This week’s featured collector is Cryptonicky
Cryptonicky has an unusual collection of NFTs. Worth a browse at lazy.com/cryptonicky
Last week’s poll on the Big3 NFT lawsuit produced a clean 50/50 split between two lessons: half our readers took away that art NFTs are safer than equity-style ones, and the other half concluded that governance rarely means real control. Nobody voted for the other three options. That’s a revealing result, because both winning answers point at the same underlying truth from different directions — the gap between what an NFT technically records and what it can actually enforce. The half who picked “art NFTs are safer” landed on the distinction we drew in the piece: an art NFT delivers the artwork itself on-chain regardless of the issuer’s behavior, while an ownership stake tied to a business depends entirely on that business honoring an off-chain promise. The half who picked “governance rarely means control” zeroed in on the specific failure mode — Big3 fire holders had voting rights on paper and still couldn’t stop the teams from being sold and rebranded out from under them. It’s telling that our readers gravitated toward these structural lessons rather than the more personal “buy for love, not upside,” even though that sentiment has won polls before. Faced with an actual legal case, the audience got analytical rather than sentimental. The message is consistent with where this newsletter keeps arriving: on-chain permanence is real, but off-chain promises are only as good as the party making them — and the safest NFTs are the ones where the thing you own is the thing on the chain.
The Sandbox Co-Founder Built a Physical Gallery and a Sharper Way to Think About Digital Art
We spend a lot of time in this newsletter on the tension between digital art’s speculative past and its more durable future. A new Observer interview with Sébastien Borget offers a useful vantage point on that shift, precisely because he comes at it from an unusual angle — not from the traditional art world, but from gaming and Web3 infrastructure. Elisa Carollo’s conversation with him is worth reading, and here’s what stood out.
Who he is. Borget co-founded The Sandbox, one of the emblematic Web3 gaming companies of the boom — a decentralized metaverse where users create, own, and monetize experiences using NFTs and the SAND token. The company was valued at $1 billion in June 2024. He’s now president of the Blockchain Game Alliance, a group of more than 90 companies. In other words, he understands digital ownership and creator economies from the infrastructure side, which gives his views on art a different foundation than most collectors or curators.
How he got to art. Borget’s path is telling. While building The Sandbox, he didn’t want to neglect culture, so he began collecting digital art and NFTs to display inside the virtual world. But crucially, he didn’t want to just replicate the white-walled museum model in a virtual space. His instinct was that a virtual world should do better than reproduce the physical one — art should function more like it does in the street, accessible and inspiring, rather than sequestered somewhere inaccessible. That logic eventually moved from the virtual world into physical space: first his offices, then, when they ran out of room, a gallery.
The gallery, and a course correction. Four years ago Borget opened ArtVerse in Paris with his Sandbox co-founder Arthur Madrid, to support artists working at the intersection of art and tech who weren’t getting much exposure. But the more interesting detail is what came before it. Borget had earlier helped found NFT Factory, a space in front of the Centre Pompidou. He’s candid that it didn’t align with his vision — it became too focused on showing blockchain art and selling NFTs rather than supporting artists through sustained programming, and it stayed too tied to the NFT bubble. ArtVerse is his correction: a space for a broader, more nuanced conversation around art, technology, and artists’ practices, less about the transaction and more about the work.
The core idea collectors should sit with: it’s not about the medium. This is the through-line, and it echoes something we keep landing on. For Borget, the question is no longer whether a work is “digital art” in the narrow sense. As he puts it, the art can take any form — painting, sculpture, tapestry, video, sometimes blockchain — and what matters is the depth of the concept. The artists he collects and shows are, in his words, solid in their conceptual framework, so whether or how they use technology isn’t about surfing a hype market. Good digital art, to him, is made by artists who think rigorously through science and technology to explore new cultural forms — whether the result ends up on a screen or not.
If that sounds familiar, it should. It’s the same conclusion 0xDEAFBEEF reached from the artist’s side (”there isn’t a single canon”) and the same argument Paglen and Scheinman made curatorially at Art Basel (”all art is digital art at this point”). Three very different figures — an artist-engineer, two curators, and now a gaming entrepreneur — converging on the idea that the digital/non-digital distinction is dissolving and that concept, not medium, is what matters.
A generational read worth noting. Borget makes a point we find persuasive: collectors and audiences born in the 1980s and 90s carry a different cultural DNA. Video games, anime, manga, and film were formative, so it’s natural that the art they collect engages gaming, science, and technology more directly than previous generations did. As he says, technology has been integrated into the culture for 40 years — “we grew up with it” — so there isn’t the same reflexive resistance to it as a medium. He’s honest that France in particular has been slower to accept these forms, precisely because of its deep art-historical heritage, which makes education and in-person exhibition all the more important.
The bridge to gaming. One angle Borget brings that few art-world figures do: he takes gaming seriously as a creative industry and sees a real bridge forming between video-game world-building and contemporary art. More and more artists, he notes, are using game tools and techniques as a medium — making interactive works with genuine depth that provoke thought about the world or human nature, often commissioned by museums. It’s a reminder that the creative labor behind games (character design, landscapes, world-building) has cultural weight the art world has only started to recognize.
Why this matters. What makes Borget’s perspective valuable for collectors is that he understands the infrastructure most of the art world doesn’t — digital ownership, creator economies, alternative value chains, and sustainability models that digital artists have already built. He argues, credibly, that these could prove increasingly useful for the broader art world. And his posture is a deliberate counter to the hype cycle we keep critiquing: he’s clear that art doesn’t have to be controversial or generate hype to be valued. His goal, in his words, is to give artists a voice and a place without manufacturing provocation each time — to let people “feel the progression.”
That’s a quieter, more patient vision than the boom ever allowed, and it’s of a piece with everything we’ve been tracking. The speculation receded; what’s left is people building durable infrastructure and durable context around work that’s judged on its ideas. Borget is doing it from the gaming side, with a physical gallery in Paris and a refusal to soften the ambition. It’s another data point in the same direction: the medium was never the story. The concept was.
This post is based on Elisa Carollo’s interview with Sébastien Borget for Observer: https://observer.com/2026/07/interview-collector-sebastien-borget-artverse-paris-the-sandbox-digital-art/
Poll: What matters most when you collect digital art?
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