New York Times 10,000-word article review: How NFT set off a trend of the times

By Clive Thompson

Compiled by Echo and Wang Dashu

NFT is one of the hottest topics in the blockchain industry this year, and it is also the direction with the most obvious out-of-circle effect. Recently, after interviewing a number of crypto artists, Clive Thompson, a reporter for the New York Times, wrote an article describing the history of the rise of NFT and the craze in the past six months in detail, and tried to uncover the charm and reasons behind the popularity of NFT. It is worth reading. Chain Catcher compiled the article without affecting the meaning.

“It was 40.7 ETH,” Victor Langlois gasped. “That was crazy.”

It’s just before 4 p.m., and Langlois, an 18-year-old crypto artist, sits at his desktop computer, watching a frenzied bidding war between two art collectors. Langlois wears a white hoodie he designed, his arms covered in his psychedelic art tattoos, which include an eyeball and sunflowers floating in a blue sky. The room’s windows are covered with cardboard to keep it dark, and a beam of blue LED lights shines down from the ceiling. As the numbers rise, Langlois nervously pulls on his beanie.

The bidding war started the day before on February 7 on the SuperRare auction site, when an art collector named @thegreatmando1 offered 15 ETH, then worth $24,000, for Langlois's digital painting "The Sailor." But soon another bidder, @yeahyeah, bid $33,000. The two bidders kept pushing the price up until it reached $67,905.92 at noon.

"sailor"

When I dropped by his home in Seattle, it was midafternoon, and bidding on “Sailor” was at $75,000. Langlois was talking to other digital artists on Twitter, who were excitedly cheering him on.

Langlois has an earnest, almost unsettling vibe. “Because I grew up with people being mean, I’m trying to be the best person I can be,” he told me. He chuckled nervously as he watched the bids on the screen. “I couldn’t believe it,” he said.

A year ago, he was a broke high school student living unhappy in his grandparents’ house in Las Vegas, where his grandmother would peer into his bedroom and dismiss his piles of acrylics and colored marker drawings as “ugly.”

He began selling his art on sites like SuperRare last summer, and by New Year’s Day 2021, the day he turned 18, Langlois had enough money to move out and move to Seattle as a full-time artist. He rented a house near downtown and filled it with art supplies, a Keurig coffee maker and a set of dumbbells (still unopened).

"My family has no money, everyone has two jobs and lives in a horrible part of California." Making that much money in a day is "just weird."

Langlois creates surreal digital images, often grotesque cartoon portraits—tear-stained faces and exposed skin—that convey his dark moods. The work he was selling the day I visited, “Sailor,” depicts a large-headed figure with its brain exposed like a pile of pink beef; its two eyes look like they were cut out of a magazine picture, a common theme in his portraits, and a paper boat hat happily perches on its head.

Langlois drew most of the work on an iPad during his first few days in Seattle, curled up on his living room couch. He then used animation software to add movement: the brain gently pulsed, the eyes kept blinking. The Sailor looks both unsettling and whimsical.

Langlois isn’t really selling digital art, though. He’s selling a non-fungible token, or NFT, which represents a unique relationship to the artist and the art to its owner. NFTs are digital files created using blockchain code, much like the code that makes Bitcoin possible. Langlois’ NFT contains data pointing to an online copy of Sailor Man, as well as data about who currently owns the NFT.

This means that an NFT behaves a bit like a physical piece of art. Someone can own it, keep it, or resell it to another collector. Langlois's animation is online and anyone can see it, even copy and download it. But there is only one copy of the NFT.

NFTs have been the subject of countless headlines lately, part of a craze that began in December, when crypto artist Beeple sold a collection of works for more than $3.5 million. By the spring, a dizzying array of digital files—video clips of LeBron James, Jack Dorsey’s first tweet—were minted as NFTs and auctioned for hundreds, thousands, or even millions of dollars.

