Give a guess and try.

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Did you guess it?

Freeports.

Let’s dive in.

The total transactions of global art market is worth around $65B in 2021.

I am talking about just the transactions of physical paintings and drawings, Picassos and Monets .etc.

Yes, I don’t know my art history and famous artists well, but I’ll try.

No, this doesn’t include NFTs and digital art.

They are literally too new and incredibly difficult to value.

Some say it was worth around $15B in 2021.

Have you watched Tenet?

The movie that nobody, literally no one alive, understands.

Not even Christopher Nolan himself.

He is the Director of Tenet by the way.

The entire show revolved largely around Freeports.

Which is such a fascinating concept, that is quite unknown and unfamiliar to many.

So what is it?

Essentially, it is a geographical location where you don’t have to pay taxes when you buy and sell stuff internationally.

So why do people use it?

“If you buy a $10m painting from a dealer in France and want to bring it to the US (or anywhere else, really), you’ll have to pay import duties as high as $2m — $3m. Storing it in a free port gets around this. For around $1,000 per month, you’ll never pay those import taxes on your van Gogh.”

The bummer is that you will never have the luxury to stare at the painting hanging on your wall.

Hey, but you save a lot on taxes and logistics eh?

Imagine being a tycoon with $100M worth of exquisite paintings.

The tax you have to pay on those babies would be astronomical!

Freeports and Art is a HUGE business.

“Geneva Free Port supposedly hosts the world’s largest art collection, with an estimated value of US$ 100 billion. Journalist and art critic Marie Maertens estimated the number of artworks stored in the free port to be around 1.2 million. Great museums’ collections are nothing compared to that: the Museum of Modern Art in New York City has about 200,000 artworks.”

Imagine all the priceless Art and nobody to enjoy them.

The best part?

There is a huge veil of secrecy shrouding everything.

Transactions, bidders, buyers, sellers, artworks and middlemans are all highly secretive.

That is why it is not alarming to know that so many money laundering, illicit activities and grey dealings occur in freeports all the time.

Stolen art, illegally exported artifacts and blackmailing.

We are only just beginning to uncover some of the naughtiness.

This is why NFTs and digital art is such a big deal.

There is the potential to take over traditional Art.

And it is all on the blockchain, so we can track and trace everything.

So don’t sleep on NFTs just yet.

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Do you know what’s a Freeport?

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