NFTs made artists rich overnight, crashed spectacularly, and became shorthand for hype, speculation, and internet absurdity. Declared dead more times than anyone can count, they nevertheless changed the art world, forcing artists, collectors, museums, and institutions to rethink ownership, value, and what digital art could be.
Kevin McCoy knows this better than anyone. Widely regarded as the inventor of NFTs, the artist never set out to create a speculative market. What he imagined instead was monetized graphics: a way for digital artists to own and distribute their work online. More than a decade later, he is still surprised by what happened next.
In conversation with Anika Meier for SLEEK, Kevin McCoy looks back at the NFT boom and bust, the market frenzy that followed, and what happened to digital art after the hype faded.
Anika Meier What happened to NFTs, Kevin McCoy?
Kevin McCoy NFTs succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. The idea that blockchain technology could create unique and transferable ownership for digital art was something people simply did not understand for a long time. And then, people did. The technology has evolved, but it continues to work. The core idea has been validated. The future looks bright for the core concept.
I came from the experimental media art world, very much connected to the capital-A Art world. But that is not where most of the action ended up happening. That said, the market side of NFTs was a surprise to me. Not a bad surprise. When I was thinking about these ideas more than a decade ago, this was not where my mind was at all. I did not foresee the kind of community that would form around it, or the kinds of work and people it would attract. The trading card mentality, the collectible culture, large-edition drops, profile picture projects, and the intersection with pop culture—none of that was part of my background.
AM I’m not sure many people would agree that NFTs succeeded, because what we hear a lot about is the death of NFTs: the bubble burst, the hype is over.
KMC That’s all market talk. That’s all bag talk. From a speculative frenzy perspective, it rose and fell. Which is funny to say, because my term for this technology back in 2014 was monetized graphics. Monetization was literally the first word. I’m not pretending it was not central to the idea.
The market side of it is complicated. There is no common denominator that everyone is going to agree on as the most important measure. Is it institutional acceptance? Number go up? Increasing holder count? There are all these different metrics. You are not going to make everybody happy.
After the public presentation at the New Museum in 2014, I was asked to bring the idea to the incubator that was starting there, NEW INC. I spent about three years building a platform. We went out of business, just like everybody else now has.
So I had this early experience of riding that wave and dealing directly with the business model challenges from the platform side. It is tough. It is really hard to know how a platform stays in business. You can say everybody wants to support artists. The whole narrative of “we support artists” is a bit like saying you love puppies. Everybody loves puppies.
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, “Phase Diagram #4”. 2024, 4k digital video, 2:00, Non-fungible token. Image Courtesy of Jennifer and Kevin McCoy.
AM A new group of people suddenly found themselves navigating both collectibles and art. The trading card mentality met the “support the artist” mindset.
KMC My theory about the 2020 to 2022 boom is that it took the Ethereum community to create an integrated stack. The technical infrastructure was finally in place, much of it built around DeFi. At the same time, DeFi generated a huge amount of crypto-native wealth through tokens, yield farming, and related mechanisms. That created an injection of capital. Those two things together allowed the idea to really take off, and that is what drove the boom. That wave has passed. The market has settled down, and we are no longer in the get-rich-quick era.
Crypto seems to have gone through many of the same cycles we are now seeing around AI, only earlier and on a smaller scale. Mining, power infrastructure, getting in early, sudden wealth, the fear of being too late—it all feels familiar. You see it now in conversations around AI companies like Anthropic and the expectation of life-changing wealth for early employees. Even the data center story has echoes of crypto.
For me, crypto was always fascinating because it felt like a toy universe where broader economic and technological forces could unfold in miniature. You could see financialization, distributed technologies, and the integration of creative practice with technology, all compressed into one space. Now many of those same dynamics seem to be emerging again, only on a much larger stage.
AM You are an artist. What was your initial idea when you first started thinking about what later became known as NFTs and what you called monetized graphics?
KMC My initial idea would probably be seen today as a one-of-one. You make a piece, and that piece is the work. But early on, the real question was always: What is the artwork?
