You're right that I expect there is a large group of both people and money who I expect to be interested in this because it's on the blockchain which forms part of my reasoning. It also allows for better interoperability with existing Ethereum assets, which helps if you thinking making ICs liquid is important (which I do).
What I instead meant by the second point, however, is that moving funding to existing IC holders seems like it would be harder to do with traditional finance methods and easier with blockchain tech.
I haven't worked enough with traditional finance protocols, but it seems like the process of querying all holders of the IC and then making payments to all of them could be more costly and complex, even when using something popular like Stripe.
I agree that they probably have a good system in place for electronic tabulation, but museums generally don't trade art at high speeds across many, many actors.
And it seems desirable to have ICs trade at volume and speed, which I think museums probably don't have the specialized infra for, but blockchain does.
The short list of reasons is:
I think having a symbolic object could also be cool as well (and definitely welcome other projects looking to do them!), but the problem we're more focused on is:
Both of the above two things are much harder to keep track of with a physical object.
FYI one of the links seems broken for the website?
Appears to prefix effectivealtruism