The New York Times' lengthy article review: How NFTs sparked a trend of the era

This article is from The New York Times, authored by Clive Thompson, and translated by Echo and Wang Dashu.

NFTs are one of the hottest topics in the blockchain industry this year and represent one of the most obvious directions of the "out-of-the-box" effect.

Recently, New York Times reporter Clive Thompson wrote a detailed account of the history of the rise of NFTs and the recent surge in popularity after interviewing several crypto artists, attempting to unveil the charm and reasons behind the NFT boom, which is quite valuable for reading. Chain Catcher has compiled the article without affecting its original meaning.

"It was 40.7 ETH," Victor Langlois said breathlessly, "It's insane."

It was still before 4 PM, and 18-year-old crypto artist Langlois sat in front of his desktop computer, watching the frantic bidding war between two art collectors. Langlois wore a white hoodie he designed, his arms covered in his psychedelic art tattoos, including an eyeball and a sunflower floating in a blue sky.

The windows of the room were covered with cardboard to keep it dark, and a beam of blue LED light shone down from the ceiling. As the numbers climbed, Langlois nervously tugged at his beanie.

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

The Sailor

When I stopped by his home in Seattle, it was already 3 PM, and the price for "The Sailor" was $75,000. Langlois was chatting on Twitter with other digital artists, who excitedly cheered him on.

Langlois had a sincere, almost unsettling vibe. He told me, "Because people were so mean in my upbringing, I want to be the best person I can be." As he watched the bids on the screen, he nervously giggled. "I can’t believe it," he said.

A year ago, he was a broke high school student living unhappily in his grandparents' house in Las Vegas, where his grandmother would peek into his bedroom and dismiss his pile of acrylic and colored marker paintings as "ugly."

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

"My family had no money; everyone had two jobs, living in terrible places in California." Earning this much money in a day was "so weird."

Langlois created surreal digital images, often grotesque cartoon portraits—faces streaming with tears and exposed skin—that conveyed his dark emotions. The piece he was selling that day, "The Sailor," depicted a big-headed character with its brain exposed like a pile of pink meat; its eyes looked like they were cut out from magazine pictures, a common theme in his portraits, happily wearing a paper boat hat.

In his first few days in Seattle, Langlois curled up on the living room couch and created most of the piece on his iPad. Then he used animation software to add motion: the brain gently pulsated, and the eyes blinked continuously. "The Sailor" looked both unsettling and whimsical.

However, Langlois wasn't really selling digital art. He was selling a non-fungible token (NFT), which represents a unique relationship with the artist and the artwork for its owner. NFTs are digital files created using blockchain code, very similar to the code that makes Bitcoin possible.

Langlois's NFT contained data pointing to an online copy of "The Sailor," as well as information about who currently owns the NFT.

This means that NFTs behave somewhat like a physical artwork. 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 NFT.

Recently, NFTs have become the topic of countless headlines, part of a craze that began last December when crypto artist Beeple sold a collection of works for over $3.5 million. By spring, a dazzling 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 consensus on what this gold rush means for the public. If you ask die-hard Bitcoin supporters—who call themselves "crypto natives"—NFTs herald the future of digital property. They foresee a day when people will spend their income on digital products that they can trade, resell, or hoard as investments. When governments lose their unique power to create currency and protect property, people will turn to blockchain networks.

However, there are numerous risks and downsides to the NFT vision, particularly environmental costs. Running the Ethereum network requires a massive amount of energy, estimated to consume as much energy annually as Hungary.

NFT skeptics also argue that the crypto craze primarily serves to keep people talking about cryptocurrencies, so that the prices of Ethereum and Bitcoin remain high. In their view, this looks more like speculative behavior with no substance, the next phase of "financialization of everything" that has been ongoing for decades.

Since the frenzy began six months ago, the ubiquitous beneficiaries of NFTs have increasingly become the winners of the modern attention economy. Paris Hilton sold a series of digital image NFTs for over a million dollars; the Golden State Warriors auctioned a series of digital memorabilia NFTs; the person who took the infamous cheese sandwich photo at the Fyre Festival is selling NFTs with that image to pay for a kidney transplant.

