“Artists spend large amounts of time creating art and then have to spend much more time marketing it, which prevents them from creating more art. DADA is creating an alternative economy for artists.”

I was born and raised in Mexico City and have called New York City home since 1992. I graduated from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem with a B.A. in English and American Literature. I was an advertising creative director and I am a writer and film critic whose work has been featured in several magazines, and my own blog, I’ve Had It With Hollywood.

My first novel, Quién te manda, is the first book to be designed as an NFT. I am also the co-founder of DADA.art, the only visual conversation platform on the planet. In 2014, Beatriz Ramos, its founder, invited me to create a platform to empower artists. Originally, we were trying to solve the problem of how to source artists we could trust, but we ended creating a community where artists communicate with each other through art.

Today, we have over 174,000 registered members and over 150,000 individual drawings. Now, not all of those people actually draw, but many of the people who do have been drawing with us since 2014. We have always believed that artists should be able to live from making art. We needed to find a way to capture the value created by the artists on DADA. We were inspired by the Rare Pepe community, pioneers in crypto art, and by the Cryptopunks. So in 2017 we launched Creeps & Weirdos, our first collection of crypto art, on a unique digital art marketplace on the Ethereum blockchain. We were the first to encode royalties for artists into smart contracts.

In the future, I would like to see DADA and its artists at museums, where more people can enjoy DADA and see the impact and importance of NFT art. I would also like us to be completely sustainable in the sense that we can continue existing independently through our own economic system. I would love for more people to understand what DADA has contributed, and to realize that there’s an alternative way of doing things that is not dependent on market forces. Artists spend large amounts of time creating art and then have to spend much more time marketing it, which prevents them from creating more art. We have created an alternative economy for artists.