My goal of tracking down and interviewing the mysterious NFT collector Beauty and the Punk—also known as “B”—begins, appropriately, with a negotiation. B declines to connect via phone, instead suggesting the alternative telenetworking app Discord, home base for the crypto and NFT community. A compromise is reached, and in the end we conduct the interview via the more mainstream video messaging app Zoom.
Displaying only her Twitter avatar on the video feed, B refuses to divulge her real name, her age, or where she’s from. But she reveals that she is a woman in her 30s who was born in “a developing country” but has lived in Europe “for years now,” and says she has a career “as a consultant.” Her tone is friendly and gregarious, and she speaks in a British-tinged international accent that’s hard to place.
As a woman in the almost exclusively male crypto community, B admits that she’s something of a unicorn. Her bona fides equal or exceed her peers’: she holds the coveted Ape OG status, signaling that she claimed several uber-rare CryptoPunk Apes upon their initial release in 2017. There are just 24 Apes among the 10,000 total CryptoPunks, making them one of the most sought-after and prestigious collectibles in the crypto-art community. Today, the owners of these super-scarce primates are revered as pioneering visionaries who understood and invested in NFTs long before they went mainstream.
Continue reading: https://news.artnet.com/market/interview-with-nft-collector-and-entrepreneur-b-2049418
Displaying only her Twitter avatar on the video feed, B refuses to divulge her real name, her age, or where she’s from. But she reveals that she is a woman in her 30s who was born in “a developing country” but has lived in Europe “for years now,” and says she has a career “as a consultant.” Her tone is friendly and gregarious, and she speaks in a British-tinged international accent that’s hard to place.
As a woman in the almost exclusively male crypto community, B admits that she’s something of a unicorn. Her bona fides equal or exceed her peers’: she holds the coveted Ape OG status, signaling that she claimed several uber-rare CryptoPunk Apes upon their initial release in 2017. There are just 24 Apes among the 10,000 total CryptoPunks, making them one of the most sought-after and prestigious collectibles in the crypto-art community. Today, the owners of these super-scarce primates are revered as pioneering visionaries who understood and invested in NFTs long before they went mainstream.
Continue reading: https://news.artnet.com/market/interview-with-nft-collector-and-entrepreneur-b-2049418