However, crypto artists like Langlois are the originators of this craze—a strange origin for a trend that seems to be pushing the cultural economy to its peak. Just a year ago, crypto art was a vanguard of a subculture, possibly even a genre. It was SuperRare and a few other sites that created this market, gradually persuading a generation of young, highly online cryptocurrency millionaires to open their virtual wallets and spend big on digital tokens.

For those artists, the sudden wealth can be overwhelming. When I first met Langlois in January, his NFT sales had already reached $300,000.

While Langlois is a shining star in his world, dozens of other digital artists (who had previously struggled or been busy designing for websites) are also starting to make a living from their art. Whether NFTs will persist or ultimately become a new version of the 21st-century tulip mania is a question that holds far greater significance for these artists than for the art world and other institutions caught up in this speculative frenzy.

Back in his dim room, Langlois was watching his auction. In addition to "The Sailor" on SuperRare, he had also limited the sale of three works on Bitski, and their prices were rising.

In the final minutes before the 5 PM deadline, @yeahyeah bid 46 ETH (about $800,000) for "The Sailor."

"I'm going to lose my mind," Langlois shouted hoarsely. He sent a message to @yeahyeah thanking him, then clicked the button on SuperRare to transfer "The Sailor" to @yeahyeah's digital wallet.

Langlois leaned back in his chair, reflecting on his day. That day, his total sales on Bitski amounted to nearly $29,000, and with the proceeds from "The Sailor," his income was just over $109,000.

"Do you know what makes me sad?" he turned to me and said. He had been celebrating all day, chatting with his online friends, but there was no one to call. He said, "I have no siblings, and I don’t talk to my family anymore." Even if he could call them, it would be hard to explain his new life.

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

For decades, digital artists have received little respect. To the taste-makers of the art world, their work seemed more like commercial crafts—can something made with Photoshop really be called art? Galleries often scoffed at digital works, asking, "Why would collectors pay for any image that can be right-clicked and downloaded for free?"

Then Bitcoin emerged in 2009, and with blockchain code, you could create digital items that are nearly impossible to replicate.

The first artistic experiment in this area was conducted by New York artist Kevin McCoy, who became interested in Bitcoin and its blockchain shortly after its inception. He wondered if this could provide a new revenue stream for creators. McCoy was particularly excited about the prospect of decentralization—blockchain could allow artists to sell their work directly to fans without intermediaries like iTunes.

In 2014, McCoy collaborated with entrepreneur Anil Dash to create an experimental crypto token for one of his digital artworks. The following year, McCoy started a small startup that allowed artists to create and sell tokens for their works. Most of the responses he received were blank stares. "It was a tough process for people," McCoy said.

In the spring of 2017, the concept gained new life. Matt Hall and John Watkinson, two programmers from Brooklyn, created a set of collectible characters they called CryptoPunks, pixelated avatars in a punk rock style (they liked "quirky projects," Hall told me). They were unaware of McCoy and Dash's earlier experiments.

But they knew about Ethereum, a platform with a simple programming language that enabled coders to create new financial products priced in ETH. Hall and Watkinson released an NFT for each CryptoPunk, believing people would be amused by the idea of owning a small pixelated avatar and might trade them like baseball cards.

Hall and Watkinson created 10,000 CryptoPunks and placed the NFTs on a website where anyone could claim a punk for free and transfer it to an Ethereum wallet. They decided to give away 9,000 punks, keeping the remaining 1,000 for themselves.

Almost no one claimed them immediately. A few weeks later, Mashable published an article claiming that CryptoPunks "could change the way we think about digital art." A frenzied subculture was born: visitors flooded the CryptoPunks website, and "within 24 hours, they were gone," Hall told me. Owners began reselling the NFTs to new collectors, initially for hundreds of dollars, then for tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands.

Later that year, another NFT collectible 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, the crypto market began to heat up, and Coldie sold a piece for $1,000. He laughed, saying, "I crossed a threshold, and it was like an earthquake; people were going crazy."

