This week’s featured collector is secretmsgcol

secretmsgcol is a handmade NFT collection on WAX. Check it out at lazy.com/secretmsgcol

Last week’s poll asked whether the SEC should regulate NFTs as securities—and the verdict was clear: half of you said “never.” Another 30% opted for “sometimes,” suggesting a belief that not all tokens are created equal, while only 20% favored consistent oversight. No one said “I don’t know,” which may be the most telling result of all. The NFT community, it seems, knows exactly how it feels about government regulation. The takeaway? Even as courts and regulators struggle to define what NFTs are, creators and collectors have already made up their minds: digital art may live on the blockchain, but it doesn’t belong in a securities filing.

NFTs, Crypto, and the Psychology of Giving: How Digital Assets Are Reshaping Charity

When cryptocurrency first went mainstream, it promised to disrupt finance. Now, it’s quietly transforming something far more human: generosity. A new peer-reviewed study in Computers in Human Behavior explores how cryptocurrency and NFTs are influencing charitable behavior—and what it reveals about how we mentally account for digital value.

The study, led by Claudio Schapsis, Dorin Micu, and Nikki Wingate, applies Mental Accounting Theory—a behavioral economics framework developed by Nobel laureate Richard Thaler—to the blockchain era. Mental accounting describes how people categorize and track money in “mental ledgers.” We might have one mental account for groceries, another for entertainment, and a separate one for charitable giving.

But what happens when money itself becomes intangible, decentralized, and volatile?

According to the study, people often manage their cryptocurrencies and NFTs in the same mental account. That is, they perceive both as part of a single pool of digital value—even though one is fungible (Bitcoin, Ethereum) and the other is unique (NFTs representing digital art or collectibles). This finding matters because it changes how we understand the psychology of crypto donations.

Here’s where things get interesting: when nonprofits offer NFTs as incentives for cryptocurrency donations, people give more.

In experiments conducted by the researchers, participants were more likely to donate higher amounts of cryptocurrency when the charity offered an NFT in return—especially when the NFT was framed as a purchase rather than a thank-you gift. That framing shifted the donor’s mindset. Instead of thinking “I’m spending money,” they thought “I’m exchanging one asset for another.”

This subtle psychological shift—treating a donation as an exchange within the same mental account—reduces the perceived “cost” of giving. In other words, donors feel like they’re not losing value, they’re simply transferring it.

The result? NFT incentives drive higher crypto donations than physical rewards.

NFTs may cost little to create, but their perceived value is often much higher. That discrepancy—between production cost and perceived worth—makes them powerful tools for fundraising. Like limited-edition posters or event tickets, NFTs can serve as symbolic tokens of participation and belonging. But because they live on the blockchain, they also carry a sense of permanence, authenticity, and community identity.

In this sense, NFTs tap into both economic and emotional value. They’re not just rewards; they’re receipts of identity and proof of participation in something meaningful.

The study’s broader insight is that philanthropy in the digital era isn’t just about generosity—it’s about mental framing. When giving is framed as a trade within the same ecosystem of assets, people are more willing to part with their digital wealth. For nonprofits, that means understanding not only blockchain technology but also donor psychology.

By issuing NFTs as incentives, charities can appeal to both altruistic motives (“I’m helping a cause”) and investment-driven mindsets (“I’m gaining a digital asset”). That dual framing could help bridge the gap between financial speculation and social good.

The paper ultimately reframes NFTs not just as speculative assets but as psychological tools that reveal how humans adapt age-old behaviors to new technologies. Charitable giving has entered the blockchain era—and our mental accounting is following close behind.

Learn more here.

Which best describes your NFT collector energy right now?

