1. Context: Entering Web3 During Global Collapse
In 2020, at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was unemployed, isolated at home, and facing the psychological pressure that many artists felt during that period.
Through a small network of Cuban creators, I learned that a new global art movement was emerging online, one where blockchain technology became a tool for preserving digital artworks and connecting communities across borders.
This discovery shifted my perspective from survival to innovation.
2. The Conceptual Foundation: Blockchain as Infrastructure for Art
Although I had followed cryptocurrencies for years, NFTs presented a different paradigm: the use of decentralized ledgers to establish provenance, uniqueness, and value for digital art.
Key realizations during this phase:
- Blockchain allows artists to retain ownership of their work.
- Smart contracts enable sovereign distribution independent of platforms.
- Global collectors can support creators without intermediaries.
- Communities form organically across languages, cultures, and time zones.
This wasn't financial speculation; it was a new cultural infrastructure.
3. The Clubhouse Era: Knowledge Transfer at Scale
In 2020–2021, Clubhouse functioned as the core intellectual hub of the NFT ecosystem. It enabled:
- Real-time exchange of creative methodologies
- Open discussions on smart contracts and marketplaces
- Cross-disciplinary learning between musicians, coders, visual artists, and collectors
- Communal problem-solving during market outages and platform transitions
The humility and generosity within those rooms established the cultural ethos that defined the early NFT movement.
4. Early Minting: The Tezos and Ethereum Ecosystems
My first NFTs were minted on Kalamint, an early Tezos marketplace that no longer exists. These original works survived the platform's disappearance and now live on objkt.com, successors to the historic Hic et Nunc protocol, and artist-controlled smart contracts in Tezos FA2 standard.
Later, I expanded into OpenSea (Ethereum), Foundation (during its invitation-only period), community-curated drops and independent smart contract deployments.
Each ecosystem required learning new standards, metadata formats, fee structures, and collector behaviors.
5. Community Dynamics: Latin American Cohesion in a Global Space
Although English dominated the NFT landscape, a significant number of creators were Latin American. This common ground produced:
- Multilingual collaboration
- Culturally specific discussions about scarcity, identity, and censorship
- Strong long-term support networks that extended into real life
- A sense of shared resilience rooted in our own histories with economic instability and migration
These bonds became fundamental to my long-term engagement in Web3.
6. Technological Integration: AI, Markets, and Smart Contracts
Parallel to blockchain, the rise of AI image models and large language systems became part of our daily tools. Inside the community, we tracked new generative models, metadata standards, IPFS vs. on-chain storage, contract templates, oracle dependencies, Ethereum gas cycles, Tezos governance upgrades, and the social dynamics of the Twitter → X migration.
Market exposure also brought direct conversation with global traders, leading to a deeper understanding of liquidity cycles, collector psychology, narrative-driven valuation, and long-term provenance strategies.
Learning smart contracts became essential, not only to mint, but to survive platform volatility. I adopted practices such as deploying independent contracts, separating metadata hosting layers, maintaining fallback archives, and avoiding single-point-of-failure marketplaces.
7. Artistic Integration: A New Home for Multidisciplinary Work
After decades in music, the NFT ecosystem allowed me to merge sound, digital art, video, literature, memory, code, and community.
For the first time, all disciplines converged naturally. Web3 became a laboratory, not just a marketplace. It offered autonomy, collaboration, and a sense of purpose during one of the most difficult years for artists worldwide.
8. Today: A Continuously Evolving Ecosystem
Today my NFT work exists across multiple chains and formats, always grounded in technological sovereignty, conceptual clarity, multidisciplinary creation, cross-community connection, and long-term preservation of digital work.
The blockchain remains one of the most meaningful creative spaces I have entered: a place where art, technology, and society meet with unprecedented possibility.