By mid-2020, cryptocurrency prices skyrocketed. Another record-breaker was Matt Kane, who had been a painter hoping for traditional gallery success and had self-taught coding and web development around 2010.

He wrote custom software to help him create complex digital paintings. In May 2019, he released his first piece on SuperRare, a series inspired by the grief following a friend's suicide. His early NFT sales were minimal; one collector bought a piece for $85 and sold it the following week for a profit of $59.

But by September 2020, after spending months developing a more ambitious piece—an abstract artwork whose components changed based on Bitcoin's price—he found one of his earliest collectors, who called himself "Token Angels," urging him to set an auction date and expressing willingness to pay whatever Kane wanted.

Kane said, "I told him I thought $100,000 was a good story." To his surprise, "Token Angels" agreed. This price set a new record and had a psychological release effect: if people were willing to pay six figures for a digital piece, what was the ceiling?

Since Bitcoin's inception in 2009, blockchain enthusiasts have claimed it would revolutionize industries. They promised that soon everything from medical records to stock markets to agricultural inventories would use blockchain. But this has hardly happened; instead, the first popular digital application (aside from cryptocurrencies themselves) has been buying and selling crazy digital images.

Langlois began creating digital art at age 12 while playing Minecraft. Creative players would make their own "skins," customizing the appearance of their characters in the game. A YouTuber he met online taught him how to meticulously design skins pixel by pixel.

After that, he started making thumbnails for friends' YouTube channels, charging $5 each. This creative work was an escape from his unstable home life; he said, "It was that year that social services sent him to live with his grandparents."

At his grandparents' house, Langlois's days were safe but dull, and he began spending hours drawing with markers to pass the time. At 13, he got an iPhone, which opened the door to the world of online digital art. Langlois took photos of his hand-drawn images and posted them on Twitter. Later, he started drawing directly on a tablet with an app. He began to enjoy this medium because it was more private: it avoided his grandmother's disapproving gaze.

He heard Dostoyevsky's stories on podcasts and devoured "Notes From a Dead House," excited by the writer's account of perseverance during imprisonment. "When you're in prison, you think you're going to die eventually, so why are you still alive?" Langlois said. "I love that, and I love why people want to live. That's the meaning of art."

In the summer of 2020, Langlois stumbled into the world of crypto art. He had started selling occasional prints online. A customer paid $90 for one of his paintings and wrote to suggest he issue NFTs on SuperRare. Langlois was skeptical.

He told me, "I thought it was a scam at the time. But after researching SuperRare online, I thought the site was legitimate, so I applied to launch my work there and submitted a few pieces and a video, and the next day I was allowed in."

Langlois didn't know how to price his work; how much was his art worth? SuperRare's marketing director, Zack Yanger, told him, "You’ll get bids of $60 or $600, which will seem like a lot. But I assure you, if you hold onto it, it will pay off."

He took the advice, and on June 5, he released "I've Been Thinking of You," inspired by a heartbreak from high school, featuring a Dali-esque face with a purple nose and red lips, with the text "Do you like this?" The initial bid was 0.1 ETH, which was worth about $25 at the time. In the following days, the bid rose to $130, then over $500. When the price reached 4.5 ETH (about $1,017), it finally sold.

He posted a video on Twitter of himself excitedly shouting. He said, "I was thrilled; I was filled with gratitude." In the following weeks, he sold works in the $1,000 to $2,000 range. By September, he sold a piece for over $8,000. By November, his work sold for $25,000 in a single auction on the NFT site Nifty Gateway.

Who is buying NFTs? Generally, they are young people who have invested in the cryptocurrency industry for years, holding cryptocurrencies worth millions. Eric Young, a full-time crypto investor in his 40s, is one of Langlois's collectors, having purchased a piece for $25,000.

He said he started investing in Bitcoin in 2018 and made a lot of money. He loves the consistency of aesthetics in Langlois's work and the passion he infuses into his pieces. He said, "It's amazing that he has so much talent at just 18."

For some crypto investors, buying crypto artworks gives them something artistic to discuss in a field dominated by other numb technical conversations. As a collector from Manila, Colin Goltra, told me, "For a long time, you could only deal with former financiers in the crypto space and those startups telling you about blockchain medical records."

