LEONIDAS
“A century from now, our descendants will consider the earliest of these digital assets to be priceless cultural artifacts.”
My hope for the NFT space is that it doesn’t forget the early pioneers and visionaries who laid the very foundation that it was built on.”
For LeonidasNFT, he works feverishly to document the history of NFT art. He’s been in the cryptoart scene since the beginning and has a unique take on this space. Most of his time is spent trawling old internet forums and blockchain explorers to understand the early NFT experiments better. The most significant aspect of this research is uncovering the stories behind the art and the artist.
After listening to a Clubhouse room in March 2021 about the rediscovery of an old project called MoonCats, LeonidasNFT was mesmerized that this project boomed from a $0 market cap to $100M in a few hours. “It occurred to me that there were probably other forgotten NFT projects. After three hours of research, I came across an old project from 2017 called ‘Digital Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility by Mitchell F Chan,” says Leonidas. “I absolutely fell in love with it and hold to this day. That’s when I really started taking historical NFT collecting seriously.”
As a collector and historian of cryptoart, LeonidasNFT has a clear strategy guided by his belief in the future of the digital world. He says, “Our civilization is in the middle of a century-long transition to becoming fully digital. When Satoshi introduced the concept of true ownership of digital assets, it changed the trajectory of our society forever. A century from now, our descendants will consider the earliest of these digital assets to be priceless cultural artifacts. When I collect, I try to look through their eyes and determine what I think they will view as being the most historically significant.”
He hosts two Twitter spaces a week with Adam McBride and White Rabbit, where they bring up early artists or innovators from NFT history to give them a platform to share their stories with others. “As an NFT historian, I naturally gravitate towards the early AI NFT experiments from 2018/2019 and have been fortunate enough to speak with many of these early AI art pioneers like Obvious and DeepBlack,” he says. “While the establishment art world has rejected AI art, the NFT space has embraced it. I believe that this will not be the last time that the ethos of cryptoart attracts the most talented artists who are on the bleeding edge of a new genre of art to find a home in the NFT space.”