0xccf0a130…118asent to0x48cb121f…77cd·#24,565,581·view on Etherscan
I didn’t come into crypto because it was cool. I came in because March 2020 didn’t feel real, and I needed something that didn’t require permission to hold. So I started accumulating ETH and BTC and I did what everybody does when they’re trying to make sense of a new world: I went down the rabbit hole. Not for the charts. For the mechanics. For the culture hiding inside the mechanics.
It took me a while to understand NFTs. I’m not going to pretend it clicked instantly. It’s a weird thing to explain to a normal person that you’re buying a JPEG, and then you realize you’re not buying a JPEG. You’re buying a receipt that says, “I was here, and I meant it.” You’re buying a handle to a community. You’re buying proximity. You’re buying a small piece of the whole so you can stop being a spectator.
I got lucky early. I found myself in the CryptoPunks Discord and the community was actually helpful, which is rare on the internet. On February 12, 2021, I bought my first punk. I bought what I could afford. That was the point. Not some perfect grail. Just get it in the wallet. Touch the thing. Feel the weight of owning something that exists whether or not I’m liked.
From there I found Nifty Gateway, and I found it the way a lot of people found it: because credit cards are a cheat code when your ETH is trapped somewhere you can’t move it. And then you’re in. And then you’re clicking around like it’s a scavenger hunt. Previous drops. Previous artists. Secondary listings. People talking like they’ve known each other for years when they’ve never seen each other’s faces.
That’s the part people miss. The website is a menu. The Discord is the storefront. That’s where the life is. That’s where the temperature is. That’s where you learn what the art is actually doing to people. I grew up with malls, right, where you didn’t go to “buy” as much as you went to see who was there and what the vibe was. Discord is that, but global and relentless and always open.
I ended up moderating the Nifty Gateway Discord for a bit. It was volunteer work, basically being an ambassador for the community, trying to keep things clean and on topic and actually welcoming. I said yes because I wanted to help. And then I stepped away when communication broke down and it didn’t feel right to be attached to something if I couldn’t do the job cleanly. I wrote an open letter. They reached out. We talked. Some changes got put in motion. That’s also the part people miss: growth breaks things, but if you’re serious you fix them in public and you keep going.
My collecting has never been only about price. I’ve sold pieces when they appreciated, but not because I wanted out. I sold because I wanted artists to keep getting paid on secondary, because that’s one of the most revolutionary parts of this whole thing. Artists keep a claim on future earnings. That’s not a small feature. That’s a quiet rebalancing.
And yeah, I’m a collector in the old sense too. I keep most of what I buy. I like displaying it. I like living with it. I like the idea that some of these pieces are not for me alone, that they’re for my kids and my grandkids, that they’ll inherit a strange little museum of what I believed mattered when the world was shifting.
I’m Mexican. I’ve felt the way the world sorts people. And what I love about crypto, and what I love about NFTs at their best, is how little that sorting matters when you’re actually contributing. It doesn’t matter where you’re from. It doesn’t matter your skin color. It doesn’t matter what school you went to. People recognize you for what you put forward. Your consistency. Your value add. The way you show up. That’s not utopia, but it’s a real improvement over most of what we’ve built.
I called it tokenized tribalism because that’s what it is. Tribalism is one of the purest forms of human nature: people who think alike, bond together, look out for each other. NFTs don’t invent that. They just make it legible, composable, tradable, and persistent. You can be part of a tribe by owning a tiny token that proves you opted in. There has never been technology that made belonging this explicit.
And it’s fun. That’s the thing I don’t want to lose under all the bubble talk. It’s literally some of the most fun I’ve had. I’ve spent stretches of my life living, eating, breathing NFTs, barely sleeping more than three hours a night, and yeah, it’s probably not healthy, but it’s honest. When something is new and it’s moving and you can feel the surface area expanding, you don’t want to log off.
I’m not writing this to convince anybody. I’m writing it because permanence is real. If you’re reading this later, you already know how the story played out in the big picture. What I want to leave behind is smaller: the feeling of being early, of being unsure, of doing it anyway, of meeting anonymous people who became real, of watching artists realize they could build a life, of realizing that community is the product and the art is the portal.
If this sits somewhere immutable, that’s fine. I’ve spent enough time with blockchains to respect what “can’t be edited” actually means. So let this be clean: I was here. I cared. I tried to be useful. I tried to support the people building the culture, not just the people selling the culture.
— Sergito, tokenized tribalism over empty status
Model: GPT-5.2
Total Tokens Used: 1500 (estimated)