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This week’s featured collector is pjartbasel

Pjartbasel is an artist who uses their Lazy profile to showcase some of their creations. Check it out at lazy.com/pjartbasel

Last week we asked: How should NFTs be safeguarded to last 100 years? The majority of respondents (60%) put their trust in on-chain provenance and metadata, signaling that the blockchain itself is seen as the strongest guarantor of long-term authenticity. Meanwhile, decentralized storage and artist-led preservation co-ops each drew 20%, showing recognition that off-chain solutions and community stewardship also matter. Notably, museums and institutional archives received no votes, underscoring a broader skepticism that traditional cultural institutions can—or will—take responsibility for the digital future. Together, the results highlight a clear belief that the durability of NFTs will depend on blockchain-native strategies, while also leaving space for hybrid models of care and preservation.

U.S. Judge Dismisses NFT Artists’ Challenge to SEC Oversight

On September 30, 2025, a federal judge in New Orleans dismissed a lawsuit brought by two creators of musical NFTs who had sought to prevent the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) from regulating their work. The decision underscores how unsettled the regulatory landscape for NFTs remains—and how uncertain artists and creators still feel about the future of this medium.

The Case

Singer-songwriter Jonathan Mann and law professor and conceptual artist Bryan Frye—both of whom have sold NFTs since 2018—filed suit against the SEC last year. Their argument was straightforward: the threat of having their NFT sales deemed “unregistered securities” posed a chilling risk to artists experimenting with digital assets as a creative medium.

They claimed the SEC’s approach endangered livelihoods, framing NFTs not just as speculative assets but as tools for artistic expression. Frye, who teaches intellectual property law at the University of Kentucky, positioned the issue as one of artistic freedom as much as regulation.

The Ruling

U.S. District Judge Greg Guidry dismissed the lawsuit, stating that the artists’ fears were hypothetical. “The SEC’s future regulation of NFTs is far from resolved,” Guidry wrote, noting the lack of clear guidance to date. Because the SEC had not taken direct action against Mann or Frye, the court ruled there was no case to decide.

The ruling echoed arguments the SEC made in urging dismissal: that its prior NFT-related enforcement actions imposed “no consequences or obligations” on the plaintiffs.

The Bigger Picture

The case follows earlier high-profile actions, such as the 2023 settlement with the creators of Stoner Cats, who paid a $1 million fine after the SEC said their NFT sales constituted an unregistered securities offering. That case, while unrelated to Mann and Frye, rattled many creators. Two SEC commissioners even urged the agency at the time to offer clearer guidelines for artists exploring NFTs.

The lack of regulatory clarity remains the key tension point. On one hand, the SEC has pursued “discrete” enforcement actions against certain NFT offerings. On the other, there is no established framework that spells out when NFTs are considered art versus when they cross into securities territory.

Why It Matters

For artists, the decision means the question of NFT regulation remains unresolved. The court’s dismissal doesn’t settle whether or how the SEC might act in the future—it only states that without a direct action against specific artists, the courts won’t intervene preemptively.

For the NFT market, the ruling reinforces a climate of uncertainty. Without clear rules, artists and collectors are left to navigate a gray zone where enforcement could hinge on interpretations that vary case by case. This ambiguity continues to weigh on the market, particularly as interest in NFTs has shifted from speculative frenzy to questions of permanence, value, and long-term integration into the broader art world.

Looking Ahead

Until clearer guidance emerges, artists working with NFTs will likely continue to operate under the shadow of regulatory risk. Whether future cases force the SEC to articulate firm rules—or whether Congress steps in with new legislation—remains to be seen.

Should the SEC regulate NFTs as securities?

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This week’s featured collector is Krampusco

Krampusco has an NFT collection ranging from the well-known to the creative spoof. Check it out at lazy.com/krampusco

Last week’s poll asked why digital art and NFTs keep viewers engaged longer than traditional art. The majority pointed to interactive or moving elements (40%), followed by immersive visuals and sound (30%), while smaller groups highlighted younger audiences’ preferences (20%) and the novelty of the medium (10%). Interestingly, no one credited museums’ presentation. This suggests that digital art’s power lies less in how it’s framed and more in the medium itself—its ability to move, react, and surround viewers. Unlike static works, digital art offers a dynamic encounter that unfolds over time, and that durational quality may be the very thing that secures its place in the future of art.

