SCALYNELSON
“It didn’t take me long to get into NFTs because I sort of went to digital collectibles.”
ScalyNelson has been a passionate collector, teacher, and NFT fan since the beginning of 2018. He collected CryptoPunks, Beeple, Hackatao, and XCOPY. He’s also served as an advisor to artists and collectors and was one of the first participants in the private Beta for NBA Top Shot.
ScalyNelson was introduced to the crypto space in 2018 when a friend, who had been trading, told him about it. “He gave me a hundred dollars in Bitcoin just to play around with. And pretty quickly, it didn’t take me long to get into NFTs because I sort of went to digital collectibles, like baseball cards,” says ScalyNelson. That rabbit hole sucked him in real quick.
He bought his first CryptoPunk on New Year’s Eve of 2019, and the first project he got into on his own was the MLB (Major League Baseball) crypto project. “It was called MLB Crypto, and then they later changed it to MLB Champions. It was a baseball collectible thing that’s like digital bobbleheads,” says ScalyNelson. He used to collect baseball cards and other collectibles as a kid, and this passion was rekindled by his dive into the NFT space.
He’s also one of the founders of 8liens, a pixel art NFT collection. They will soon be launching the second phase of their project, which is an exciting artist collective. “The motivation behind doing 8liens was really to get back to that feeling in the crypto Discord before all the hype. That’s exactly what we were trying to capture with 8liens, to build a collection that was kind of fun to collect,” says ScalyNelson. The collection was given away for free because they wanted people to have fun and collect it rather than expecting to buy and sell it immediately for a profit.
ScalyNelson believes that the future of the NFT art space needs more transparency and has to be better self-regulated. He reckons this can even be done by instituting an agency that approves projects. There’s always room for improvement, and ScalyNelson recognizes that the art space needs more art critics and that more work in diversity is required for the community to attract more people from all walks of life to participate in the opportunities offered by web3.