Moonbird’s NFT founder bought a $16 million house – DIRT

Who, who knew owls were so popular? The art world’s latest craze is Moonbirds, a collection of 10,000 owl avatars that are also non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The Ethereum-based project launched earlier this year and sold out almost immediately, generating $445 million in revenue within days and later raising $50 million in a Series A funding round led by venture capital behemoth Andreessen Horowitz.

Behind Moonbirds is Kevin Rose, who is not a household name but has been a well-known tech entrepreneur for nearly two decades. The California native, 45, first came to prominence in the mid-aughts thanks to his popular Digg website. The success of the now-defunct website and other early Internet endeavors led Rose to become a venture capitalist, and he became a very early investor in a number of large tech companies now worth billions — Twitter, Zynga and Square among them.

For most of the past decade, Rose has lived primarily in Portland, Oregon, where in 2020 he completed the construction of a very glassy custom home. But with the burgeoning success of Moonbirds and his Proof web3 umbrella company, it’s perhaps no surprise that he’s looking to Los Angeles to grow what he describes as a “huge, massive, brand new kind of media company.”

Records show Rose paid $16.5 million for an unfinished property in prime Brentwood Park, one of LA’s most expensive neighborhoods. The long and very L-shaped house sits behind gates on a half-acre lot and is still midway through construction, meaning Rose probably won’t move in for at least another year. Renderings additionally reveal that the modern home will offer walls of glass overlooking grassy lawns, plus six bedrooms and 8.5 bathrooms in 7,600 square feet of living space.

Rose is sure to love the new Brentwood mansion, because his Portland home that just sold looks almost exactly the same. Tailored to his specifications and located in the unincorporated area of ​​Dunthorpe, the elegant residence offers soaring ceilings, walls of glass, five-bedroom suites and open-concept living throughout.

Other amenities in the nearly 7,000-square-foot Oregon home (below) aren’t limited to a “secret” wet bar, gym with sauna, wine cellar, home theater, three-car garage with electric car chargers and top-of-the-line security system. No wonder the house hit the market in July and sold in just one month for $7.9 million, nearly the entire $8 million asking price.