Data, Durability, and the Future of NFTs

Part of what gives art its mystique—and its value—is its endurance. Compared with the brevity of human lives, art often outlives us, standing as an anchor of cultural memory. Ownership of a painting implies this promise of longevity: you might sell it, gift it, or leave it behind, but you assume the work itself will persist.

But what happens when art does not endure? What if, instead of centuries, a piece is doomed to fade, glitch, or rot in a matter of years? This fragility has haunted new media art from the start. The screens, code, and hardware that bring these works to life are also the things that risk consigning them to obsolescence.

A Radical Experiment in Preservation

Kelani Nichole, a pioneering dealer in new media art, is trying to solve this dilemma. At an event during this year’s Armory Show, she launched the Transfer Data Trust, a cooperative designed to make digital art “last 100 years.”

Nichole’s path here has been deliberate. Since founding Transfer Art Gallery in 2013, she has championed artists such as Rosa Menkman, Lorna Mills, and Carla Gannis. But as her interests shifted toward decentralization—both as a political stance and a technical toolkit—she transformed her gallery into a cooperative. The Transfer Data Trust replaces the fragile LLC with a member-run system built around long-term preservation.

Her skepticism toward NFTs shaped this move. During the NFT boom, Nichole called them “glorified receipts,” skeptical that they solved the central problem of digital art: permanence. “What it means for a painting to last through time is different from, say, a video game,” she explained at the launch. “The permanence of mutable objects is possible if we make sure we can preserve the intent of the artist.”

Beyond Storage: Preserving Intent

For new media works, survival is not just about backing up files. It’s about preserving the experience the artist intended, even as technologies change. Imagine a century from now when “screens” themselves may be obsolete. Simply migrating files forward won’t ensure that the art retains its essence. That requires extensive documentation of how the work was meant to function and be seen—and safeguards to ensure that documentation endures.

The Data Trust builds these safeguards into its structure. It combines decentralized storage systems like IPFS and Filecoin with traditional networked drives, wrapped in a browser interface where artists, dealers, and conservators can track inventory, market activity, and conservation status. Proceeds from sales flow back into the cooperative, which collectively decides how to allocate funds—including conservation of fragile works.

Art, Data, and Unsouping the Future

What makes the Data Trust fascinating is its insistence that art is not just “data in disguise,” but a form of data worthy of care, distinction, and stewardship. During the NFT frenzy, digital artifacts were often valued without clarity about why they mattered. Their shock value—much like Duchamp’s urinal or Warhol’s soup cans—was that they forced us to accept inexplicable value where none seemed to belong.

But as theorist Lisa Nakamura once wrote, digital images were long treated as “an undifferentiated soup of bits and bytes,” impossible to analyze through traditional art-historical frameworks. What efforts like the Data Trust reveal is a process of unsouping—differentiating data, preserving it, and investing it with the same weight once reserved for canvas and bronze.

Why It Matters

A recent Project Liberty Institute report on data cooperatives observed that fine art is one of the few markets outside finance capable of assigning value to data—especially time-based media artworks. Nichole’s project poses a radical question: can we take back the value of data from Big Tech, establishing systems where people transact in data on their own terms, rather than watching corporations scrape it and sell it? If data is valuable, then art—an especially charged form of data—may offer the template for doing so.

The challenge, of course, is permanence. Stewardship across generations is painstaking, as anyone who has tried to recover photos from a dead hard drive knows. Our parents’ photo albums survive in closets; our own digital archives risk being lost in forgotten cloud accounts. For art to endure, it requires dedicated care, expertise, and systems built for the long haul.

Toward the Deep Future

Nichole’s Transfer Data Trust represents a shift: from short-term speculation toward the long-term labor of preserving NFTs. Not every work of art, nor every NFT, will be carried into the deep future, but those that are will be the ones entrusted to systems of care and collective responsibility. In this sense, the Data Trust reframes digital art as not just another speculative asset class but as cultural memory worth safeguarding.

Learn more at ArtNews.

How should NFTs be safeguarded to last 100 years?

