This week’s featured collector is MightyMoe
MightyMoe has a wild collection of pixel art and anime. Check it out at lazy.com/mightymoe
Last week’s poll was surprisingly split: 60% of you felt that books like Robert Alice’s On NFTs help legitimize collecting NFTs, while a substantial 40% weren’t convinced. That tension—between wanting scholarly validation and resisting the need for it at all—pretty much mirrors where the space is right now: half leaning into museums, books, and market reports, half preferring crypto’s more renegade, self-authenticating culture. It’s the same fault line running through Art Basel’s digital conversations this year: are NFTs becoming part of art history’s official record, or are they rewriting the rules from the outside?
Two Art Basel Conversations NFT Collectors Shouldn’t Ignore
Those of us who continue to collect NFTs have probably felt the shift: the conversation is no longer just about floor prices and flipping, but about context—how digital images are made, circulated, and eventually canonized. At Art Basel Miami Beach 2025, two conversations cut through the noise and speak directly to that deeper layer. Both take place next week and will be livestreamed, and together they sketch a useful map of where digital and blockchain-native art might be heading.
The first up is the Beeple conversation on Thursday, December 4, 2025, from 4–5 pm. On stage: Beeple, art advisor and curator Amanda Schmitt, Larva Labs cofounder Matt Hall, and moderator Natalie Stone, founder of StoneWork. The premise is straightforward but timely: from crypto memes to pixel punks, digital imagery has become both an art form and an asset class, and the logic of humor, virality, and speculation is now baked into how attention—and therefore value—is produced.
Beeple’s presence guarantees this won’t be an abstract panel. He’ll be creating a new “Everyday” live on stage, effectively exposing the process that underpins his now-famous daily images and headline-making NFT sales. Beyond the auction numbers, his practice blends satire, tech anxiety, and surreal world-building at a scale few digital artists have matched. For collectors, seeing how an “Everyday” comes into being in real time offers a glimpse into the workflows and instincts behind a body of work that helped push NFTs from niche experiment into mainstream awareness and institutional conversation.
Matt Hall brings a complementary, more infrastructural perspective. As cofounder of Larva Labs, he helped create CryptoPunks, Autoglyphs, and Meebits—projects that have become reference points in the history of blockchain-based art. CryptoPunks in particular evolved from a small experiment into a proto-PFP canon, absorbed into the collections of institutions like the Centre Pompidou, the Whitney, LACMA, ICA Miami, and ZKM Karlsruhe. Hearing Hall talk about how these projects were conceived, maintained, and ultimately embraced by museums is especially relevant if you’re thinking about which early onchain works might be read as “historical” ten years from now.
Schmitt and Stone supply the bridge between artists, collectors, and institutions. Schmitt’s advisory practice spans Modern, contemporary, and digital art, with a focus on access, institutional engagement, and strategic philanthropy, as well as cofounding CHAOS Agency for artists working at the art–tech intersection. Stone has worked on experimental programs in VR, AR, and AI at Google and previously stewarded one of the most influential digital art collections of the 21st century as general manager of CryptoPunks. Together they’re in a position to speak candidly about how memes and blockchain-native artworks are actually collected, evaluated, and integrated into broader collections, public and private. For NFT holders, this panel is essentially a one-hour snapshot of how the online economy of attention interfaces with advisory practices, institutional frameworks, and long-term collection strategy.
Two days later, on Saturday, December 6, 2025, also from 4–5 pm, a second conversation shifts the focus from memes and speculation to the visual grammar of the networked image itself. This panel brings together artists Maya Man, Kiya Tadele of Yatreda, and Jack Butcher, in conversation with Art Basel’s Head of Editorial, Dr. Jeni Fulton. Here the guiding question is how art is made for feeds, from formats, and through platforms—the actual conditions under which so much NFT-native imagery is produced and consumed.
Maya Man’s work operates inside browsers, timelines, and even wardrobes, but consistently returns to the question of how we perform identity under algorithmic scrutiny. Projects like the browser extension Glance Back and her Art Blocks series FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT focus on femininity, authenticity, and self-presentation in systems that reward certain types of behavior and aesthetics. For collectors, her practice offers a conceptual lens on the culture of PFPs, online self-branding, and the “optimized” persona that often sits behind digital collections and communities.
Yatreda, led by Kiya Tadele, approaches digital art from a different but equally relevant angle. Their work is rooted in the Ethiopian concept of tizita—a deep nostalgia and longing for the past—combining folk tales, collective memory, and national history with blockchain-native formats. The result is a body of digital work that uses networked images to preserve and reinterpret heritage rather than to chase the latest meme cycle. If you’re thinking about NFTs not just as financial instruments but as carriers of cultural memory, Yatreda’s practice is an important counterpoint to the more market-driven parts of the space.
Jack Butcher, founder of Visualize Value, completes the picture from a market- and systems-oriented standpoint. His minimalist diagrams of markets, scarcity, and consensus have become instantly recognizable across social platforms, and his projects collectively have generated more than USD 1 billion in sales volume on Ethereum since 2021. Butcher treats visual systems as a way to make the structure of the digital economy visible, distilling complex ideas into simple forms that can move quickly through feeds while still retaining conceptual weight. For collectors, his trajectory is a case study in how visual clarity, narrative, and distribution strategy can crystallize into durable network value.
Under Fulton’s moderation, the panel is set to explore how artists navigate and resist algorithms; how file types, compression, and glitches become aesthetic choices; how distribution channels like Instagram, TikTok, and NFT marketplaces act as mediums rather than mere pipelines; and what it means ethically and creatively to mine, mirror, and remix online culture. These are not purely academic questions. They bear directly on how digital artworks age, how legible they’ll be outside their original platforms, and where the line is drawn between homage, appropriation, and exploitation.
Neither panel will tell you what to buy next week, and none of this should be taken as investment advice. But if you’re serious about collecting digital and blockchain-based art, it’s worth paying attention to the places where artists, technologists, advisors, and institutions are aligning—or disagreeing—about what this field is becoming. In that sense, these two Art Basel conversations offer something the market alone can’t: a chance to watch the narrative of NFTs being written in real time, in public, by many of the people shaping it.
Learn more at Art Basel. Both events will be livestreamed.
Poll: What are you most excited about in the future of NFTs?
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