Chain Reading Recommendation: From Tiles to Generative NFTs

Erick Calderon, aka "Snowfro", shot to fame a year ago as the creator of NFT generative art platform Art Blocks.But his crypto journey has been a circuitous one.

Calderon first heard about Bitcoin in 2013 from his brother after nearly a decade at the tile company he founded with his father.Drive," Calderon said on the latest episode of Decrypt's gm podcast. "And I thought, 'It sounds really cool to know this a year ago.'"

Fast forward a few years and Calderon read an article about Bitcoin that resonated - at a pivotal moment: "I felt like the world was burning for a long time and I started to distrust more and more," Calderon saidSay.With a "crazy desire" to own a full bitcoin by the end of 2016, he achieved his goal "right at midnight" on New Year's Eve — after having "a few glasses of wine."

But "my brain literally exploded," when he discovered Ethereum and its smart contracts.

Calderon experimented with smart contracts, creating a time-locked gift of ethereum for a friend's child that would only be opened when she was 18.A house,'" he said.

After the launch of the NFT series CryptoPunks in 2017, "everything went well".Since then, Calderon said, "I've spent more time in the NFT space than anyone."

Architectural Art Building Blocks

This led him to create Art Blocks, a generative art platform.NFT artwork made on the platform, including the Fidenza collection and the iconic Chromie Squiggle, has sold millions of dollars, and it's an explosive growth path that, even if it's exciting, "feels unreasonable."

“Art Blocks was a hobby and I didn’t expect it to become what it is today,” he said."I'm not a financially driven person in my life."

Calderon told Decrypt that he believes the current valuation of NFT technology relative to the underlying art is skewed.

“I think 60% to 70% of the value of NFTs was probably attributed and allocated to the NFT technology during the crazy period last year, and maybe 30% was the value of the content,” he said."For me, it shouldn't be more than 5%."

He also believes that we may soon stop using the term "NFT" entirely.“A few weeks ago, I was in Basel, Switzerland, for a week, and I was very careful not to use the term NFT — 'blockchain-powered art,' or just 'art,' in most cases,” he said.Say.

Generate Community

More exciting for Calderon is the technology used to create generative artwork.“The product-market fit of generative art is just too beautiful,” he said."An artist can make a thousand, ten thousand -- a million a day -- independent, unique, personal works of art in one motion without manual manipulation."

He said generative art "made it possible" in a situation where a single artist could not create tens of thousands of individual paintings in a lifetime, allowing the artist to define a set of rules for making art.

This, in turn, allows communities to form around art, he said."When an artist is a budding artist, it completely democratizes access to art, since acquiring art from that artist is usually not very expensive."

In the future, he predicts, generative manufacturing will become commonplace."Your coffee table won't be the same as your neighbor's, even if you bought it from the same place."

As for the future of NFTs, Calderon expects them to expand beyond art.“NFT art or cryptocurrency art, blockchain art, is the least frictional use case for the concept of non-fungible tokens,” he said.“It’s the easiest thing for the world to have their brains wrapping around and understanding.” Ultimately, he said, “your mortgage will be on the blockchain, and your homeownership will be on the blockchain.”

And - to make a mess of it - Calderon's Tile Company will be there to provide it."I did that for the first 18 years of my career," he said."And I'm actually still in the field now, although unfortunately I can put zero time into this business. It's still running, it's still running, and it's still part of the process I got here."