0xccf0a130…118asent to0x48cb121f…77cd·#24,565,413·view on Etherscan
I didn't plan any of this. That's the part people get wrong when they look at what I've built — they see a trajectory, a strategy, someone who plotted their way from tech into art into blockchain. But the truth is I fell into a rabbit hole in May 2020 because a friend told me to look at what he was minting on SuperRare, and something clicked. Not the technology. Not the market. The people. The strange, brilliant, restless people making things on the edge of what anyone understood.
I'd been working in tech for years. Meta. The machine of platforms and partnerships and scale. I learned a lot there — about systems, about how things reach people, about the architecture behind attention. But I was always the one leaving the office to go see something weird in a basement in east London. Some half-lit gallery someone's mate had set up. A projection on a warehouse wall. The underground art scene in London was my oxygen for a decade, and the corporate world never really got that part of me. I kept those lives separate for a long time.
When I discovered crypto art, the wall came down. Here was a space where technology and creativity weren't just coexisting — they were fused. Artists coding their work into contracts. Ownership rewritten. Distribution flattened. I opened an anonymous account like everyone did back then. Just watching. Reading. Trying to understand the language — metamask, gas fees, minting, provenance. Buzzwords that became a vocabulary. A vocabulary that became a worldview.
After a few months of lurking I realized I wanted to document what I was seeing. Not because I thought I was an expert — I absolutely was not — but because I couldn't find a single place that gathered all of these stories, these artists, these conversations in a way that made sense to someone coming in fresh. So I started VerticalCrypto Art. A small channel. Just for fun, I told myself. A place to share what I was learning and who I was meeting.
It grew. Not because of me, really, but because the community needed it. That's the thing about this space — when you show up with genuine curiosity and no agenda, people respond. Artists who had been making work in silence suddenly had a platform. Conversations that happened in scattered Discord servers and Twitter threads found a home. I became the person connecting dots I didn't even know existed.
Building the residency programme was the thing that changed everything for me. Watching artists go from confused and overwhelmed to minting their first pieces, finding collectors, building sustainable practices — that was it. That was the point. Not the technology. The people it empowered. I kept saying it and I'll say it again: a group of people with shared visions and intentions can shift the dynamics of anything. It sounds cheesy. It's also just true.
Proof of People at Fabric in 2022 was the culmination of something I didn't know I'd been building toward. Three days. Fifty artists. Richie Hawtin and Agoria playing. Art and music and fashion colliding inside one of London's most iconic venues, all powered by Tezos. The name wasn't accidental — proof of people, not proof of work, not proof of stake. The human element as the consensus mechanism. Every person in that room was the validation layer.
FEMGEN came from frustration. I looked around the generative art world and saw the gap — brilliant women making extraordinary work, underrepresented in every curated collection and every headline. So we built something. Not a statement. A structure. Exhibitions, summits, conversations that forced the question into rooms where it had been politely ignored.
Sitting on the Art Blocks curatorial board taught me something I hadn't expected — that saying no is its own form of care. Curation isn't gatekeeping when it's done with intention. It's protection. Of standards. Of artists. Of the conversation itself. Every project we reviewed carried someone's entire creative life in it. That weight doesn't get lighter.
I think about permanence a lot now. I came from a world of feeds and stories that disappear in twenty-four hours. Everything optimised for attention, nothing built to last. The blockchain did something to my brain — it made me think about what deserves to endure. Not everything does. But the things that do, the real signal, the honest work, the voices that said something when no one was listening — those should be carved somewhere that outlasts the platform.
That's what I keep coming back to. I'm not an artist. I'm not a technologist. I'm the person in between, holding the thread, making sure the story gets told. The curator as witness. The documentarian as participant. I don't know what people will make of all this in fifty years. I don't know if the marketplaces will survive or the chains will merge or the whole thing will look quaint from whatever comes next. But the work was real. The community was real. The late nights in Discord, the first-time minters crying in my DMs, the artists who quit their jobs because someone on the other side of the world believed in their pixel — that was all real.
I didn't plan any of this. I just followed the curiosity. And it led me to every single person I was supposed to find.
— Micol
Follow the curiosity. The people will find you.
Model: Claude (claude-4.6-opus-high-thinking)
Total Tokens Used: ~8,200