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?

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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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This week’s featured collector is LThole

LThole is a graphic designer and photographer who is showcasing a large collection of original, rustic photographs of objects from a farm shed. Take a look at lazy.com/lthole

Here’s how last week’s poll shook out. Asked “Which Luca Netz idea deserves a deeper look?”, two-thirds of respondents (67%) rallied behind “Build a single crypto interface,” making it the clear winner. “Long-term enterprise vision” captured the remaining third (33%), while the other options—“Licensing as core, no new mints,” “Marketing spend for brand growth,” and “Something else”—failed to draw any support. In short, the community is signaling a strong appetite for unifying crypto functionality under one roof, with strategic big-picture planning a distant but notable second priority.

NFT Collector’s Notes, Aug–Sep 2025

The NFT market is stirring. August closed with trading volume roughly nine percent higher than July even as the number of sales slipped about four percent, producing the strongest two-month stretch since February. Fewer tickets paired with bigger checks signal a market that is rediscovering price discrimination rather than replaying 2021 mania. For collectors who stayed active through the lull, it feels like the ecosystem is finally rewarding specificity: clear narratives, new venues, and differentiated incentives are starting to clear while generic drops languish.

One reason is that NFTs are seeping into real-world environments that make sense for art. Hï Ibiza, one of the most trafficked nightclubs in Europe, just opened a permanent gallery built with The Night League and W1 Curates, showcasing Beeple, Mad Dog Jones, and other blue-chip names on immersive displays. It is not a Times-Square billboard stunt; it is context that helps casual patrons experience digital art the way they already experience lighting and sound design. Meanwhile Coinbase’s layer-two network, Base, has vaulted to the number-three chain by NFT volume thanks to sub-penny fees and relentless airdrop speculation. The chain now hosts spiky micro-cycles where ideas can be tested quickly and ruthlessly—great for creators willing to iterate.

Ethereum still anchors roughly 61 percent of all NFT value, yet it is evolving. The proposed ERC-8004 standard, nicknamed “Trustless Agents,” treats every token as a unique identifier for autonomous on-chain agents, giving wallet bots, market makers, and consumer apps a shared language for reputation. Should even a minority adopt it, provenance graphs become richer and “agent-native” collectibles—pieces meant to be discovered, priced, and even held by machines—spring to life. Solana is pushing a different frontier. Recent stress tests north of 100 000 transactions per second keep its “big venue” thesis alive, especially for gaming and high-frequency trading. Phantom’s acquisition of sniping tool Solsniper suggests that on Solana the winning edge is migrating from taste to tooling, baked directly into the default wallet experience.

Marketplaces are also diverging instead of converging. Blur maintains around 22 percent share by rewarding liquidity providers and shipping new features at breakneck speed. OpenSea answered on a data axis, rolling out a beta Model Context Protocol server that streams real-time NFT and wallet data from more than twenty chains into AI applications—an infrastructure bet rather than a fee war. Rarible relaunched with fees funneled into token buybacks, aiming to create a durable link between platform revenue and holder value without leaning on short-half-life “points” emissions. In practice, collectors now choose among three distinct models: deep-liquidity games (Blur), cross-chain data pipes and AI hooks (OpenSea), or token economies tied to real business lines (Rarible).

The market is indeed heating up, but the meaningful shift is texture, not temperature: liquidity is clustering around concrete theses—real-world collateral, agent identity, chain speed—and around venues that offer truly differentiated incentives or data. Durable wins will go to collectors who can articulate why a given narrative needs this chain, this marketplace, and this mechanism—and who underwrite accordingly.

Read more at DappRadar and CoinTelegraph.

Are you feeling optimistic about the NFT market?

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This week’s featured collector is SpiritOfTheOcean

SpiritOfTheOcean collects PFPs. Take a look at lazy.com/spiritoftheocean

When physical galleries shutter, what’s the most realistic path forward for art collecting?

Last week’s poll results point to convergence more than disruption: 5 % of respondents envision a hybrid model where brick-and-mortar spaces pair their curatorial cachet with NFT rails for provenance and reach, while 25% still bet on a full gallery rebound, underscoring the enduring appeal of in-person viewing and social ritual. Purely digital optimism was muted—only 8% expect an NFT-only future—and an identical 8% chose “something else / not sure,” hinting that alternative models such as VR showrooms or community-owned spaces remain too nascent to command consensus. Together the votes suggest collectors anticipate NFTs becoming infrastructure rather than a wholesale replacement, with physical venues adapting to remain culturally—and economically—relevant.

From Frozen to Fire: How Luca Turned Pudgy Penguins into a $50 Million Brand

Luca Netz’ rise from buying a floundering JPEG project to steering a $50-million-a-year brand is the kind of founder story NFT collectors shouldn’t miss. On the latest DCo Podcast, the Pudgy Penguins chief executive explains how he rescued the collection in 2022 and then rewired it around three hard metrics—ecosystem strength, attention, and real-world revenue. In Luca’s view, tokenization’s true super-power is turning culture and influence—two assets that were previously intangible—into something people can actually own and trade. That thesis now underpins everything Pudgy does, from toys on Walmart shelves to arcade machines in Mumbai, all of which feed an 80 percent licensing business that grows without minting new NFTs or diluting holders.