He enjoys having long conversations late at night with artists like Pak, who is known for adopting a Warholian conceptual art approach to NFTs (Pak once sold a series of NFTs with identical images, priced from $100 to $1 million). Engaging with these artists—who are often eager to talk to wealthy new clients—is a temptation.

For nerdy crypto enthusiasts, the aesthetics of crypto art and its chaotic social networks on Twitter feel like an art scene they can finally "get." Most collectors I spoke with had never purchased any artwork and felt somewhat intimidated by the prospect of entering galleries.

They typically know little about art history. But many of the visual palettes of crypto art resonate with them because they are heavily influenced by memes, the ambiguous and flamboyant metaphors of the internet, or the futuristic styles of sci-fi movies and illustrations. If crypto art is, in a sense, a visual aesthetic movement, it has a throughline: the inspiration for a generation of creators comes not from looking out the window, but from looking at the screen—they see a digital world of software, movies, and games.

"I feel like my initial introduction to digital art was a kind of Final Fantasy-esque video game vibe," said Blake Kathryn, a crypto artist and filmmaker from Los Angeles, who uses 3D modeling software to create sleek robotic figures and dreamlike architectural vistas (she created a digital portrait of Paris Hilton that sold for $1.1 million as an NFT).

Another crypto artist, Olive Allen, frequently incorporates pop culture icons into her NFT works, from Furbies to video game character Kirby. "It really is an art form that captivates the internet, just like the entire ADHD generation," said Colborn Bell, co-founder of the Cryptoart Museum, which houses hundreds of artworks and showcases them online.

The traditional art world has aesthetic divisions. Last fall, the Vancouver Biennale decided to include NFT artworks, and Biennale president Barrie Mowatt went to several NFT sites looking for pieces. He ultimately found works that impressed him, but he said, "I remember thinking at the time that there was a lot of 'vulgar' art here."

Artist Noah Davis is more enthusiastic, believing that crypto artists possess a playful spirit often lacking in fine art. But he understands why old-school art collectors might scoff at him: "Some works do look more suited to be in a store, hung on a dorm wall, or pinned on a bulletin board," he said.

Clearly, the NFT market is to some extent driven by speculation: many collectors view crypto art as a potentially profitable investment, much like Bitcoin itself. To some degree, this is ostentatious consumption in the crypto age. UCLA law scholar Kal Raustiala points out, paying a high price for art has long been a way for the wealthy to flaunt their riches.

In the past, people hung $40 million Picasso works on the walls of their mansions. However, since NFTs are just data, crypto art collectors mostly stare at screens (when they look at their collections). Collectors have created virtual reality galleries so they can don goggles and admire their artworks on virtual walls, inviting friends to join their gatherings.

Other collectors avoid this display method. They simply pull up their artworks on their iPhones or computer browsers, much like using Instagram.

In fact, several people told me they appreciate digital art for saving space. Before discovering Cryptoart, Token Angels had bought so many real paintings that his family stopped him from continuing to buy those artworks.

Now, he owns a virtual 3D gallery on an online site called Cryptovoxels, where he showcases his crypto art, including a Matt Kane piece worth $100,000. He told me, "I would describe Matt Kane's art as pure ecstasy because the images are so beautiful that you want to zoom in."

Outsiders know almost nothing about NFT culture; they think that people who buy NFT artworks own the NFT. But in reality, NFTs contain data corresponding to information related to the artwork, such as the creator, title, and links to online copies available for viewing.

The visible image is just part of it; whether it's a JPEG or a GIF animation, it's merely a digital file hosted at an online location, but NFTs typically refer to that file (if the website hosting the artwork goes down, the NFT may become a blank link). Anyone can go to NFT art platforms like SuperRare to copy that digital file and post it on Instagram or Facebook, or set it as their phone background.

Given this, we are curious about what collectors most want when they purchase NFTs. Some collectors believe that buying NFTs is evidence of their connection to the artwork and the creator, allowing them to brag as they once did, and they care little about whether the artwork will be seen by others.