Coming out of net.art and experimental media, the answer was not obvious. The net art world had a much broader conception of the artwork. I remember Vuk Ćosić talking about the camcorder generation making videos that lived in plastic boxes and functioned almost like books. He contrasted that with net.art, which was network-native and more multifaceted. A website was made up of many files and elements. It was never just one thing. I came from that environment too.
When I started thinking in 2013 and 2014 about how blockchain technology could work for digital artists, the question became: how do you define the artwork? Monetized graphics was a very reduced answer. It was intentionally reductive. It was: here is a file, and the file is the work. That was the most distilled approach imaginable. It was not even particularly representative of where digital art was at the time. Artists were making installations, sculptural works, and hybrid pieces where a video might be embedded in an object. Think of someone like Paul Pfeiffer, or even Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds. Is the work in the file on the chip? The cartridge? The object? All of those questions already existed. For artists coming from a fine art context, that complexity was second nature.
Monetized graphics reduced all of that into a file, a file hash, a description, and a statement of ownership, wrapped together and represented as a transferable token on the blockchain. It was the most distilled version possible, but it was the only way I could think of to get from zero to one. Others working at the same time arrived at similar conclusions, even with different technical assumptions.
Rhea Myers took a different path and stayed closer to an art-world approach. Her work embraced the tension between lived experience and its reduction into an on-chain marker. Works like MYSOUL turned identity and personhood into blockchain transactions, collapsing something vast and metaphysical into a transaction ID.
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, “T16-87Land-72Mountains-40Sea-52Sky”, 2023, 4k digital video, 2:00, Non-fungible token. Image Courtesy of Jennifer and Kevin McCoy.
AM You are referring to Rhea Myers’ MYSOUL (2014), where she “minted” her soul on a Dogecoin fork.
KMC There is this impossibly grand statement about the self, the soul, identity, and then it becomes this tiny on-chain marker, almost like an exclamation point. The impossibility of that translation is where the beauty lies. To her credit, she never reduced the complexity of the artwork itself.
AM What was your approach?
KMC I started from the technical constraints. The artwork had to conform to what was possible. It would be a file, a file hash, and that is what would go on-chain. This was very early thinking, really zero-day thinking. The idea evolved quickly after that through bundling, editioning, and other approaches. But the key realization for me was that Bitcoin had created digital uniqueness. The question then became: how do you apply digital uniqueness to digitally native artworks? My answer was reduction. Strip it down to the essentials and make it work. And it did.
In many ways, the underlying logic did not change that much. CryptoPunks took a slightly different approach, but the broader structure remained similar. The ERC-721 standard eventually became the model that took off, yet many of those systems were still close to the ideas I had been working on years earlier.
What matters to me is that we now have a robust concept of digital property that people can use if they choose to. To me, that is a sign of success.
AM This was also around 2014, during the Tumblr era, when Instagram was still new and artists were sharing work online without really making money from it. That was also part of the context you were thinking about.
KMC Open source was incredibly important, and Creative Commons played a major role. It was still very much the era of the sharing economy and the internet as a space built around openness and exchange. In that sense, monetized graphics were almost reactionary because they moved in the opposite direction. It said, “No, this can be private property.”
At the same time, platforms like Tumblr and Instagram already had user agreements that granted them broad licenses over the work being shared. Artists were effectively giving platforms commercial rights to monetize their content within those ecosystems. I recognized that dynamic and started wondering whether artists could opt out of it. Was there a way not to hand over that monetization potential to platforms from the outset? And that is still the case today. You create an account, post your work, and agree to these broad, non-exclusive, global licenses that allow platforms to use the media you share.
AM Unter Token Supremacy: The Art of Finance, the Finance of Art, and the Great Crypto Crash of 2022, New York Times investigative reporter Zachary Small questions whether you invented NFTs. What is your response to that?
KMC It comes down to definitions. People define things differently and decide for themselves what the essential component of NFTs is.
The Bitcoin genesis block itself contains a newspaper headline. So right from the beginning, there was a literary, journalistic, human-produced statement embedded into the blockchain. Then you had mining messages, where miners embedded text into blocks. There is almost a poetic history there. Memorials to early cryptographers were written into the Bitcoin blockchain at the metadata level. In 2013, there was also Proof of Existence, where people uploaded documents and generated hashes as a kind of digital notary service. Then there were colored coins, Namecoin namespaces. All of these ideas already existed.
