I lit a cigar in the house and opened a bottle of champagne and was drinking it by myself with my dogs
howling at me, blasting Russian rap music as loud as I could.
The neighbors probably thought there was like some kind of rager and it was just one artist transitioning into
a new medium.
I remember the first painting I had sold for a significant amount of money was about
$11,000 in New York, which was really exciting as I had sold things, you know,
close to that neighborhood.
But hadn't really cracked the $10K mark until I had done this.
And I think that was a big milestone for me.
It was a beautiful painting of my wife as Sleeping Beauty, and we had
rented a full-sized white coffin to place her on top of in full costume makeup.
It was a gorgeous painting and it came with, maybe, like, a 200-pound sculpture frame that I had
hand-built.
In January of 2020, I was getting ready for a solo art show in Brisbane.
A marquee exhibition event at the Brooklyn Center in New York.
Also had an exhibit in London.
And it was kind of like this year where I had three massive events instead of one or two.
I was gearing up to make so much work and I was so excited.
And then end of February, boom.
Global pandemic hits and over the next couple of months, I watched all of my shows and marquee spots
melt away.
I watched a lot of my customers and clientele just not feel comfortable enough to pay off, you know, the
things that they had owed.
The commissions had all dried up.
It was a scary time of year.
So my wife and I decided that like, we're still going to do the art thing.
We're just going to pivot pretty hard.
We had taken some PPP loans instead of yolo'ing those into the stock market like a lot of people did.
We built a massive inventory of art prints and started selling quite a few of those.
Because everyone was home, we ended up making quite a bit more money than we would if we were still
exhibiting, which was a nice windfall.
I didn't take them seriously back in 2017, 2018.
It all changed for me when I saw the Bored Ape Yacht Club had given all of their
holders a free NFT just for having one.
And I realized being able to see all of the clients on the blockchain at the same
time, you could start doing some real interesting stuff with it.
And I started getting some crazy ideas.
My animator friend had made a painting into an NFT about January
2020 and it was so good that we wanted to do more with it than just posted to
Instagram.
I think by the time we were finishing animations, that space moved so fast it moved right past us.
And we realized that the 10,000 generative PFP collections were the hot new thing.
Art in general has much more of a scam angle to it than NFTs do.
NFTs are all kind of obvious of where they are on the chain and you don't have to argue provenance on any
NFT. Who made it?
Where did it come from?
How many people have owned it?
With that being said, end of March 2020, I had reached out to Wall Street
Memes on Instagram just kind of telling them like, "Hey, you guys are doing a great job.
I painted you this tiny little rocket going to the moon."
And like, "This is great.
Can we post on our page?" And it's like, "No, I'm sending it to you.
It's yours. Keep the faith.
Let's ride this thing to the wheels fall off."
About September of 2021, I had reached out to Wall Street Memes and said,
"Hey, let's do an NFT collection.
Let's produce 100 of them."
We have cute little cartoon Wall Street Bulls and they can have smooth brains and diamond horns and all that.
And they turn around, was like, "Oh no, we want to do 10,000.
Let's do a real 10,000 generative PFP collection.
I was like, "OK."
So I quit all my other gigs, buckled in and made 150 traits.
Photoshopped my brains out until we had the Wall Street Bulls.
We had filtered between a 94,000 Twitter, a 380,000 following
Instagram, and we had filtered all of this into a Discord server.
And that Discord server had about 11,000, maybe 12,000 people in it at the time
before we were going to launch.
And if we're launching 10,000, I was under the assumption that we weren't going to mint this out.
We were dead. I thought I'd make, you know, $30,000, $40,000 and that would be it.
I was determined to push it back.
And I was voted out by the developer and the Wall Street Bets and Wall Street Memes.
We sent out these massive emails to a million people.
And I'm not saying like a hyperbole million.
It was like an actual 960,000 people who received an email.
On October 27th at 4:20 p.m.
Eastern Time, we launched our mint process.
10,000 NFTs hit the market at that point and we watched our entire Discord community
ape into it. And in the beginning, it was like, "OK, great.
It's moving." In the first 5 minutes, about 2,000, 2,500 of them were gone.
And then I realized by minute 8 or 9, we were like more than halfway done.
Where I started thinking, "Oh my God, we're going to sell this thing out super hard."
And in 32 minutes, we had totally sold out the entire collection.
I kind of freaked out. We were screaming.
I was calling people hollering into the phone.
I lit a cigar in the house and opened a bottle of champagne and was drinking it by myself with my dogs
howling at me, blasting Russian rap music as loud as I could.
The neighbors probably thought there was like some kind of rager, and it was just one artist transitioning to a
new medium. So I didn't realize how much we had made.
I remember calling the developer and saying, "How much was that?
How much is that today?"
And he told me it's 660 ETH and I didn't know what more than 3 or
4 ETH was at the time.
660 sounded like more money than I had ever heard of.
It turns out that 660 ETH on that day was $2.6 million.
So I was trying to do the conversion on my phone and it didn't seem like...
It just seems so ridiculous.
I didn't want to deal with it for a little bit.
I had moved what other crypto I had into my MetaMask wallet so I could just start buying NFTs
all over the place.
And I went a little bit crazy for a little bit.
And then on November 11th, I went to go cash out.
But the price of Ethereum had gone up quite a bit.
I went from having $673 on the low to
$811,000 on that day.
Holding crypto is quite a roller coaster.
We've watched maybe a 50% drop from November to early February.
With that drop, the interesting thing is is that the value of NFTs didn't drop.
Watching your own personal value get cut in half is pretty tough, but it's part of the game.
So I'm still making art, but I don't think I'm going to continue to do anything without an NFT angle or arm
to it. I think your regular art should exist in the digital sphere at the same time.
Hopefully, I'm still working with the Wall Street Bulls.
I love it so much.
We're trying to gamify this space.
We're building this options market.
And our brilliant developers figured out how to change the artwork on the NFT after you've already got it in
your wallet. I think NFTs are here to stay.
I think NFTs are going to be part of my artwork for as long as I can keep them together.
I think NFTs and art shouldn't be two separate things.
They should be symbiotic.