As most artists - I imagine - when I first arrived at this side of the world wide web, I was both fascinated and confused. I could immediately see the potential of these technologies but I didn't quite know where to begin.
One of the first projects that caught my attention was the japanese Digital Art Chain that allows you to submit your own art and mint it as a ERC721 token in exchange for a minimal ETH fee. It was on this platform that I minted my first token, Aurum - and I still use them to mint the occasional one off.
(0xad2b59ad6b97a83dc27b654205c7c85e3eb7aa588bd151956d0febdf184453ea - the hash of my first tokenized piece.)
Soon after, I discovered Known Origin, submitted my work and eventually joined the growing family.
They are a really nice group from Manchester, UK, and personally, what really attracted me was the fact they were 3 friends that had an idea on a pub, and self funded this project to give us artists an opportunity to showcase our work and gain visibility on the vast cryptolands, by putting up one of the most interesting marketplaces for cryptoart and certainly, one of the best Telegram communities to be found on the Ethereum mainnet (which they're really not, because Telegram isn't on the blockchain, but you knew that).
Through the creative challenges that KO puts up, I have had the opportunity to make some really cool NFT's for the NIFTY Hackathon (via 0xCert) in Hong Kong as well as for Devcon 4 in Prague.
(Pebbles - 0xCert for NIFTY Hackathon HK)
I've been submitting new pieces regularly, and most of my work has been been greeted with both support and sales. The exposure and involvement with the cryptoart community has also led me to some wonderful paths such as the collaboration of the most wondrous pixel master Kryptocromo and the (still to be revealed) collab with my friend Mattia C.
(Abraxas, a Talisman - collab with Kryptocromo (greyscale version)
If investors are now through hard times with these markets, on the cryptoart side of the community, these are looking like really great times, with lots of new platforms and ideas being developed, and a lot of love being exchanged between artists.
I've been 'reinvesting' my ETH on artwork by other artists, which is not only great because you can actually contribute to someone's life directly, but also because Art, being valued in other ranges outside money is always a sound investment for the aesthetically inclined.
Foundations of Matter I
Just recently, our work got added to Portion and one of the pieces was sold in just 5 hours (!) which serves to show the immense power of these new platforms - It would have been very hard to accomplish this on a more conventional artistic venue, such as a gallery or a museum: being shown, sold and shipped somewhere to the world in 5 hours is just not possible.
I can't wait to see what happens in the next 123 days.