Interview with NFT Brands: Q&A with Art Blocks

I started in crypto as a DeFi hobbyist.  I was drawn-in with the excitement of volatility and yield opportunities, but I stayed because of my new found appreciation for the efficiency and power of composable protocols and digital assets.  NFTs were a natural progression for me because, as an extension of digital assets, they represent digital property rights for unique one-of-a-kind assets.

I minted my first NFT, a Euler Beats Print, on March 4, 2021.

Erick Calderon (crypto-handle: Snowfro) founded Art Blocks in 2021.  Erick has a passion for art and he had a vision for creating a more inclusive and accessible platform for viewing and purchasing digital works where both ownership and provenance could be irrefutably confirmed on the blockchain.  I joined Art Blocks in November 2021 excited to build out the business operations as COO and to also expand the business into other verticals such as gaming, fashion, media, and physical minting experiences.

Art Blocks is a first of its kind platform for the creation of on-chain generative art.  “On-chain” means that every project is loaded directly to the Ethereum blockchain by the artist and this information can be read off of the Art Blocks contract.  This isn’t a simple image loading; this is a real-time rendering of a generative piece of art that is immutably preserved on the Ethereum blockchain. 

All of our projects are vetted by our curation board and they’ve been fortunate to review projects from the world’s greatest generative artists.  I think that this really sets us apart.  We’re so fortunate to get to work with all of these amazing and talented people.

We’re currently up to 26 people that are staffing our Creative, Engineering and Operations departments.

I see NFTs becoming more pervasive and accessible as time progresses.  I believe that they will become a standard for identification (i.e., licenses, birth certificates, passports), contracts (i.e, bills of lading, titles, loan agreements), and a wide array of other digital assets, including art.  Eventually this technology will become mainstream and the “non-fungible token” and “cryptography” terminology will fade away – people will just talk about digital assets.

Ethereum Layer 2 (“L2”) and sidechain scaling solutions need to mature before NFTs become mainstream.  These scaling solutions allow for much higher transaction volumes and lower transaction costs.  Today, it might make sense to pay a couple hundred dollars in transaction fees for a $100,000 piece of digital art – but it doesn’t make as much sense for lower cost digital assets such as documents or video game assets.  L2 solutions such as ZK Rollups and Optimistic Rollups, and side chains such as Polygon will dramatically increase transaction throughput while simultaneously reducing transaction costs to a couple dollars or even pennies.

Purchase digital art for its beauty and/or an emotional attachment and purchase non-art NFTs for its utility.  If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.  And, please, make sure you’re purchasing from a reputable source.  We’re still on the frontier of cryptographic asset technology and there are a lot of predators and scams looking to take advantage of new users – do you research and purchase a hardware wallet from Leger or Trezor.

All of the artists that launched projects on our platform are the best of the best, world class generative artists.  Some of the most successful include Tyler Hobbs, Dmitri Cherniak, Matt DesLauriers, Kjetil Golid, Alexis André, Shvembldr, Aaron Penne, Jeff Davis, Snowfro, and a very long list of other artists that I’m sorry that I’m not naming!

We just started licensing our generative minting smart contracts to companies, artists, and brands that want to introduce generative minting and content to their own audiences.  Some examples include Bright Moments, Doodle Labs, Plottables, TBOA Club, ArtCode, Flutter by Flamingo DAO, and Legends of Metaterra.

We’ll be launching an updated website / info site next quarter, so lookout for that.  We also have a very active Discord community as well as Twitter and Instagram pages.  You can also follow me by my crypto handle, 0xHouston, on all of these sites.