There is no public consensus on what this gold rush means. If you ask Bitcoin's hardcore advocates - who call themselves "crypto natives" - NFTs herald the future of digital property. They herald a day in the future when people will spend their income on digital products that they can trade, resell or hoard as investments. When governments will lose their unique power to create money and protect property, people will turn to blockchain networks.

However, there are a lot of risks and downsides in the NFT vision, not least the environmental costs. Running the Ethereum network requires a lot of energy, and it is estimated that the annual energy consumption is roughly equivalent to that of Hungary. NFT skeptics also believe that the crypto craze has emerged mainly to keep people talking about cryptocurrencies so that the prices of Ethereum and Bitcoin remain high. In their view, this is more like groundless speculation, the next stage of decades of "financialization of everything."

Since sparking the frenzy six months ago, the beneficiaries of the ubiquity of NFTs have increasingly been the modern attention economy winners. Paris Hilton sold a collection of digital image NFTs for more than $1 million; the Golden State Warriors auctioned off a collection of digital memorabilia NFTs; and the man who took the infamous cheese sandwich photo at Fyre Festival is selling an NFT with that image to pay for a kidney transplant.

Yet crypto artists like Langlois are the ones who started the craze — a strange genesis for a trend that seems to be taking the cultural economy to the top. Just last year, crypto art was at the vanguard of a subculture, perhaps even a genre. It was SuperRare and a few other sites that created the market, gradually convincing a demographic of mostly young, heavily online cryptocurrency millionaires to open their virtual wallets and spend big bucks on digital tokens.

For those artists, the sudden wealth can be overwhelming. When I first met Langlois, in January, he had already made $300,000 in NFT sales. While Langlois is a shining star in his world, dozens of other digital artists — who previously stumbled or hustled for website design jobs — are starting to make a living from their art. The question of whether NFTs last or end up being a 21st-century version of tulip mania means far more to these artists than to the art world and other institutions caught up in this speculative frenzy.

Back in his dimly lit room, Langlois is observing his auctions. In addition to the Sailor on SuperRare, he has three more works on sale in limited quantities on the Bitski website, and their prices are also rising.

In the final minutes before the 5pm deadline, @yeahyeah placed a bid for Sailor for 46 ETH (about $800,000).

“I’m going crazy,” Langlois yelled, his voice hoarse. He wrote a message to @yeahyeah thanking him, then clicked a button on SuperRare to transfer Sailor to @yeahyeah’s digital wallet.

Langlois leaned back in his chair and took stock of his day. His sales on Bitski totaled nearly $29,000 that day, which, when added to the proceeds from The Sailor, brought his earnings to just over $109,000.

“You know what makes me sad?” he turned to me and said. He had spent the day celebrating and chatting with his online friends, but there was no one he could call. “I don’t have any brothers or sisters, and I don’t talk to my family anymore,” he said. Even if he could call them, his new life would be hard to explain.

From left to right: Treasure Cat by Sarah Zucker, sold for $8,623; CryptoPunk #7804 by Larva Labs, sold for $7,673,568; CRYPTOART MONETIZATION GENERATION by Matt Kane, sold for $82,764.

For decades, digital artists have received little respect. To the tastemakers in the fine art world, their work seems more like a commercial craft—can something made with Photoshop really be considered a work of art? Galleries often express disdain for digital work, asking, “Why should collectors pay for any image that can be right-clicked and downloaded for free?”

Then Bitcoin came along in 2009, and with the blockchain code, you could make digital items that were almost impossible to copy. The first artistic experiment in this regard was conducted by Kevin McCoy, an artist in New York, who became interested in Bitcoin and its blockchain soon after it came out. He wondered if it could provide a new source of income for creators. McCoy was particularly excited about the prospect of decentralization — the blockchain could allow artists to sell work directly to fans without the need for intermediaries like iTunes.

