“Nate has played a pivotal role in revolutionizing the NFT marketplace and showcasing smart contracts as a creative process.”

Collecting and flipping CryptoKitties. Creating ChainFaces and SquigglyWTF. An influential thought leader in web3 since 2017. Nate Alex is the epitome of a web3 degen.

Nate Alex is on a mission to create an artistic medium through smart contracts to add further security and creative realms to the NFT community. It is a unique approach to art and the blockchain. His inspiration? “The additional mechanics and stuff you could do with smart contracts interested me; to have this sort of art that’s experiential rather than just visual.”

Before diving into the NFT world, Nate was a normie: an engineer working in the automation of electrical design and machine building. Itching for something extra to add an additional revenue stream to his income, he happened upon crypto and digital art through his searches. That began his wild and successful journey into crypto and digital art. “In 2017, a friend at work mentioned Bitcoin,” he remembers. “I had heard about it many years before, but didn’t think anything of it until 2017. When my friend mentioned it, Bitcoin was over a thousand dollars. We left it again until the fall of 2017, and it was probably like $3,000, and we just said, ‘We’re going to buy this.’”

As Bitcoin continued rising, he discovered CryptoKitties and dove into the community with micro-flips. As he became more involved in NFT art and started to wrap his head around the buying and selling processes, Nate found an unlikely inspiration: smart contracts. “I’ve sold and bought thousands of NFTs over the last few years, and I believe the contract is part of the art. And the kind of projects that I want to create is very much inspired by that. Like, the idea that it’s not just a token and a picture attached to it; like, the generator for autoglyphs is in the smart contract.”

This passion and interest for smart contracts and autoglyphs catalyzed Nate’s creations of ChainFaces and SquigglyWTF. “The turning point for me was launching ChainFaces, seeing that maybe I had some future as a creator or as a developer, or as a technical person,” he shares. “At this point, I just loved NFTs.”

Nate has played a pivotal role in revolutionizing the NFT marketplace and showcasing smart contracts as a creative process. His efforts have empowered and enabled artists who’ve never heard of him – he’s profoundly changed the blockchain for artists and creators. Not bad for an engineer.