How a pipe-smoking alien became the 'digital Mona Lisa'

if you’ve got your identity tied to an Ethereum address, and you’ve got a Beeple in there, that’s no different than someone walking into your house and seeing a Picasso, in a lot of ways.

Even Beeple thinks the current mania is a bubble, as he told my podcasting partner Kara Swisher. But the history of the art market is a history of bubbles, as are the histories of finance and the internet. All are still with us.

Last October, an image appeared on Twitter of a crypto Mount Rushmore: a drawing of four men etched in stone, looking out onto a valley of trees. There was Dorian Nakamoto, rumored to be the pseudonymous creator of bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. There was the distinct, angular jawline of Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, the world’s second most ... See more

Since Blitmap’s launch, Hofmann had been thinking about other novel ways to promote the creation of blockchain-based art and communities to surround them. One idea he had was to let people create (or “mint,” in blockchain-speak) NFTs based on his random-item generator for free — essentially just to see what would happen. He would not provide any ar... See more

Now in the 2020s, as Web3 develops and a new era of digital ownership begins, creatives will be richly rewarded to the extent that they have the creative skill of building community around themselves – those creatives who best invent context and stories. It might be that this skill, more than the art itself, is what triggers unusual amounts of mone... See more