The collectors I interviewed all believed that if the artworks they owned were widely copied on the internet, they would be pleased: for the owners of the artwork, having thousands of people pay attention to their digital art is a happy thing.

For cryptocurrency believers, this attention signifies that the crypto industry is at the beginning of a major economic transformation, where creators can sell any easily replicable digital products: music, videos, game attachments, articles, and photos. Nifty Gateway co-founder Duncan Cock Foster said, "It's a bit like the internet's relay chat in 1996, before Facebook was invented."

"I spend a lot of time posting art for free to attract potential customers," said André Oshea, one of the few successful Black NFT artists, who is optimistic about NFTs, believing that the technology is helping online artists improve the situation of their work being misused.

However, the emerging NFT market still has many drawbacks. Economist Alex de Vries, who tracks cryptocurrency energy consumption, believes that energy consumption is a major drawback; currently, all Ethereum mining equipment consumes about 42.78 terawatt-hours of electricity annually, which troubles some crypto artists with climate activist identities.

French artist Joanie Lemercier sold a few NFTs last winter, earning $30,000, and originally planned to release and sell artworks again in February to earn $200,000. "This income is equivalent to two or three years of sales for my gallery, but as a climate activist, I can't be sure if 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-takes-all speculative game based on trends. UK crypto artist Sparrow Read, along with data scientist Massimo Franceschet, analyzed NFT sales and found that a very small number of artists and collectors own most of the wealth generated by NFT art.

Read stated that the market system encouraging leaderboard competition seems to contradict the early democratic vision of NFTs, going against its initial promises. Additionally, collectors and most artists are almost entirely male.

Sarah Zucker is one of the few artists who has not achieved financial freedom but lives a decent life. At 35, she resides in Hollywood, working as a photographer and animation writer, often selling prints in the art market.

To pay for living expenses after graduation, Sarah Zucker started running a website development company in the early 2010s. She soon discovered her talent for creating viral animated GIFs, as her work, made using low-fidelity equipment from the 1980s and 90s, always had a distinctive meme quality.

As a GIF animator, Sarah Zucker has published a total of 1,500 GIFs on Giphy, garnering 6.6 billion views, which is clearly a huge success. However, these GIFs did not bring her income; they only attracted many corporate clients seeking her work for marketing campaigns.

Sarah Zucker was an early user of SuperRare. "I'm a veteran now, often selling works for $2,000 to $4,000." During the interview, she mentioned that she had just paid her taxes, and now almost all her income comes from cryptocurrency sales. "It's not an exaggeration to say that NFTs changed my life."

She said the speed at which these earnings arrived, combined with the volatility of Ethereum's value, shattered her perception of money. Now she no longer has to hustle for commercial work but can focus on creating, earning a 10% royalty on resales of 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 my descendants can still have my Ethereum wallet in 100 years and earn royalties. Just imagine how much Van Gogh's descendants would earn if they could do that?" 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 consistently created works called "DAY," posting his daily creations online to hone his craft. "I will keep doing this until I die."

Mike Winkelmann started with paper sketches and later began using 3D modeling software. He is said to favor surrealism, sometimes creating grotesque images, sometimes mocking pop culture or everyday events, like a burly Tom Hanks contracting the coronavirus. Based on this, his fame spread widely online, with DJs using his images in their shows, and brands like Louis Vuitton and stars like Nicki Minaj and Justin Bieber began collaborating with him. He currently has over 2 million followers on Instagram.

In October 2020, Mike Winkelmann heard about cryptocurrency and was surprised to realize that the visibility and income of artists were mismatched. From then on, he began creating his own works, the first of which depicted an overweight naked man straddling a bull, wearing a Guy Fawkes mask and giving the middle finger. He earned about $130,000 from that transaction.

Last December, he conducted a limited sale of some "EVERY DAY" images as NFTs, including one NFT containing 20 "EVERY DAY" images, earning over $3.5 million in a single week.