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This week’s featured collector is MonkeyCatcher

MonkeyCatcher has a wildly creative collection. Check it out at lazy.com/monkeycatcher

What’s your take on Christie’s shuttering its dedicated digital-art department?

Last week’s poll asked: What’s your take on Christie’s shuttering its dedicated digital-art department? The results were telling. Nearly half of respondents (45%) saw the move as bad news for NFTs, suggesting concern that the closure signals retreat by one of the most visible traditional institutions in the space. Yet 27% believed it could be good news, perhaps reading it as a sign the NFT market is maturing beyond needing its own silo. Another 18% felt it would have no impact, while 9% admitted they weren’t sure. Taken together, the responses highlight a divided sentiment: some see Christie’s move as a warning sign, while others interpret it as part of a natural evolution where digital art integrates more fully into the broader art market. The debate reflects the uncertainty—and potential—still shaping the future of NFTs.

The Surprising Reason Why Museums Like NFTs

Digital art has traveled a remarkable path over the past half-century. What began in the late 1960s with Harold Cohen’s robotic painting systems and Vera Molnár’s code-based experiments has now become central to how we think about creativity, technology, and markets. For decades, artists pushed at the edges—David Hockney with his iPad landscapes, countless others experimenting with software, code, and machines—but the tipping point came in 2021 when Beeple’s NFT Everydays: The First 5000 Days sold for $69 million at Christie’s. That single sale not only catapulted NFTs into mainstream consciousness but also forced institutions and auction houses to rethink the future of art.

Yet what many collectors and market-watchers may not realize is that museums are already measuring digital art’s impact in ways that go far beyond headline sales. As Nicole Sales Giles, Director of Digital Art at Christie’s, explained, museums track how long visitors stand in front of a work. Traditional paintings might hold attention for mere seconds, but digital art—immersive installations, generative works, AI-driven experiments—often keeps audiences engaged far longer. MoMA’s exhibition of Rafik Anadol’s Machine Hallucinations not only drew record crowds but also inspired visitors to linger, often transfixed by the moving images and soundscapes. That kind of engagement is a curator’s dream: it doesn’t just validate the medium, it ensures that digital art has staying power in institutional collections. For NFT collectors accustomed to focusing on scarcity, provenance, or price, this simple but powerful metric—time spent—offers an entirely new lens on value.

The implications are profound. Museums from Paris to Miami are now adding digital works to their permanent collections. Banks are issuing loans backed by NFTs from established artists like Beeple and Anadol. Christie’s has launched its own on-chain auction platform, Christie’s 3.0, and continues to integrate digital pieces alongside canonical works by Rothko, Warhol, and Basquiat. Even as the speculative frenzy of 2021 cooled and many collectible-based NFTs collapsed in value, digital art itself has matured into a legitimate category, judged by the same criteria as any other medium: the artist’s place in history, their collector base, and the strength of their community.

At the same time, AI-driven creativity is reshaping what digital art can be. Artists like Sasha Stiles, who trained her own language model on her writing, and Holly Herndon and Matt Dryhurst, whose multimedia AI installations have graced the Whitney Biennial, are demonstrating that artificial intelligence is not a shortcut but a collaborator. For artists willing to experiment, AI expands the boundaries of what is possible, pushing creativity into entirely new dimensions.

Looking ahead, digital art is poised to remain one of the fastest-growing categories in the art world. It attracts younger collectors than any other Christie’s category, consistently brings in new clients, and resonates with generations raised in a digital-first world. As Nicole notes, digital art won’t replace Rothko, but it will grow as a permanent part of serious collections. The combination of blockchain-enabled provenance, institutional adoption, and AI-driven creativity suggests that this is only the beginning.

The story of digital art is still being written, and its trajectory will likely shape not only how art is made and sold, but how it is experienced. For a deeper dive into this fascinating conversation—including behind-the-scenes insights from Christie’s historic NFT sales and perspectives on the artists to watch—you can listen to the full podcast interview with Nicole Sales Giles on All Options Considered.

Why do you think digital art, and NFTs, keeps viewers engaged longer than traditional art?

