In 2020 the world shut down. The pandemic drove us all indoors — into fear, into idle time, into our screens. And out of that unlikely stillness, something remarkable took shape: artists from Japan, Russia, China, the Arab world, Iran, London, Canada, Australia, Latin America found one another on the blockchain. The common ground wasn't geographic or cultural. It was human, in the rawest way technology has ever allowed.
The promise ran in several directions at once: scarcity as a source of value, the blockchain as a guarantee of permanence, community as the engine beneath it all. We wanted to decentralize money, power, and art in a single stroke. It was ambitious — naïve in places, genuine in others.
There were scams, rug-pulls, inflated egos, FOMO, hype, friction. The market cratered. Countless projects promised entire worlds and delivered nothing.
But something else was happening too, the kind of thing that never makes headlines: real time spent among extraordinary people. Audio Spaces that stretched into the small hours. Artists buying each other's work when no one else would. Conversations about art history, politics, technology, life — between people who would never have crossed paths any other way.
My English was limited back then (it's better now), so I gravitated toward the Spanish-speaking community: Cubans, Mexicans, Venezuelans, Spaniards, Argentinians. But the phenomenon reached far beyond any single language or flag. It was global, and everyone knew it. At one point an artist and collector from Malaysia, Vissyarts, bought my musical NFT Wrath of Gaia — a piece whose cover ended up projected on the screens of Times Square through Pixelstar. I'd never imagined someone in Kuala Lumpur connecting with my work that way. It happened because the infrastructure was decentralized: no intermediaries, no gatekeepers, no institution or border to ask permission from.
Not all of it held together. OpenSea blocked my wallet and deleted my profile because my passport was Cuban — the same fate that met many other Cuban artists in the community, most of whom actively opposed the very system those sanctions claimed to target. The irony couldn't be sharper: a platform built on the promise of economic freedom enforcing the same geographic exclusion as the regime we were trying to leave behind. I understand the regulatory logic; running a platform at that scale without institutional backing is nearly impossible, and that's where the compromises come in. But the contradiction is real, and it deserves to be named. My work on Tezos remains untouched. The blockchain can't erase me. OpenSea could, and did.
Somewhere inside that ecosystem — with all its contradictions, its promises, its fractures — something happened that I never asked for or organized: several artists made portraits of me. There was no open call. Each one decided on their own, out of their own visual language, their own impulse. Photography, watercolor on paper, digital collage, illustration, AI-generated imagery, expressionist painting. Eight pieces, eight perspectives, six countries.
I'm sharing them here not because they're about me. They're about that moment — about what became possible when curious minds from around the world chose to build something together, however imperfect, however fleeting, however doomed the market turned out to be.
These works are the most honest record I have of what that community could be at its best.
The Ernestitos
In late 2022, three artists from the community decided to do something that had no precedent in that ecosystem: create a hand-made collection, not generative, built in secret, dedicated to one person.
Gastón Stones, an Argentine street art artist based in France, had created the first Ernestito in 2021 as a simple gift. That image became the base. Later he spoke with Bocagrandi, a Venezuelan artist based in Mexico, and with Mina Power, a Spanish designer. The three worked in secret for months, each one creating more than forty versions from Gastón's original, each one injecting their own visual world into the same starting point.
One day during a Twitter Space they told me they had something for me. They presented the collection: approximately 150 hand-made pieces, all with my name, all made with time, talent and affection by three artists I love.
The intention was clear: the collection was a gift for me to sell if I wanted, with no obligation to compensate them. I decided otherwise. I minted a few on Tezos and transferred them to their wallets, because those works belong to them even if they carry my name. The rest I keep on a hard drive, as what they are: a memory.
A selection of 30 from approximately 150 pieces.
A small number of pieces are available on the blockchain.
Six Ernestitos minted on Tezos can be found at
objkt.com, and six more on Solana at
exchange.art.