In 2014, McCoy teamed up with entrepreneur Anil Dash to create an experimental crypto token for a piece of his digital art. The next year, McCoy launched a small startup that lets artists create and sell tokens of their work. He was met mostly with blank stares. “It was a hard process for people,” McCoy said.

The concept took on new life in the spring of 2017. Matt Hall and John Watkinson, two programmers in Brooklyn, had created a set of collectible, punk-rock-style pixelated avatars they called CryptoPunks. (They liked “weird projects,” Hall told me.) They had no idea about McCoy and Dash’s earlier experiments.

But they knew Ethereum, a platform with a simple programming language that enables coders to create new financial products with ETH as currency. Matt Hall and John Watkinson used this language to issue an NFT for each CryptoPunk, thinking that people would be amused by the idea of ​​owning small pixelated avatars and perhaps trading them like baseball cards.

Hall and Watkinson created 10,000 CryptoPunks and put the NFT of each punk on a website where anyone can claim a punk for free and transfer it to an Ethereum wallet. They decided to give away 9,000 punks and keep the remaining 1,000 for themselves.

Almost no one applied right away. A few weeks later, Mashable published an article declaring that cryptopunks “could change the way we think about digital art.” A frenetic subculture was born: Visitors flooded the CryptoPunks site, and “within 24 hours, they were gone,” Hall told me. Owners began reselling the NFTs to new collectors, first for a few hundred dollars, then for tens and hundreds of thousands. Later that year, another NFT collectibles site called CryptoKitties emerged, where people bought and traded NFTs of digital cats. By the end of 2017, some individual cats and punks were selling for as much as $170,000.

In the spring of 2020, as the crypto market began to heat up, Coldie sold a work for $1,000. “I crossed a threshold, and it was like an earthquake,” he said with a smile. “People were going crazy.”

By mid-2020, cryptocurrency prices were soaring. Another record-setter was Matt Kane, a former painter who had given up on traditional galleries and taught himself coding and web development around 2010. He wrote custom software to help him make complex digital paintings. In May 2019, he released his first work on SuperRare, a series based on grief after a friend committed suicide. His early NFTs sold for very little, with a collector buying one for $85 and selling it the following week for a profit of $59.

But by September 2020, he had spent months developing a more ambitious artwork, an abstract work of art whose composition changes depending on the price of Bitcoin. One of his earliest collectors — calling themselves “Token Angels” — had urged him to set an auction date, offering to pay whatever Kane wanted.

“I told him I thought $100,000 was a good story,” Kane said. To his surprise, Token Angels agreed. The price hit a new high and served as a psychological release: If people are willing to pay six figures for a digital work, where is the ceiling?

Ever since Bitcoin was invented in 2009, blockchain enthusiasts have been claiming it would revolutionize industries. Soon, they promised, everything from medical records to stock markets to agricultural inventories would use blockchains. But that hardly ever happened, and instead, the first popular digital application (besides the cryptocurrency itself) was for buying and selling crazy digital images.

Langlois first started making digital art at age 12, playing Minecraft. Creative players would make their own “skins,” customizing their character’s appearance in the game. A YouTuber he met online taught him how to meticulously design skins, pixel by pixel. He then began making thumbnails for a friend’s YouTube channel for $5 a piece. The creative work was an escape from an unstable family, he says. “That was the year social services sent him to live with his grandparents.”

In his safe but dull days at his grandparents' house, Langlois began spending hours drawing with markers to pass the time. At 13, he got an iPhone, which opened the door to the online digital art world. Langlois took photos of his hand-drawn paintings and posted them on Twitter. After that, he drew directly on a tablet with an app. He began to like this medium because it was more private: he could avoid his grandmother's disapproving scrutiny.

He heard Dostoyevsky’s story on a podcast and devoured Notes From a Dead House, thrilled by the writer’s account of perseverance during incarceration. “When you’re in prison, you think you’re going to die, so why are you still alive?” Langlois said. “I love that and why people want to live. That’s what art is about.”