Mike Winkelmann was ecstatic, believing this validated crypto art, asserting that crypto art is even more impactful than traditional painting or sculpture. "Crypto artists are essentially shaping the visual language of society; I hope crypto art gains mainstream respect." He expressed a desire for his mother to participate in purchasing crypto artworks.

In January, Christie's contacted Winkelmann, inviting him to participate in an auction. Noah Davis told me, "People go crazy when they see works like this." So they decided to convert the entire "Everydays" (of which there are 5,000) into NFTs, allowing buyers to purchase a collection of his works from the past fourteen years.

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

"What just happened?" he exclaimed, almost cursing.

It turned out that the main collectors of Beeple's work were Vignesh Sundaresan and Anand Venkateswaran, founders of the NFT fund Metapurse, who built multiple pseudonymous accounts to purchase Beeple's $69 million NFT.

Sundaresan and Venkateswaran had a plan for Beeple's art; they bought a piece of land in three online 3D worlds and hired a design team to build a virtual museum showcasing Beeple's artworks.

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

These 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 remaining portion would be sold. Sundaresan said, "This idea comes from sharing ownership of art with many people, as our avatars float above the museum."

In any case, the B20 tokens may have generated substantial returns. In late January, Sundaresan and Venkateswaran held a virtual party in their online museum to introduce their new tokens, quickly selling 2.6 million tokens and raising nearly $1 million.

On March 10, the price of B20 tokens peaked at just over $27, and by May 7, the price had dropped to around $2. Assuming they still have 5 million tokens, that amounts to a value of $10 million.

Do the sky-high prices of NFTs indicate that a bubble is destined to burst? It certainly seems so, and many collectors themselves believe this is quite possible. They say it doesn't scare them. Bitcoin and Ethereum prices have dropped several times, but each time they rebounded and soared to record highs. Many collectors told me that the NFT market might experience a similar shakeout.

"I'm sure there will be a version of this where I look very foolish in a few years," Goltra told me when we first spoke last December. He said the art craze might fade for a long time, rendering his collection nearly worthless in a few years or even decades.

But he hopes NFTs will settle in almost every corner of culture. He said, "A wide variety of artists are exploring how to engage audiences and enthusiasts through tokenization." "This aligns with the initial crypto vision of eliminating intermediaries."

On a deeper level, some observers believe that the rise of NFTs is a sign of long-standing issues brewing in Western economies—as NYU marketing professor Scott Galloway puts it, "the financialization of everything." He points out that in all the bubbles of the past few decades—from the tech stock boom to the subprime mortgage boom to the recent bull market—the result has been "in the past 30 years, a great tech era has achieved trillions of dollars in economic growth.

We see wages stagnating, and one in five families with children facing food insecurity." He said, some artists may become wealthy in the short term, but any activity that transforms economic activity into pure speculation will exacerbate inequality.

NFT pioneer Anil Dash also doubts that among the venture capitalists and entrepreneurs eager to create NFT markets, few care about anything other than creating new profitable derivatives.

Galloway is skeptical that NFTs could accelerate the mass adoption of cryptocurrencies in everyday life, a dream of Bitcoin fans, but also a concern for Galloway: he worries that if national currencies truly shrink, the United States, as the primary holder of global currency, would suffer the most, which would delight competitors like China and Russia, as well as money launderers and criminals.

When it comes to the enormous energy demands of NFTs, there are some potential technical solutions, such as the PoS mechanism, which requires only 0.01% of the energy currently used by Ethereum mining networks. Developers expect to fully switch to this technology later this year or early next year.

Before that, artists like Joanie Lemercier have urged crypto artists to stop using sites like 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 with energy-intensive markets.

In my recent Zoom conversations with Langlois, he expressed surprise that this strange dead water quickly became a national conversation. Now, celebrities and brands seem to drive this trend more than artists. "NFTs are just something people mock or casually talk about, even if they don't understand what it means, right?" he said.

This doesn't bother him; he doubts NFTs will exist long-term, both for artists and for the crazy MEME collectibles. He just flew back from San Francisco, where he visited SFMOMA for ideas for his next NFT collection. His mind is full of ideas. "Art is taking off," he said, "somehow, I find myself at the top of this crazy group."