Here are the details on Flyfish Club, Gary Vaynerchuk’s NFT restaurant opening in 2023
While we already knew some of the basic details about the NFT restaurant concept from Gary Vaynerchuk and the VCR Group, we learned more last week about how it will all work.
Here’s what we learned and my quick thoughts:
Token as Membership. At a high level, the Flyfish Club and its NFT membership is essentially a cryptic new spin on an old idea: the members-only dining club. To start, VCR initially made available to the public a total of 1,501 membership tokens for the Flyfish Club and reserved 1,534 for the company. Membership remains valid as long as one person owns the token. Like most NFTs, the owner can resell the token (and many are already trying to do so) on marketplaces like Opensea.
Flyfish has a two-tier membership. Flyfish has two types of tokens available: a Flyfish token and a Flyfish Omakase token. The Flyfish token, initially offered at 2.5 Ethereum (~$8,400), grants you access to the restaurant and lounge while the Omakase token, offered at 4.25 Ethereum (~$14,300), grants you offers all of that plus entry to the exclusive Omakase room.
Frequency and Guests: A token owner can eat at Flyfish pretty much whenever they want, but they will need to make a reservation first. Token owners will need to call ahead up to 14 days in advance for a table. Each token holder can make as many reservations as they want (depending on capacity) per month, and each token member can bring the number of guests allocated for a specific table (for example, if they reserve a table for four people, it can bring three guests).
Flyfish token owners still have to pay for food. So you just spent $14,000 on your new subscription? That’s great and all, but better have some left over to pay the bill. As with a traditional exclusive dining club, membership fees at Flyfish are just that, the cost of entry. Food, payable in US dollars, will be purchased for each meal as if you were at any other restaurant.
Flyfish has raised $14 million so far. That’s right, $14 million in about a week. It’s impressive and signals a potentially revolutionary way to start a restaurant. Of course, there can only be one “first” and not everyone has millions of followers like Gary Vaynerchuk. Still, I can definitely see a lot of celebrity chefs jumping into NFT-led membership restaurants over the next two years.
Tokens are for rent. It’s an interesting (and clever) twist: Flyfish allows owners of tokens to rent them out to others on a monthly basis. Leasing essentially turns a semi-liquid asset with limited capacity for short-term recurring revenue into a potential cash cow. Say, for example, you buy a Flyfish token for $4,000 and rent it out to executives who want to try it out for $1,000 a month. This would essentially allow you to treat a token as, say, a house you buy to put on Airbnb: an investment with the potential for both long-term appreciation and short-term recurring income.
There are many more details on the club’s FAQ page, which I recommend you read. All in all, I think Gary Vee and his team have created a pretty sensible initial framework for an NFT-as-membership concept that will no doubt become a model for others (of which I think there will be many) .
If you want to learn more about how NFTs will have a chance on the restaurant and food industry, be sure to join The Spoon’s Food NFT/Metaverse Mini-Summit on February 1st. Registration is free (but limited), so hurry and register today!