Langlois got into crypto art almost by accident in the summer of 2020. He had already started selling the occasional print online. A customer bought one of his paintings for $90 and wrote to suggest that he issue an NFT on SuperRear. Langlois was skeptical. “I was like, This is a scam,” he told me. But after researching SuperRare online, he decided the site was legitimate, so he applied to list his work there, submitted a few works and a video, and was let in the next day.

Langlois didn't know how to price it, how much his art was worth? Zack Yanger, head of marketing at SuperRare, told him, "You'll get bids of $60 or $600, which will seem like a lot. But I promise you, if you hold it, it will pay off." He followed the advice, and on June 5, he released "I've Been Thinking of You," inspired by a heartbreak in high school, a Dali-like face with a purple nose and red lips, and the words "Is this what you like?" The first bid was 0.1 ETH, which was worth maybe $25 at the time. In the next few days, the bid rose to $130, then to more than $500. When the price reached 4.5 ETH (about $1,017), it was finally sold.

He posted a video of himself yelling with excitement on Twitter. “I’m so excited, I’m so grateful,” he said. In the following weeks, he sold works in the $1,000 to $2,000 range. By September, he was selling works for more than $8,000. By November, his work was sold for $25,000 in a single auction on the NFT site Nifty Gateway.

Who is paying for NFTs? Generally speaking, they are young people who have invested in the cryptocurrency industry for many years and hold millions of dollars in cryptocurrency. Eric Young, a full-time crypto investor in his 40s, is one of the collectors of Langlois's works. He bought this $25,000 work. He said that he has been investing in Bitcoin since 2018 and has made a lot of money. He likes the consistency of the aesthetics in Langlois's works and his passion for incorporating details into his works. He said: "It's amazing that he has so much talent when he just turned 18."

For some crypto investors, buying crypto art gives them something artistic to talk about in a space dominated by otherwise stultifying tech conversations. As Colin Goltra, a collector in Manila, told me, “For a long time, the only people you could deal with were former financiers in crypto and startups that told you about blockchain medical records.” He enjoys long, late-night conversations with artists like Pak, who is known for his Warholian, conceptual-art approach to NFTs (Pak once sold a series of NFTs with identical images for prices ranging from $100 to $1 million). Reaching out to these artists—who are often happy to talk to their wealthy new clients—is a lure.

For nerdy crypto enthusiasts, the aesthetic of crypto art and its scrambled social network on Twitter feels like an art scene they can finally “get.” Most collectors I spoke to had never purchased any art and were somewhat intimidated by the prospect of entering a gallery.

They don’t usually know much about art history. But the visual palette of a lot of crypto art speaks to them because it’s heavily influenced by memes, the ambiguous, grandiose tropes of the internet, or the futuristic styles of sci-fi movies and illustrations. If crypto art is in some sense a visual aesthetic movement, this is a common thread throughout: a generation of creators inspired not by looking out the window, but by looking into the window — and seeing a digital world of software, movies, games.

“I feel like my initial introduction to digital art was a ‘Final Fantasy’-style video game vibe,” says Blake Kathryn, a Los Angeles-based crypto artist and filmmaker who uses 3D modeling software to create sleek robotic figures and visions of dreamy architecture. (She created a digital portrait of Paris Hilton that sold as an NFT for $1.1 million.)

Another crypto artist, Olive Allen, often uses pop culture icons in her NFT works, from Furbies to the video game character Kirby. "This is really an art form that has obsessed the internet, like a whole ADHD generation," said Colborn Bell, co-creator of the Cryptoart Museum, which has hundreds of works of art and exhibits them online.

The traditional art world is divided over aesthetics. Last fall, the Vancouver Biennale decided to include NFT artworks, and the biennial's president, Barrie Mowatt, went to several NFT websites to look for some works. He eventually found works that impressed him, but he said: "I remember thinking, there's a lot of 'dirty word' art here."

