, not magic spells — and tools only matter when they solve real problems.\n\nThe end of fast money\n\nThe era of easy flips and overnight fortunes is fading. That is not the death of NFTs; it is the end of a distraction. Speculation was never the point. The technology stays promising precisely because it can do quiet, useful work that has nothing to do with hype — and the people still here after the crowd left are the ones who were always more interested in the work than the windfall.\n\nWhere real utility lives\n\nThe interesting question is no longer how high a JPEG can sell. It is which real-world problems a token can actually solve:\n\n- Tokenizing real-world assets, from property deeds to financial instruments, so ownership is verifiable and transferable.\n\n- Paying creators directly through music platforms built on transparent, on-chain royalties.\n\n- Owning and moving game assets across worlds instead of being locked inside one publisher.\n\n- Verifiable digital identity and credentials — university diplomas and certificates that cannot be faked.\n\nFix the plumbing first\n\nFor any of this to last, the infrastructure has to grow up. Artwork and data need durable storage on networks built to keep files alive — not links that quietly rot when a server is switched off. And assets need to move across chains rather than being trapped on one. These are unglamorous problems, which is exactly why solving them matters more than the next collection drop.\n\nNo shortcuts\n\nThe hardest lesson is also the simplest: NFTs are not a magic spell, and traditional growth still matters. Quality, trust, branding, and patience built every creative industry before this one, and they will build whatever NFTs become next. The tool is genuinely useful. It was never going to do the work for us.\n\nThis essay draws on my book Fools and JPEGs: The NFT Scam That Might Actually Work.","date_published":"2026-02-25T00:00:00.000Z","date_modified":"2026-02-25T00:00:00.000Z","authors":[{"name":"Amir Soleymani","url":"https://mondoir.com/#founder"}],"tags":["The Future","NFTs","Utility","Web3","Real-world assets","Future"]},{"id":"https://mondoir.com/insights/the-broken-promise-of-nft-royalties","url":"https://mondoir.com/insights/the-broken-promise-of-nft-royalties","title":"The Broken Promise of NFT Royalties","summary":"Guaranteed royalties on every resale was the best idea NFTs ever had. Then marketplaces made them optional. What that did to creators — and what it revealed about the market.","content_text":"If you ask me what NFTs got most right, I will not point to the art or the prices. I will point to royalties: the idea that an artist could earn a share every time their work changed hands, for as long as it kept selling. It was the best promise this technology ever made. Then the market broke it.\n\nWhy royalties mattered so much\n\nIn the traditional art world, an artist usually sells a piece once. If it resells years later for a hundred times the price, they see none of it. On-chain royalties were supposed to fix that old injustice — to make ongoing payment to creators automatic and permanent. For a while it worked, and it genuinely changed how artists thought about their futures.\n\nThe race to the bottom\n\nThe catch is that royalties were never truly guaranteed. They relied entirely on whether marketplaces chose to enforce them. Once those marketplaces started competing for traders, royalties became a cost to cut. Platforms like Blur made them optional to win volume, and OpenSea followed to keep up. What had been sold as a permanent right turned out to be a setting someone else could switch off.\n\nThe deeper problem is whose interests the market actually serves. The incentives kept rewarding short-term trading over long-term artist sustainability. Trader-first won. Creator-first lost.\n\nThe reality for working artists\n\nStrip away the royalty headlines and the day-to-day for most artists is harder than the dream suggested:\n\n- Selling requires constant promotion — many successful NFT artists spend more time marketing than making.\n\n- The market is oversaturated, so visibility, not talent, often decides who sells.\n\n- A small number of large collectors — whales — quietly shape prices and attention.\n\n- Curated platforms restore the very gatekeeping NFTs promised to remove.\n\nNone of this means the original idea was wrong. It means a good idea is only as strong as the willingness to protect it. If we want creators to thrive, royalty enforcement cannot be left to whoever is fighting hardest for trading volume.\n\nThis essay draws on my book Fools and JPEGs: The NFT Scam That Might Actually Work.","date_published":"2025-12-16T00:00:00.000Z","date_modified":"2025-12-16T00:00:00.000Z","authors":[{"name":"Amir Soleymani","url":"https://mondoir.com/#founder"}],"tags":["Creators","Royalties","Artists","OpenSea","Blur","Creator economy"]},{"id":"https://mondoir.com/insights/how-nfts-became-a-casino","url":"https://mondoir.com/insights/how-nfts-became-a-casino","title":"How NFTs Became a Casino","summary":"NFTs were meant to revolutionize art and reward creators. Instead they became a playground for speculators. How hype, the media, and one famous sale changed everything.","content_text":"NFTs were supposed to revolutionize art and ownership. Instead, for a while, they became a casino for speculators, a playground for market manipulators, and a goldmine for the rich. I say that as someone who loves this technology — which is exactly why the casino years are worth being honest about.