Stories
Field notes on this moment in digital art, written from inside one collection. The artists, the drops, the auctions, and why any of it matters. Every one of them is really about the same thing: connection. The art leads; I'm just the one who kept the receipts.
A Database With Good Lighting
How this gallery was built, for artists and for programmers: what happens to a work after it is collected, how the files get rescued, how the chain proves the history, and how a museum gets built out of one database file. With the art running through it.
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The humanities graduate who rebuilt the Renaissance
1dontknows never studied art. He studied languages, lost a design job to COVID, put a few pieces online in 2021, and started cutting the old masters into new worlds. I won one at auction. Then he sent me another.
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The chain is part of the story
Desultor lists his birthplace as the Internet, paints sodas and skulls and frogs, and when you win the token the painting comes too. Two sodas, three skull studies, and a whole hand of nightcrew cards later, I am still laughing, and I mean that as the highest praise.
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The beauty of a broken signal
ex_mortal makes video out of dying hardware, in Florida, and every piece of his I own moves. One I won on SuperRare, two at auction on Transient, and two he simply sent.
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Sacred Layers
I won it at a curated SuperRare auction in September. By December the artist's name was a mess all over X, and the platform that sold her to me under that curated label never said a word to the collectors. This is the whole file, receipts and all, written by the guy holding the token.
Read the story →A Database With Good Lighting
How this gallery was built, for artists and for programmers: what happens to a work after it is collected, how the files get rescued, how the chain proves the history, and how a museum gets built out of one database file. With the art running through it.
Read → 2026-09-12
The five hundred
Art Blocks numbered its projects like chapters, stopped at 500, and put the era behind glass. Then I started collecting it.
Read → 2026-07-18
How I got here
Before the art there was a game, and before the game there was Bitcoin. Under all of it, there was always art. Ten years from HODL to a 3,863-work gallery.
Read → 2025-06-18The humanities graduate who rebuilt the Renaissance
1dontknows never studied art. He studied languages, lost a design job to COVID, put a few pieces online in 2021, and started cutting the old masters into new worlds. I won one at auction. Then he sent me another.
Read → 2026-09-03The chain is part of the story
Desultor lists his birthplace as the Internet, paints sodas and skulls and frogs, and when you win the token the painting comes too. Two sodas, three skull studies, and a whole hand of nightcrew cards later, I am still laughing, and I mean that as the highest praise.
Read → 2026-09-03The beauty of a broken signal
ex_mortal makes video out of dying hardware, in Florida, and every piece of his I own moves. One I won on SuperRare, two at auction on Transient, and two he simply sent.
Read → 2026-09-03
What Cities Hold
SigmaX makes glowing cities. His What Cities Hold drop scattered its rarest 1-of-1s at random through the mint, and I will admit it, I used my statistics degree to go get two.
Read → 2026-07-11
The painter from Caracas
I wore Andres Del Vecchio's mask as my own face before I knew his story. Then I met him in New York, and we spent an afternoon in front of the American paintings at the Met.
Read → 2026-07-09
The curator of nostalgia
DeltaSauce calls himself an AI Wordsmith and a Curator of Nostalgia. His FEED series is the piece that turned this whole collection on, so I kept following. Then one day he started collecting me back.
Read → 2026-07-08
TDxL, and the color red
I grabbed every piece of TDxL's I could reach, the bidders and editions and 1-of-1s and animations, all of it. Then he told his story, and I understood why it had been hitting me so hard.
Read → 2026-07-08
When the file becomes a frame
Kris Shin shoots Kyoto quiet. I collected five of his Still Kyoto photographs before I learned five was the magic number, and now some of these NFTs are ink on my wall.
Read → 2026-07-07
You are the infinite light
An1 paints in the dark, in Los Angeles, and buries whole diaries in her canvases in two languages. I came for the images. I stayed to decode them.
Read → 2026-07-06
A quiet place to get away
Gul Yildiz makes emotive, figurative stills in Istanbul. I collected her at mint and through Ninfa, and somewhere in there she became one of the artists who collects me back the most.
Read → 2026-07-04
Two hundred faces
For a year I followed Justin Aversano's Moments of the Unknown one polaroid at a time, bid my way into just over two hundred of them, and on the seventh of April I shook his hand in New York.
Read → 2026-02-01Sacred Layers
I won it at a curated SuperRare auction in September. By December the artist's name was a mess all over X, and the platform that sold her to me under that curated label never said a word to the collectors. This is the whole file, receipts and all, written by the guy holding the token.
Read → 2026-08-30What an NFT is, now that pictures are free
One word covers oil on canvas, a film that never had a body, and a carving in wood. The word is not the point. What survives the word is.
Read → 2026-07-23
The guild years
Two crowns, one spreadsheet, four games, a coin that died, and the memes that kept it all funny. What crypto gaming actually felt like from inside.
Read → 2026-07-18Who owns the picture
Buy a painting and you own the canvas, not the picture. The copyright stays with the artist. Minting did not change that. So what does a collector actually own?
Read → 2026-07-14
The feeling was mutual
I set out to collect other people's art. I did not expect so many of them to turn around and collect mine, to keep sending work my way, or to watch a hundred followers become a room worth speaking to. The table has two sides, and both of them gave.
Read → 2026-07-02
The year of the daily drop
For one year, collecting meant showing up. Not browsing a back catalogue, but being there when the drop went live, every day, saying good morning to the same people before the auction closed. This is the room that made the collection.
Read → 2026-06-30
Why I keep the originals
An NFT does not actually store the art. The token is permanent; the picture usually is not. So I keep the pictures.
Read → 2026-04-01