Artist Noah Davis is more enthusiastic, saying that crypto artists have a spirit of play that is often missing from fine art. But he understands why old-school art collectors would sneer at him: "Some works do look more suitable for being placed in a store, hanging on a dormitory wall or on a message board," he said.

Obviously, the NFT market is driven in part by speculation: many collectors see crypto art as a potentially lucrative investment, just like Bitcoin itself. In a way, this is conspicuous consumption in the crypto age. Kal Raustiala, a legal scholar at UCLA, points out that paying high prices for art is a time-honored way for the rich to show off their wealth.

In the past, people hung $40 million Picassos on the walls of their mansions. Since NFTs are just data, though, crypto art collectors mostly stare at screens (when they look at their collections). Collectors have created VR galleries so they can put on goggles, view their art on virtual walls, and invite friends to join them in the party. Other collectors eschew such displays. They simply pull up their art on their iPhones or computer browsers, like they would on Instagram.

In fact, several people told me that they appreciate digital art for the sake of saving space. Before he discovered Cryptoart, Token Angels bought so many real-life paintings that his family stopped him from buying them. Now, he has a virtual 3D gallery on an online site called Cryptovoxels, where he displays his crypto art, including a $100,000 Matt Kane piece. “I would describe Matt Kane’s art as pure orgasm because the images are so beautiful that you want to zoom in,” he told me.

Outsiders know little about NFT culture and assume that people who buy NFT artworks own the NFT. But in fact, NFTs contain data corresponding to relevant information about the artwork, such as the creator, title, and a link to an online copy that can be viewed. The visible image is only part of it. Whether it is a JPEG or a GIF animation, it is just a digital file hosted in an online location, but the NFT usually refers to that file (if the website hosting the artwork goes down, the NFT may become a blank link). Anyone can go to an NFT art platform such as SuperRare to copy the digital file and post it to Instagram or Facebook, or set it as a mobile phone background.

In this case, we are curious about what collectors want most when buying NFTs? Some collectors think that buying NFTs is evidence of their connection with the artwork and the creator, which allows them to brag as before, and they hardly care whether the artwork will be seen by others. The collectors I interviewed all think that they would be very happy if the artwork they own is widely copied on the Internet: for the owner of the artwork, it is a happy thing for thousands of people to pay attention to their digital artwork.

To cryptocurrency believers, the attention means the industry is at the beginning of a major economic shift, in which creators can sell any digital product that is easily reproducible: music, videos, game add-ons, articles, photos. “It’s a bit like Internet Relay Chat in 1996, before Facebook was invented,” said Duncan Cock Foster, co-founder of Nifty Gateway.

"I spend a lot of time posting artwork for free to attract potential customers." André Oshea, one of the few successful black NFT artists, said he is optimistic about NFTs and that the technology is helping online artists improve the situation of their works being abused.

However, the emerging NFT market still has many drawbacks. Alex de Vries, an economist who tracks cryptocurrency energy consumption, believes that energy consumption is the main drawback. Currently, all Ethereum mining equipment consumes a total of about 42.78 terawatt hours of electricity per year, which troubles some crypto artists who are climate activists.

French artist Joanie Lemercier sold several NFTs last winter and earned $30,000. She originally planned to release and sell artworks again in February to earn $200,000. "These revenues are equivalent to the total sales of my gallery for two or three years, but as a climate activist, I can't be sure whether NFTs will consume a lot of energy, so I canceled the release of digital artworks," she said.

Other artists are frustrated by the rapid transformation of NFTs into a winner-take-all speculative game based on popularity. Sparrow Read, a British cryptocurrency artist, and a data scientist named Massimo Franceschet analyzed the sales of NFTs and found that a very small number of artists and collectors own most of the wealth generated by NFT art. Read said that the market system that encourages leaderboard competition does not seem to be in line with the democratization vision of the early days of NFTs and contradicts its early promise. In addition, collectors and most artists are almost entirely men.