\n\nFrom a movement to a market\n\nThe original promise was simple and good: verifiable ownership for collectors, and royalties that paid artists every time their work resold. Somewhere along the way the conversation stopped being about art and started being about price. Profile-picture projects, floor prices, and flipping replaced the work itself.\n\nThe hype machine\n\nThe media did not just report the boom — it manufactured it. Headlines turned a niche experiment into a gold rush, celebrity endorsements poured in, and fear of missing out did the rest. Then, when the market turned, the same outlets reported the crash as if they had merely been watching, rarely acknowledging their part in amplifying the hype. Underneath it all ran practices most buyers never saw: wash trading to fake demand, and rug pulls that vanished with the money.\n\nThe sale that defined an era\n\nNo single moment captures this better than the $69.3 million sale of Beeple's “Everydays” at Christie's in March 2021. On the surface, it was a digital artist's coronation. Look closer and it reads more like a strategic maneuver. The winning bidder, Vignesh Sundaresan — known as MetaKovan — was not only a collector. He ran Metapurse, a fund that already held a bundle of Beeple's work and had issued B20 tokens tied to it.\n\nIn the weeks before the auction, B20 surged roughly 1,100% — from about $2 to $28 — then collapsed below $3 by May. The record-breaking sale doubled as an advertisement for a financial product: the closest thing to owning a piece of a $69 million Beeple. It was a textbook case of buy the rumour, sell the news.\n\nWhy this still matters\n\nThe casino did real damage — to artists who were told easy money was guaranteed, and to collectors who learned otherwise. But naming what happened is not the same as giving up on the technology. It is how you separate what was only hype from what was actually built.\n\nThis essay draws on my book Fools and JPEGs: The NFT Scam That Might Actually Work.","date_published":"2025-11-19T00:00:00.000Z","date_modified":"2025-11-19T00:00:00.000Z","authors":[{"name":"Amir Soleymani","url":"https://mondoir.com/#founder"}],"tags":["Market \u0026 Hype","NFTs","Speculation","Beeple","Media","Art market"]},{"id":"https://mondoir.com/insights/the-myth-of-decentralization","url":"https://mondoir.com/insights/the-myth-of-decentralization","title":"The Myth of Decentralization","summary":"Blockchain is decentralized, but the way we reach it is not. A look at the gatekeepers — marketplaces, wallets, and infrastructure — that quietly control Web3.","content_text":"Decentralization is the word that sold an entire industry. No middlemen, no gatekeepers, no one who can tell you what you may own or sell. It is a beautiful idea. It is also, for now, mostly an idea.\n\nThe ledger is decentralized. The pipes are not.\n\nThe blockchain itself — the public record of who holds what — is genuinely decentralized and hard to censor. The problem is everything you use to reach it. The marketplaces, the wallets, and the infrastructure that connect ordinary people to the chain are run by a handful of companies. While the blockchain may be decentralized, the way we interact with it is not.\n\nOpenSea, the largest marketplace, can ban users, hide collections, and restrict transactions — the very censorship blockchain was supposed to make impossible. Wallet and infrastructure providers like MetaMask and Infura have blocked users in entire countries, from Venezuela to others under sanctions, in response to regulatory pressure. The chain stayed open. The doors to it did not.\n\nNew gatekeepers, same as the old ones\n\nThe art world was promised a future without gatekeepers. Instead, NFTs simply produced new ones. Curated platforms decide whose work is seen. A handful of influential voices shape what the market believes is valuable. And anonymity, which the space often treats as a virtue, quietly removes accountability: when decision-makers cannot be named, trust becomes very hard to build.\n\nSmaller projects — the ones bootstrapped by individuals or tiny teams — often struggle to be recognized at all in this so-called decentralized space. That is not the level playing field we were promised.\n\nAn ideal worth being honest about\n\nI am not saying decentralization is a lie. I am saying it is a work in progress that the marketing has run far ahead of. A permissionless Web3 is an ideal, not yet a reality — and pretending otherwise only sets people up to be surprised when a company they never think about decides what they can and cannot do. The honest path is to name the gatekeepers we still have, and then do the slow work of depending on them less.\n\nThis essay draws on my books The Art of Connectivity (2023) and Fools and JPEGs.","date_published":"2025-10-15T00:00:00.000Z","date_modified":"2025-10-15T00:00:00.000Z","authors":[{"name":"Amir Soleymani","url":"https://mondoir.com/#founder"}],"tags":["Web3","Decentralization","OpenSea","Censorship","Infrastructure"]},{"id":"https://mondoir.com/insights/how-nfts-gave-me-a-tribe","url":"https://mondoir.com/insights/how-nfts-gave-me-a-tribe","title":"How NFTs Gave Me a Tribe","summary":"Beyond the speculation and the price charts, the real magic of NFTs was the people. A personal look at how a global digital art community became a kind of family.","content_text":"My love of collecting did not begin with pixels. It began with my grandfather's stamp collection — the careful order of it, the small story each square seemed to carry. When I found NFTs, that lifelong passion found new life. But the part that surprised me was not the technology, and certainly not the prices. It was the people.