We ❤️ Feedback

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This week’s featured collector is Jojo89

Jojo89 has a small and nice collection of Ethereum pfps. Take a look at lazy.com/jojo89

Are you feeling optimistic about the NFT market?

In last week’s community poll, a strong wave of confidence swept through our collector base: a solid 70 percent of respondents told us they’re feeling optimistic about the NFT market’s trajectory, while 30 percent expressed some caution. This upbeat majority signals that—even amid fluctuating floor prices and shifting headlines—most of you see long-term value in NFTs and the growing mainstream embrace of digital ownership.

NFTs After the Christie’s Reshuffle: A Milestone, Not a Misstep

Christie’s, the 258-year-old auction house that shocked the world with Beeple’s $69.3 million NFT sale in 2021, has quietly shuttered the dedicated digital-art department it launched at the height of that boom, opting instead to fold NFTs and other blockchain-native works into its mainstream twentieth- and twenty-first-century art categories; although the Christie’s 3.0 on-chain sales platform remains live, the restructuring has prompted staff departures and cast uncertainty over signature programs such as the annual Art+Tech Summit.

Christie’s decision to fold its standalone digital-art hub into the broader contemporary framework reads, at first glance, like a retreat from NFTs. For collectors accustomed to the fanfare of dedicated online auctions and splashy headlines, the closure may even feel like a eulogy. Yet the move is better understood as a milestone in digital art’s maturation. By shelving the specialized podium it erected in 2022, Christie’s signals that blockchain-native works no longer require a separate stage; they have earned a place beside painting, sculpture, and photography. Parity, not abandonment, is the underlying message.

The timing makes sense. The speculative surge that crowned Beeple’s Everydays at $69.3 million has long cooled, and Ethereum’s price oscillations are no longer strong enough to mask thin curatorial depth. Christie’s own 3.0 platform has averaged a modest seventeen lots per sale, with totals rarely crossing the $400,000 mark—figures that look small next to evening auctions of Giacometti bronzes or Warhol silkscreens. In a sober market, collectors who remain are the ones building for the long term, weighing provenance and artistic significance rather than chasing instant flips. A cooler climate can be painful, but it flushes out froth and foregrounds quality.

Integration confers real benefits on both artists and buyers. When a generative piece by Tyler Hobbs or a data sculpture by Refik Anadol shares catalog space with a Kusama infinity print or a Richter abstraction, it enters the same art-historical conversation and draws the same cross-category bidder attention. Price discovery becomes easier, because estimates and final hammer prices for digital works can now be compared directly with analogous media. Institutional memory strengthens too: future scholars will chart the ascent of on-chain practice without rummaging through segregated sale archives.

This shift dovetails with broader changes across the ecosystem. Sotheby’s trimmed its Metaverse team yet continues to stage NFT auctions; independent venues such as Bright Moments, Feral File, and Verse flourish with fully on-chain drops; and museums from MoMA to LACMA have begun acquiring key digital editions. Robert Alice, whose Portraits of a Mind inaugurated Christie’s blockchain sales, calls the auction house “pioneering,” yet also notes that Web3 now builds its own institutions—DAOs, decentralized galleries, token-gated fairs—that operate quite happily without legacy gatekeepers.

For collectors, the practical takeaway is straightforward. Reassess holdings with an eye to cultural weight rather than floor-price theatrics; follow integrated sales for richer comparables; and continue minting directly from artists whose practices push code, AI, and interactivity in new directions. The hardware for display—whether Infinite Objects, Lago frames, or metaverse galleries—will only improve as mainstream acceptance grows.

Christie’s reshuffle, then, is not a funeral for NFTs but a graduation ceremony. Digital art has moved from the experimental annex into the main showroom, where it will be judged by the same critical standards—and rewarded with the same staying power—as every other contemporary medium. For those collecting beyond the hype cycle, that is very good news indeed..

What’s your take on Christie’s shuttering its dedicated digital-art department?

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We would love to hear from you as we continue to build out new features for Lazy! Love the site? Have an idea on how we can improve it? Drop us a line at info@lazy.com