Sarah Zucker is one of the few artists who has not achieved financial freedom but lives a decent life. She is 35 years old and lives in Hollywood. She is a photographer and animation screenwriter who often sells prints in the art market. In order to pay for her living needs after graduation, Sarah Zucker started a website development company in early 2010. She soon discovered that she had a talent for making viral animated GIFs. Because she used low-fidelity equipment from the 1980s and 1990s to make her works, her works always have a distinctive meme quality.

As a GIF animation creator, Sarah Zucker has published a total of 1,500 GIFs on Giphy, which have received 6.6 billion views, which is obviously a huge success. However, these GIFs did not bring her any income, but only attracted many corporate clients to find her for marketing activities.

Sarah Zucker is an early user of SuperRare. "I'm a veteran now, and I often sell my works for $2,000 to $4,000." In an interview, she said that she had just paid taxes and that almost all of her income currently comes from cryptocurrency sales. "It's no exaggeration to say that NFT has changed my life." She said that the speed at which these incomes arrived and the fluctuations in the value of Ethereum broke her view of money. Now she is no longer busy with commercial work, but can concentrate on creation, and she receives 10% of the copyright royalties from reselling her works.

"This income is permanent. When I become a great and wise artist in the future, I will establish the Sarah Zucker Foundation so that my descendants can still own my Ethereum wallet 100 years later and earn royalties. Just imagine how much money Van Gogh's descendants will make if they can do this?" she said.

The peak of the NFT market began with Beeple, a 39-year-old crypto artist from South Carolina named Mike Winkelmann. For the past fourteen years, he has insisted on making works called "DAY", which, as the name suggests, means posting his daily creations online to hone his craft. "I will keep doing this until I die."

Mike Winkelmann started out sketching on paper and later began using 3D modeling software. He is said to have a preference for surrealism, sometimes grotesque images, sometimes mockery of pop culture or everyday events, such as the burly Tom Hanks fighting the coronavirus. Based on this, his fame spread widely on the Internet, and even DJs used his images in their shows, while brands such as Louis Vuitton and stars like Nicki Minaj and Justin Bieber began to cooperate with him. He currently has more than 2 million followers on Instagram.

Mike Winkelmann heard about cryptocurrency in October 2020, when he was surprised to realize that the artist's popularity did not match his income. Since then, he has started to make his own works. The first work depicts a fat naked man astride a bull, wearing a Guy Fawkes mask and raising his middle finger. He made about $130,000 in that transaction. In December last year, he conducted a limited edition sale of some "EVERY DAY" picture NFTs, including an NFT containing 20 "EVERY DAY" pictures, with a single-week income of more than $3.5 million.

Mike Winkelmann was ecstatic. He believed that this was a validation of crypto art, which was even more influential than traditional paintings or sculptures. "Crypto artists are essentially people who shape the visual language of society. I hope that crypto art will be respected by the mainstream." He said that he hoped his mother could also participate in the purchase of crypto art.

In January, Christie’s contacted Winkelmann and invited him to participate in the auction. Noah Davis told me, “People go crazy when they see works like this.” So they decided to convert the entire “Everydays” (5,000 of them) into NFTs, allowing buyers to purchase a collection of his works over the past fourteen years.

The auction took place on March 11 this year, during which Winkelmann conducted an audio conversation on the theme of NFT art on the social media platform Clubhouse, and everyone held their breath until the bidding price for the collection reached $50 million. Winkelmann left Clubhouse and witnessed his NFT finally sold for $69 million.

"What just happened?" he almost swore.

It turns out that the main collectors of Beeple's works are Vignesh Sundaresan and Anand Venkateswaran, the founders of the NFT fund Metapurse, who set up multiple pseudonymous accounts to purchase Beeple's $69 million NFT.