If we narrow the discussion and say NFTs mean digital art and intentional digital artworks, then you arrive at Ascribe. Their approach was to create a hash from an artwork and use it to establish provenance. That was a great idea. But I would argue that it was different from what I did a few months later because it lacked a critical component: transferable ownership. And this is really my defense of the work. It is not a zero-sum argument. I am not trying to diminish what Ascribe did. But Ascribe fits into a digital notary model. Even their early marketing materials focused on provenance and immutable records. They did not foreground transferability.
With monetized graphics, the idea that a token transfer represented a transfer of ownership was there from the beginning. Updating the blockchain record itself signified a change in ownership. That was built into the demonstration from day one. If digital provenance alone is enough to define an NFT, then Ascribe comes first. If NFTs require both provenance and transferability, then I would argue mine comes first. But people can make up their own minds.
AM And then Zachary Small writes in the book that NFTs are basically “marketing bullshit” anyway.
KMC Monetized graphics, baby.
AM So your argument is that it was a marketing term from the beginning?
KMC Absolutely. Monetized graphics. Anil Dash and I thought it was pretty funny. Anil Dash, the entrepreneur, writer, and my collaborator on Quantum, and I developed the project for Rhizome’s Seven on Seven conference in 2014, where artists and technologists were paired together. But that was also the conversation at the time. I remember it from the Bitcoin Talk forums. There was this ongoing debate: is this a computer science innovation, an information theory innovation, or a marketing innovation? The whole crypto space constantly flips between those things.
And the truth is, there is a genuinely novel information-theoretic component to it. Network-native digital uniqueness and digital scarcity are real inventions. That is remarkable. They are not absolute, though. There are conditions attached to them. Satoshi is very clear about that in the Bitcoin white paper, including the social and technical assumptions that make the system possible. There is fragility and context to it. At the same time, it quickly became a huge marketing machine. The space turned into this endless sea of hype, marketing, scams, and everything in between.
AM What happened to digital art? You said you were thinking in terms of one-of-ones, but what happened instead was things like Art Blocks, generative art, and platforms such as objkt, which on Tezos always felt to me like the closest thing to a paid Tumblr.
KMC Art Blocks was obviously a huge success story. It became the defining example. The invention of the long-form generative format was fascinating to watch. Technically, the approach was fairly straightforward. What really made it work was the community. Maybe that goes back to what we were talking about earlier. Community and marketing ended up being just as important, if not more important, than the purely technical side.
Because in many ways, the technical questions had already been answered. The primitives existed: wallets, token representations, and storage solutions, imperfect but functional. They were good enough to bootstrap communities. And platforms like objkt and projects like Art Blocks became some of the strongest examples of that. At the same time, it is impossible to separate any of this from the market story. The trading volumes, the prices, the bubble—all of that drove attention.
The early Art Blocks collections exploded. CryptoPunks had this slow multi-year build-up, and then suddenly the volumes and prices went insane. You cannot separate that market frenzy from the story because it accelerated everything. And then the fever broke.
I remember being at conferences like NFT.NYC in 2021 and 2022, after the monetized graphics story became widely known. People would come up to me and say, “Oh my God, you changed my life.” And I would think, Well, not really, but okay.
AM When we first met a few years ago, I also told you that you had changed my life, and I was not happy about it. (laughs) Because suddenly, being a curator in digital art became tied to the expectation of selling work. Curation was no longer primarily about creating context, but increasingly about selecting artists who performed well in the market.
KMC We saw those dynamics play out: curation becoming tied to sales and digital art becoming increasingly centred around ownership and wallets. To go back to Vuk Ćosić’s conversation with you, one of the key figures of the 1990s net.art movement, he said: we had the browser, NFTs got the wallet. He meant it critically, in the sense that the artwork became reduced to the wallet. And that is true.
As an artist, especially in that early Ethereum moment, producing work that ultimately ended up in a wallet did not feel great. It did not feel like making work had felt before. When you make work for a gallery exhibition, people experience it together. There is a social dimension and a physical presence to it. Doing a drop on a platform and having the work end up in people’s wallets was not the same experience.
