JAKE GALLEN
“He is in the process of uncovering old projects, many of which he believes were ahead of their time and which therefore have already been consigned to history.”
Jake Gallen is like crypto’s Indiana Jones, an NFT archaeologist searching digital antiquity for rare artifacts. Of course, it might have something to do with his past and owning an antique shop with his father in Las Vegas in 2017. Still, it also has a lot to do with preserving the recent history of this rapidly evolving landscape, the early developments of which are already being misremembered if not forgotten completely.
As covid hit when Jake was working in a Vegas nightclub, he turned to podcasting, talking to many people in a town that was amongst the worst affected by unemployment that resulted from the pandemic.
That Las Vegas podcast later morphed into one that focused on NFTs, and it was, for Jake, the launch pad for everything he has learned to date. During the course of his interviews, he had the opportunity to speak to some of the early adopters, founders, and original collectors, as well as NFT ‘historians.’
“Having an antique store in the past and understanding historical value and provenance was something that I’d come to have a fascination with and a pretty firm understanding of,” he tells us.
Sotheby’s 2021 Mooncat sale, which included a couple of Jake’s early investments, he believes added more to the credibility of provenance in the history of the entire sector. This took Jake down the path of digital archeology and the desire to create an historical NFT marketplace, like a one-stop-shop for information, articles, and thought pieces, and supporting proof-of-work blockchains and stake tokens, etc.
Jake joined Emblem Vault, and from there he aims to build his historical NFT marketplace. He has already created Curated Collections, which is integral to tracing the history of NFTs. He is in the process of uncovering old projects, many of which he believes were ahead of their time and which therefore have already been consigned to history.
It might only have had a very short lifespan, but Jake has already compiled a history of NFTs, which covers a little over a hundred different moments that happened over the last year and a half, which will help people understand what actually transpired and how we all got where we are today.
