"Gonna try out NFTs"

Dear Bankless Nation,

NFTs aren’t a catch-all “guaranteed success” solution for artists.

But NFTs are an empowering option in the modern artist’s toolbox, and they absolutely can lead to incredible results.

Why’s that? Because the NFT + Ethereum combo lets creatives distribute their works and engage audiences in unprecedented ways:

That said, I wanted to highlight how one talented artist gave NFTs a try this week and received an incredible response ❤️

-WMP

NFTs: liberating artists one mint at a time

jmw327 is a virtuoso digital and pixel artist who, between web2 platforms like Twitter and Instagram, has over 173k followers.

In the past, the popular artist sustained themselves by selling custom commissions, prints, and wallpapers, yet they’ve struggled to make ends meet through these traditional avenues.

Indeed, as seen in the tweet depicted above, this week jmw327 announced their decision to try NFTs because they couldn’t “keep making less than $10k a year.” They followed up by minting their first NFT, Corner, on Foundation and putting it up for auction with a 1 ETH reserve price.

It was a brave move, since jmw327’s mainstream, gamer-heavy fanbase didn’t have much overlap with the NFT community. Accordingly, many of the artist’s “fans” blasted the move with anti-NFT sentiments via quote tweets, but it was too late: NFTers quickly spread word of the mint and the first bid came in, kicking off a 24-hour auction on Foundation.

Then another bid streamed in.

And another one…

And another one…

By the time the dust settled, the auction received 15 bids in total, with the final bid coming in at 20.9 ETH — more than 4x the value of jmw327’s previous annual salary! The winning collector, Fozzie Bear, said in the aftermath:

Of course, not everyone will make 20 ETH on their first NFT auction. jmw327’s original “Gonna try out NFTs” tweet did go viral first, after all. But still, the episode is a great reminder of how artists can turn to NFTs as another way to sustain and earn from their practices.

So now we’ve added yet another creator to the list of artists whose lives have been changed forever by experimenting with NFTs — a list that includes luminaries like Claire Silver, Drift, and Sarah Zucker to name a few.

And with enough time, eventually NFTs and other web3 solutions may help kill the “starving artist” trope once and for all. How amazing that would be. Until then, there’s still much work to be done — we need more NFT innovation, more education, more experimentation, etc. If we keep pressing out in all these directions, then in 10 years’ time more artists may use NFTs than not!

Action steps

• 🎨 Follow jmw327 on Foundation in case you want to track their future mints
• 🧸 Catch my previous Metaversal write-up (They’re) Not Okay Bears if you missed it