But looking at it from a more optimistic perspective, you would then see collectors opening their wallets and showing the works to people on their phones. That social sharing, combined with a genuine sense of ownership, was real. It meant something to people. So experientially, it may have been less rewarding for artists, but it was meaningful for collectors. It is a strange trade-off.
AM Vuk Ćosić was referencing my term wallet art with that answer. I coined the term wallet art in an essay for Kunstforum in 2021 and spoke with artists such as John Gerrard, who also liked the idea. But the term never really took off because I think people misunderstood the word wallet. They read it through the lens of monetization.
For me, it was more a question of where the artwork lives. The browser defined net.art. NFTs introduced the wallet. And artists adapted to that logic. You said you were originally thinking about one-of-ones and were then surprised by editions, long-form generative art, collections, profile pictures, and all these other formats that emerged. NFTs became more like the edition model of digital art rather than singular works. It was no longer about one big piece.
KMC Maybe Zachary Small is right. Are NFTs ultimately just “marketing bullshit”? Is it simply an ownership trick? And in the end, it is just digital art. It is media art. That is where the cultural side becomes important. Because then the answer is: no, NFTs are also the norms, habits, aesthetics, and practices that emerged through the integration of technology, communities, and artistic production.
AM In his interview with Art Basel about Zero10, the curated digital art space he co-curates, Trevor Paglen said that there is a “civil war” between the traditional art world and the blockchain community. What are your thoughts on that?
KMC Looking at the relationship between digital art, the traditional art world, and the blockchain space historically, I think that framing is also a bit of a marketing thing. Jennifer and I had a digital work in an art fair in New York in 2001 that sold to the Metropolitan Museum. We had digital work in Miami Basel in 2002 that also went to museums. Steve Sacks at Bitforms has been showing at art fairs since 2000. Postmasters too. Digital art in art fairs is not new. It has been happening for a long time. At the same time, digital art has always occupied a minority position within the art market. That is simply true.
Artists like Paul Pfeiffer or Cory Arcangel circulate in blue-chip galleries and appear in auctions, but media art has still remained a minority position, both in the market and in the gallery world. Maybe there is a struggle for legitimacy. You and I can both trace a fifty- or sixty-year history of media art. We grew up seeing extraordinary installations in museums: Gary Hill, Bill Viola, Rosemarie Trockel, Shigeko Kubota, Nam June Paik. There has always been a rich history of media art and dedicated collectors, but it remained a minority position.
What has changed now is that the digital world has won. Culture is digital. Everyone’s reality is saturated with networked technologies. And yet it is striking that the art market itself is still not more digital than it is. The infrastructure is digital: JPEGs, PDFs, emails, tweets, Instagram posts, spreadsheets. Everything around the market is digitized, but the inventory itself remains largely physical. That seems strange. As the world becomes increasingly digital, it is surprising that the collector space has not embraced natively digital artworks more fully.
AM If we look at collections such as the Julia Stoschek Collection or the Zabludowicz Collection, there seems to be another framework for discussing digital art. The Julia Stoschek Collection uses the term time-based art. Anita Zabludowicz simply frames it as contemporary art. And if we look at the artists and works in those collections, large parts of them could also be described as digital art.
Yet there seems to be a divide. There are artists who identify as digital artists and remain at the margins of the art market. And then there are artists who become absorbed into the contemporary art world through major galleries. Take Jon Rafman, for example, opening a major exhibition at K21 in Düsseldorf and represented by Sprüth Magers. Or Cao Fei, also represented by Sprüth Magers and exhibiting at Kunstmuseum Basel during Art Basel. Cory Arcangel is represented by Thaddaeus Ropac.
So there seem to be artists who end up on the digital art side and others who become part of the contemporary art world. The digital art side would be galleries like Postmasters in New York, DAM Projects in Berlin, and bitforms in New York.
KMC There are these hierarchies, at least in a market sense. But there is also the question of self-definition. It reminds me a bit of photography. There have always been photography galleries existing alongside contemporary artists who work with photography, and there has long been a split between those worlds.
