We are seed investors in Fairmint. We put money into this company before writing a word about it, and we intend to keep our own cap table there. Read every sentence below knowing that. It is also in the disclosures, where it will stay.
The what
Fairmint keeps a company’s ownership record: who owns what, on what terms, verified rather than asserted. They are a transfer agent registered with the SEC, which is the boring and load-bearing part. A transfer agent is the entity legally responsible for knowing who holds a company’s securities, and it is the difference between a cap table that is a spreadsheet somebody maintains and a cap table that is a record.
The records are kept in the Open Cap Table Format, an open-source schema from the Open Cap Table Coalition, and their protocol puts that format onchain. So the shape of the data is not theirs, which means leaving is possible, which is the only property that makes staying a choice.
Why it matters to a gallery
A gallery’s capital has always come from the people who buy from it. The instinct to let those people onto the cap table is old; what has always killed it is the paperwork. Fifty small cheques means fifty line items, or a special-purpose vehicle wrapped around them, and either way the friction argues for taking one large cheque from somebody who was never in the room.
Their current product consolidates many small cheques into a single line without an SPV, handles the identity and accreditation checks, and lets a company bring its own instrument rather than adopt a bespoke one. That is the financing equivalent of the waitlist described at the waitlist room: funded interest at a price the person chose, rather than an ask nobody has to honour.
It also puts our own cap table under the rule we apply to every contract we write: readable by the people it affects, without asking us.
What this page is not
It is not an offer to sell anything, an invitation to invest, or a solicitation of any kind. It describes a structure we admire and intend to use. If this company ever raises, that will happen through the documents and the checks a raise requires, under counsel, and not through a page on an art site.
The entity and the jurisdiction that would sign those documents are not settled either. That question is written out at the entity page, and it is the same one the print room waits behind.
The deck, and the decision we have not made
We have not decided to raise. No round is open, no instrument exists, nothing has been offered to anybody, and no money has been taken. The document below is a piece of thinking about a company, written in July 2026 and published for the same reason as everything else here: it can be checked. Reading it does not make you an investor and cannot: there is nothing to invest in.
It runs sixteen pages on why a floor price is not a bid, seven mechanisms the trade has used for decades written as contracts, and a page listing every claim in it that is not true yet. That last page is the one worth reading first, and it is the reason the rest of it is publishable at all.
This is the public cut. The version that goes to a person in a meeting carries a name, a face and a location; a document left on the open internet does not need any of the three, so they were removed from the source and the file rebuilt rather than covered over. Everything that makes an argument is intact.
The small print, in our words
Fairmint’s product, pricing, regulatory status and claims are theirs and live at fairmint.com. Nothing here is financial, investment or legal advice. They do not pay us to be mentioned; the relationship runs the other way, which is the point of the yellow box at the top of this page.