I’m a 90s crypto baby.
Over a decade ago I was a junior in high school who found himself mining Dogecoin on his laptop in a North Carolina hotel room while touring colleges.
Dipping my toes into crypto for the first time, I did what anyone would expect a kid that didn’t know what he was getting himself into to do: thoughtlessly build a humble portfolio of the top 15 or 20 coins by market cap. It included the usual suspects like Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Ripples*, but also included those that have come and long since gone like Primecoin, Nxt, Quark, the original Worldcoin, and so many more.
Senior year I’d be on the team of a decentralized cloud storage project in its early stages, from token sale long before the ICO days to initial test deployments of the network. Through college I’d work for a crypto trading and portfolio management platform primarily serving a retail audience. I did make the rounds at Consensus: Invest and other spaces trying to introduce a more institutional audience to our research and horde of data, but that side of the business never really took off.
That cloud storage project company makes no mention of crypto anywhere on their website now but does boast some big-name tech partners. Last I heard, the trading platform was acquired by a traditional financial services company for pennies on the dollar of what VCs were valuing it during peak 2017 mania. Crypto has played an integral role for the entirety of my adulthood. Even when I took a break post-college to work in public sector advisory, my free time was spent hopping between yield farms during DeFi summer and generally just continuing to explore the space.
You’ll probably notice I make no mention of crypto art in any of this. If I had to guess, I heard about things like Cryptopunks and Rare Pepes pre-2021 but certainly never attempted to explore them. I knew about Counterparty as far back as 2014 because at that cloud storage project, we had long internal debates about whether to launch our token through Mastercoin or Counterparty on Bitcoin (this was before Ethereum existed). But even still, I never once truly considered the artistic applications until only a few years ago.
My background in art is probably similar to that of many collectors in this space: my dad regularly took me to museums when I was younger and I had a “drawing phase” as a kid. That’s about it. By the time I was a young adult, every creative bone had left my body as I suited up to pursue the career in finance that I thought I wanted.
What finally cracked me open wasn’t a grand revelation but the steady drumbeat of images and conversations I couldn’t ignore. Beeple headlines might have caught my attention, but it was Art Blocks that sank its teeth in. That was the first time I felt that same curiosity I had back when I was mining coins on my laptop. It didn’t look like finance; it looked like culture.
Entering the crypto art scene in early 2021, I came with that same hunger mentality of it being just another meta. I collected Grant Yun’s Nighttime in the Neighborhood, burned some Framergence, and minted every Art Blocks collection I could on my way to a full curated set. By the time I was deep into the rabbit hole, it was too late: I was an art collector.
Fast forward to now, calling myself a curator, or hell, even still just a collector, would probably make the classically trained aesthetes and Sam Spikes of the world cringe. I am the quintessential example of what some might call a red-chip art patron.
At first, I thought onchain was the end-all, be-all for digital artifacts. If it wasn’t provably on a ledger somewhere, did it even exist? That was my dogma. But over time I realized how shallow that was. I’ve made the effort to read up on the history of digital art, and even the broader sweep of what we colloquially call “trad art.” The more I’ve learned, the more I’ve recognized how much I missed by parading the onchain gospel without ever asking what came before.
It was only after I took a step back in the aftermath of 2021 and found myself, with the help of others, challenging all the assumptions we had echoed as truths. For the first time in my crypto life, speed hadn’t been an advantage, it was a liability.
Along the way, I found myself sharing art every day. At some point I became subconsciously afraid to, second-guessing whether I was amplifying the right things or playing into the wrong dynamics. Because this space isn’t really small, despite what people like to say. There are groups for everything. People don’t just collect art, they collect in groups. They want the social confirmation, the shared language, the sense of being part of something. Terraforms collectors parroting vague 113-isms, punks collectors still orbiting around early claimers, Spratt as the second coming of Jesus, AB full set (sorry, AB500) holders, Ordinals believers ignoring prior Bitcoin standards, NFT archaeologists whining about V1 punks; everyone finds their corner.
And yet, so much of it feels like a hall of mirrors. In 2021, plenty of collectors would only touch an artist if they were on SuperRare. Nowadays, they pile into 6529’s network, building deep collections with no material engagement with the artists themselves. It’s not collecting the work; it’s collecting the nodes. The networks, not the images. Which is fine, it mirrors how traditional art often revolves around institutions more than artworks. But it does make you wonder what we’re actually doing here.
And then there’s the collective schizophrenia about what we claim we want. For years people parroted “wen MoMA.” But the moment MoMA actually dipped their toes in – Tezos Postcards, Refik, whatever – it became “no no, not like that.” We yelled for more diversity beyond the same ten artists, but when someone like m0dest breaks through with their alter ego, too many of us roll our eyes. We said we wanted “trad” artists with institutional backing, but when Marina, Hirst, or others came in, they were shrugged off, written off, or outright mocked. It’s a cycle of “we want more” followed immediately by “not like that.”
At this point, I’ve come to believe that most collectors in this space don’t actually know what they want beyond social validation. Those from the old world of art will read that sentence and think, “no shit!”. The expressed reasons like supporting culture, pushing digital frontiers, and reshaping institutions are one thing. The subconscious reasons are another: most just want returns, whether financial or otherwise, sooner rather than later (again, no shit!).
Now we find ourselves here today. Traitmaxxing, avant gay, schizocollage, and art coins (no, not you fxhash) are the talk of the crypto art streets. A community carving out their small corner over the years and showing collectors from elsewhere that Solana had a spark of something culturally definitive. I find myself down the rabbit hole with this scene now too.
What’s compelling about these micro-movements isn’t that they promise permanence or prestige. It’s that they feel alive in a way the ossified blue-chip meta doesn’t. They’re chaotic, internet-native, a little unserious and they’re exactly the kind of energy that got me into crypto in the first place. Maybe that’s why I’ve followed them down the rabbit hole.
That’s true for any of my involvements in the distinct scenes on Bitcoin, Tezos, Solana, and Ethereum. Each chain feels like a different country with its own codes, histories, and small wars. Juggling them is exhausting, but that’s the only honest way to be here and refusing to let one protocol define the whole story.
Whatever it is, it’s that tension that eventually pushed me into curation myself, something that it feels most collectors in this space try to dabble in at some point. Curation became the way I worked through my own confusion about the space, a way to test if art could anchor meaning where everything else felt slippery. Singular, and later Ancora, started as experiments in seeing how far we could push the idea of tying art directly to its digital substrate. Every project felt like a negotiation: how much can you bend the tech without breaking the art, and how much can you bend the art without breaking the tech? In this case, both within and outside of the confines of the Ordinals protocol.
If most of the space felt like a hall of mirrors, then All At Once, a group show I co-curated with sssluke and Grailers, was the rare exhibition that cut through the noise. To me, it’s still the single most important exhibition done with Ordinals to date. Not because it sold well (it didn’t!), but for one of the first times I felt like Ordinals had escaped the hall of mirrors and proved the scene could be thoughtful, conceptual, and unashamedly itself.
I’ve been in crypto long enough, exploring deeply enough, and frankly making enough money, that I now can’t be bothered to chase every new shiny perp protocol, L1, or whatever’s next. Maybe I’ve “made it” in my own way; not in the sense of pedigree, but in the sense that my attention is worth more than an airdrop. I’m back to moving fast and breaking things with this new lens, but I can confidently say that I still don’t know what the hell I’m doing.
Teenage me mining Dogecoin and late-twenties me fumbling through the crypto art scene aren’t so different in that way. Neither knew what they were doing, but that’s okay. Opinions don’t need to be strong because loosely held ones have gotten me this far, and maybe that’s all I can promise myself going forward.