Some of that is self-selected. Some of it comes down to where artists find support and community. The art world is a complicated place. I tend to look at it as a glass half full. People are just doing their thing.
AM Take artists like Andreas Gursky and Hito Steyerl. Andreas Gursky is considered a photographer. Hito Steyerl is a filmmaker represented by Esther Schipper. Avery Singer is described as a painter, and she is represented by Hauser & Wirth, one of the biggest galleries in the world. It would not occur to anyone to describe Avery Singer as a digital artist. Yet these artists are now part of Zero10 by Art Basel because they work with digital media.
KMC The artist’s role is to look at the world as closely as possible, frame a viewpoint, and present it. In the eighteenth century, that might have meant looking out over a pastoral landscape. Today, the world is largely digital, shaped by networks and technology. And when the world changes, the work changes with it.
That is not the same thing as being a digital artist. It is about being an artist who is aware of the digital environment and makes work in response to it. Take Mark Lombardi. His drawings mapped networks of power and relationships. They were literally representations of networks, yet they were ink and pencil on paper. Nobody would call him a digital artist, but the work was deeply informed by the structures of its time.
Artists who do not position themselves polemically as digital artists sometimes have an advantage because they can move more fluidly. That said, there is absolutely no criticism of artists who stay entirely within digital practices. But contemporary artists, especially since the 1960s, have largely been multimodal. They move across forms and media and explore ideas through different approaches. That is certainly true for me. To the extent that digital art becomes a fixed category or a box artists place themselves in, it can become limiting.
I would encourage artists to think as broadly and expansively as possible. One of the victories of the NFT space is that many artists, young artists, and marginal artists suddenly found opportunities. They rose to the occasion. Their practices expanded. They experimented and moved into new forms. Take Beeple. He is probably the clearest example. Now he is making these crazy robot dogs and is exhibited at major institutions such as Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.
AM Would you agree that artists no longer need gallery representation?
KMC There are a lot of advantages to the gallery model. Not every artist is suited to managing the commercial side of their career themselves, and that is completely fine.
The challenge with the artist-led model is financial. It comes down to costs and risk. Galleries operate through distributed risk, whereas artists carry concentrated risk. A gallery might represent twenty-five artists, run a two-year exhibition program, and participate in several art fairs a year. The risk is spread across different artists, practices, exhibitions, and revenue streams. An individual artist has their own body of work. Even if there is stylistic range, it is still one name and one practice.
And if the costs are similar, fifty thousand dollars, a hundred thousand dollars, whatever it takes to participate in a fair, the artist is still carrying that entire burden. The gallery has far more ways to distribute risk. Doing it independently pushes much more risk onto the artist and the studio. And I do not think that ends well.
AM It did not end well for many galleries lately.
What are your hopes for the future of NFTs?
KMC There are artists, makers, and creatives with broader backgrounds and interests who are bringing different ideas into the field. On the creative side, and that includes artists, curators, and supporters, I am optimistic.
The financial side is always going to be difficult. Making a living as an artist has never been easy. You have to think seriously about your own economics. You have to control your living costs, have a day job if necessary, and understand that the world does not owe you a living. You have to make it happen. That is not meant as a pessimistic statement. It is just reality.
Look at Josh Kline’s essay in October recently. He writes about rising costs and economic pressure, saying, “Look at me. I had a Whitney retrospective, and I still cannot keep my studio running.” He talks about how it affects the scale of his work. The Richard Serra generation could think expansively and work at a monumental scale. He does not feel he has that same freedom. And that is true.
So what do you do? You either stop, or you respond. It becomes part of the landscape artists work within. I have been an educator throughout my career. Teaching was my way of smoothing out the ups and downs. It was not only a job; it was also a way of sharing knowledge and staying connected. The lesson remains the same: control your cost of living and take your economics seriously.
At the same time, I still believe in abundance. The internet massively expanded distribution. Even if we are operating inside someone else’s ecosystem, Elon’s, Zuckerberg’s, or Google’s, the reality is that artists still have access and reach they never had before. E-commerce exists. Native digital distribution exists. So it is possible. The number one rule is simple: do not stop. You just keep going.
AM Thank you for the conversation, Kevin.