Sundaresan and Venkateswaran had a plan for Beeple's art. They purchased a plot of land in three online 3D worlds and hired a team of designers to build a virtual museum based on it, displaying all of Beeple's art.

But the museum is only part of their plan. Another part is to turn Beeple's work into a new cryptocurrency. In January, they took out the 20 Beeple "Everydays" NFTs they bought for $2.2 million and created a new set of NFT tokens totaling 10 million, called B20.

The tokens represent partial ownership of Beeple’s work. They paid 10% of the tokens to the designers who built the virtual museum, 2% to Beeple, and kept 50% for themselves. The rest will be sold. “The idea came from taking a work of art and sharing ownership with multiple people, when our avatars float above the museum,” Sundaresan said.

Regardless, the B20 token may already be generating strong returns. In late January, Sundaresan and Venkateswaran held a virtual party on their online museum to introduce their new token, and within a short time, they sold 2.6 million tokens, raising nearly $1 million.

On March 10th, the B20 token price peaked at just over $27, and by May 7th, the price had dropped to around $2. Assuming they still have 5 million tokens, that equates to $10 million worth.

Do NFTs’ sky-high prices indicate a bubble destined to burst? It certainly looks that way, and many collectors themselves think it’s likely. They say it doesn’t scare them. Bitcoin and Ethereum prices have dipped several times, but each time they’ve recovered and surged to record highs. Many collectors told me that the NFT market could go through a similar shakeout.

“I’m sure there will be versions of this where I’m going to look really stupid a few years from now,” Goltra told me when we first spoke in December. He said the art craze could fade over a long period of time, making his collection worth little in years or even decades. But he expects NFTs to take up residence in nearly every corner of culture. “Artists of all kinds are figuring out how to attract audiences and fanatics through tokenization,” he said. “That fits in with the original vision of crypto to eliminate the middleman.”

On a deeper level, some observers see the rise of NFTs as a symptom of long-simmering problems in Western economies—“the financialization of everything,” as Scott Galloway, a professor of marketing at New York University, puts it. He notes that in all the bubbles of the past few decades—from the tech boom to the subprime mortgage boom to the bull market of the past few years—the result was “a great tech era over the last 30 years, trillions of dollars of economic growth. We’ve seen wages flatten and one in five families with children facing food insecurity.” Some artists might get rich in the short term, he says, but any shift in economic activity to pure speculation will exacerbate inequality.

NFT pioneer Anil Dash also suspects that few of the venture capitalists and entrepreneurs rushing to create NFT markets care about anything other than creating new profitable derivatives. Galloway suspects that NFTs could accelerate the mass adoption of cryptocurrencies in everyday life, a dream for Bitcoin fans but also a concern for Galloway: He worries that if currencies do shrink, the United States, as the main global currency holder, will lose the most, which will please competitors such as China and Russia, as well as money launderers and criminals.

When it comes to the huge energy requirements of NFTs, there are some possible technical solutions, such as the PoS mechanism, which only uses 0.01% of the energy currently used by the Ethereum mining network, and developers expect to switch completely to this technology later this year or early next year. Until then, artists such as Joanie Lmercier have urged crypto artists to stop using sites such as SuperRare and switch to trading markets that already use the PoS mechanism, such as Hic et Nunc or Kalamint. But so far, most artists seem to stick to energy-intensive markets.

When I spoke to Langlois over Zoom a few times recently, he expressed surprise at how quickly this strange backwater had become the focus of the national conversation. Now, celebrities and brands are driving the trend more than artists. “NFTs are just something that people make fun of or talk about casually, even if they don’t understand what it means, they can talk about it, right?” he said.

It didn't bother him, he suspected that the NFT would last for a long time, both for the artists and for the crazy MEME collection. He just flew back from San Francisco and visited SFMOMA there to collect ideas for the next NFT. His mind was full of ideas. "Art is taking off," he said. "Somehow, I'm at the top of this crazy group."