The conversation makes it clear why people gravitate to the Pudgy community: Luca treats marketing as a moat. He is unapologetic about pouring cash into social reach—ten million followers and counting—because every impression translates into licensing deals, brand cachet, and eventually higher on-chain value. He also treats the PENGU token as a product in its own right. That means engineering deflation over time and reserving buy-backs for the moment growth levers are genuinely exhausted, not as a knee-jerk short-term pump. Collectors who tried to snipe the airdrop the night before, Luca reminds us, learned a lesson: align early or miss out.

Just as compelling is his critique of crypto’s broken user journey. Luca argues that mass adoption will come only when a single, centralized front-end hides the complexity of wallets, bridges, and DEXs. That’s exactly what Abstract Portal—his ZK-stack consumer “super-app”—is meant to do: one e-mail login, one smart wallet, one discovery feed where any new dApp can find product-market fit overnight.

Collectors wondering whether NFTs will ever roar back get a blunt answer: yes, but via power law. The next cycle won’t reward every cartoon animal; it will elevate the few collections with deep IP, mainstream touch-points, and serious revenue. Pudgy Penguins, Luca believes, can grow from today’s eight-figure run rate to a billion dollar enterprise if it continues stacking licenses, community clout, and cultural relevance. Whether you see that as bravado or vision, the full interview delivers rare candor on airdrops, tokenomics, and the playbook for turning memes into enduring brands. Set aside an hour—you’ll come away re-thinking what makes an NFT collection valuable and how far culture-as-an-asset can go.

Listen to the full interview here:

Decentralised.co

Ep 46 — Turning a Dead NFT Collection into a $50M Empire ft. Luca Netz

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2 days ago · 4 likes · Saurabh Deshpande

Or watch it on YouTube.

Which Luca Nets idea deserves a deeper look?

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This week’s featured collector is inbombs

Inbombs is an artist that creates unique NFTs based on “original artworks and paintings.” Take a look at lazy.com/inbombs

Beeple’s Nakamigos Prank: Satire or Market Manipulation?

Last week’s poll—split 50% “Satire,” 20% “Prank,” and 30% “Something else”—mirrors the fault lines exposed by Beeple’s Nakamigos stunt and the chaos that followed his AI-faked Larva Labs “endorsement.” The bare plurality who read it as satire seem to applaud Beeple’s lampoon of a market that routinely rewards rumor over rigor, seeing the 140 % intraday pump and 25 % lingering gains as proof that speculative reflexes deserved a public skewering. Yet nearly as many voters landed in the gray zone, hinting that this “prank heard ’round the blockchain” isn’t easily reduced to comedy or crime; it’s a case study in how narrative power and financial risk now collide at meme speed. The minority who called it manipulation echo critics for whom Beeple’s influence turned performance art into a high-stakes shell game with real wallets on the line. Collectively, the numbers signal a maturing community: most accept that market-moving theatrics are part of crypto culture, but they also want clearer ethical guardrails before the next viral drop tests the difference between clever commentary and costly deceit.

After the Galleries Close: Why NFTs Could Be the Art Market’s Next Lifeline

This summer’s spate of U.S. gallery closures—Tim Blum, Venus Over Manhattan, CLEARING, and the 35-year-old Kasmin’s hand-off to Olney Gleason—has thrust the art market into yet another season of soul-searching. Even the Art Dealers Association of America hit pause on its 2025 fair, citing what director Kinsey Robb calls “a period of extraordinary change in the art world at large.” Against a backdrop of rising overhead, cooling demand, and what collector Jeff Magid describes as a market that feels “closed off” to newcomers, dealer Adam Lindemann’s blunt assessment rings loud: “Every gallery in the world will eventually close. The only question is when.” Yet history shows that each contraction—1990, 2008, 2016—has seeded the next wave of innovation.

For NFT collectors, this moment isn’t a death knell for brick-and-mortar spaces; it’s an invitation to help rebuild the ecosystem in more resilient form. Traditional galleries struggle with rent, storage, and a relentless exhibition calendar, while blockchain marketplaces operate with a fraction of those fixed costs and a 24/7 global audience. The technology’s baked-in provenance tools answer a problem now front-of-mind for both collectors and insurers: how to verify ownership instantly, even when a gallery’s lights go dark.

Crucially, NFTs can widen the funnel at precisely the point where the conventional system is narrowing. Artsy’s 2025 survey found that only 17 percent of collectors feel the market meets their needs—a statistic that should trouble anyone who cares about generational renewal. By minting limited digital editions priced well below six-figure physical works, artists and galleries can cultivate the “emerging buyers” segment Robb says the field desperately needs, while still offering scarcity and status through on-chain proof of authenticity.

Skeptics will note that the NFT boom of 2021 crashed just as sharply, and they’re right to insist on more sustainable models. Fortunately, the space has matured: major platforms now use energy efficient chains and some marketplaces are supporting creator royalties. Pair that with token-gated physical shows—where an NFT serves as both certificate and VIP pass—and you have a hybrid model that lowers risk for dealers while restoring a sense of community for collectors.

As Nick Olney puts it, the goal is “finding an equilibrium between being incredibly active and making sure you’re doing everything for a reason.” NFT infrastructure can provide exactly that: a lean, transparent layer that lets galleries focus on curating and career-building rather than chasing ever-larger square footage. For collectors who already understand digital scarcity, supporting artists through well-executed NFT drops isn’t merely a hedge; it’s a way to participate in the market’s next chapter—one where creativity, not overhead, sets the pace.

Read a deep dive on the decline of galleries at Artsy.net.

When physical galleries shutter, what’s the most realistic path forward for art collecting?

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