\n\nFinding my tribe\n\nThe NFT community — or, as I fondly call them, my tribe — became an integral part of my life. These were not transactional relationships. They were meaningful and deep-rooted, built across borders that would normally keep us apart. In Web3 we greet each other with a simple “GM,” good morning, and that small ritual says everything about the culture: people from wildly different backgrounds showing up for one another, every single day.\n\nI have met artists, collectors, and friends I never would have crossed paths with otherwise — the artist Sacha Jafri, the Persian rapper Tohi, the calligrapher Diaa Allam, and many more. Some of these people have become far more than friends. They are family.\n\nArt as a bridge between worlds\n\nOne of the early milestones for me was NFTLiverpool, an exhibition that drew thousands of submissions and put digital artists from every continent on the same wall. Seeing that shared space made the promise of this technology feel real. It was never about changing what art is. It was about expanding the canvas of possibilities for artists and collectors alike.\n\nNFTs as a force for good\n\nWhat convinced me most was how this technology could do good. NFTs let us turn acts of kindness into something secure, verifiable, and lasting — digital badges of generosity that inspire others to give:\n\n- I won an auction of Nadya Tolokonnikova's work for 100 ETH to support victims of domestic violence.\n\n- I helped found The NFT Guild to give artists and collectors a place to build together.\n\n- Through Time to Help, our community funded a water well in Kawulumu Village, Uganda.\n\n- We rallied around causes close to home, from the victims of Flight PS752 to the Women, Life, Freedom movement in Iran.\n\nIn the NFT space, at its best, people and community matter more than profit. That is the part of this story I never want to lose — and the reason I keep building.\n\nThis essay draws on my first book, The Art of Connectivity: Unveiling the Magic of NFTs (2023).","date_published":"2023-09-10T00:00:00.000Z","date_modified":"2023-09-10T00:00:00.000Z","authors":[{"name":"Amir Soleymani","url":"https://mondoir.com/#founder"}],"tags":["Community","Web3","NFTs","Digital art","Philanthropy"]},{"id":"https://mondoir.com/insights/collecting-with-meaning","url":"https://mondoir.com/insights/collecting-with-meaning","title":"Collecting With Meaning: A Philosophy for Digital Art","summary":"How my collecting changed — from chasing trends and aesthetics to supporting artists who stay true to themselves. A personal philosophy for collecting digital art.","content_text":"When I started collecting digital art, I bought with my eyes. I chased what looked striking, what was trending, what everyone said would go up. It took a while — and a hard personal stretch — to learn that this is the least interesting way to collect.\n\nWhen collecting becomes transactional\n\nAs my collection grew, so did the pressure. I began to feel that some artists saw me as a source of financial support rather than someone who genuinely loved their work. That weighed on me more than I expected; at one point it contributed to a real low in my own well-being. Collecting had quietly turned into a series of transactions, and transactions are a thin foundation for something that is meant to bring meaning.\n\nWhat pulled me back was small and human. The artist Rebecca Rose once reached out simply to check on me — not to sell me anything, just to ask how I was doing. That gesture reminded me what I actually valued: the person behind the work, not the next acquisition.\n\nCollectibles versus art\n\nIt helped me to separate two things that often get lumped together. Collectibles are frequently about community, status, or utility — the membership and the upside. Art is about expression and emotion, about a piece that moves you whether or not anyone else ever wants it. Both are fine. But knowing which one I am buying, and why, changed everything about how I collect.\n\nCollecting as conviction\n\nI gradually moved from chasing aesthetics to seeking out artists who stay true to their own style, even when the trends pull elsewhere. I would rather support an artist's journey than catch a wave. When Sotheby's invited me to curate for their Natively Digital sale, I used the moment to champion other artists rather than myself — that, to me, is what a collector is for.\n\nMy collection is not just a gallery of digital art. It is a mosaic of diverse voices and creative visions — and the relationships behind each piece matter as much as the piece itself.\n\nThis essay draws on my first book, The Art of Connectivity: Unveiling the Magic of NFTs (2023).","date_published":"2023-01-21T00:00:00.000Z","date_modified":"2023-01-21T00:00:00.000Z","authors":[{"name":"Amir Soleymani","url":"https://mondoir.com/#founder"}],"tags":["Collecting","Digital art","Artists","Curation","Philosophy"]}]}