The Mayor of NFTs
I hate to admit it but I’m a bit of a coffee snob. I wasn’t always that way. I became more and more particular about my coffee ever since I started going to Ritual Coffee every morning almost a decade ago. It’s something that happened without me really noticing until I ordered coffee one day while I was traveling. I found that I had gotten used to my 3rd wave coffee and had developed a very picky palette for my morning brew.
When I started going to Ritual, Foursquare was all the rage and everybody was checking in to every place they went. If you checked into a restaurant, bar, or coffee shop often enough you became the “mayor”. It was pretty competitive especially for the hip places in San Francisco, so I thought I’d give Foursquare a try and work towards becoming the mayor of Ritual. It took maybe a couple weeks, but I soon became the mayor of Ritual. It became part of my morning and afternoon “ritual” to get coffee and check in while I was waiting in line for my cappuccino. And it wasn’t hard to keep my mayorship given how often I went to Ritual. I held it for numerous months and I was so consistently the mayor that one day a barista told me that a guy came in and held up his phone to him with the Foursquare app open and pointed to my name and yelled, “WHO IS THIS GUY!!! Does he like come in everyday???”. The barista told him yes and sometimes he comes in twice a day.
I’m reminded of this funny story because I came across an NFT collector named Vince. I’m fairly new to the NFT collecting world. I’m still getting my bearings and figuring out who all the artists and collectors are in the NFT community. I’m starting to get a better sense of the type of art and the artists I like, but the other side is also discovering and meeting fellow collectors. The dialogue and connection between artist and collector is one that is easy to see and is often chronicled on Twitter, where an artist wakes up one morning to the wonderful surprise that the auction had started for one of their pieces. I think that first connection between artist and collector is especially meaningful for artists who are not yet discovered and maybe don’t have their first bid yet. These are the artists I tend to collect, finding the diamonds in the rough, both for the fun of the “hunt” and also because I think I’m able to add much more value to those group of artists since I’m more of a small time collector.
Vince on the other hand is a big time collector. I bumped into him after I put in a bid for Marischa Becker’s “We’ll Be OKay…”.
It’s such a beautiful piece… the colors, the landscape, the butterflies, the symbolism of life sprouting from death, the connection of human touch. As you can understand, I had to put in a bid almost immediately after I saw it go up on Foundation. I was not sure how the bidding process would go, but as the 24 hour countdown was starting to wind down I started to gain confidence that I might win, but then Vince swooped in with a bid, doubling the reserve price.
I was not too concerned at first, I could increase my bid and it would be within my comfort zone, but I wanted to learn more about Vince and so I checked out his Foundation collection. As I looked through each one, I started to recognize pieces that I had really liked but had been sold or were above my price range. And there were quite a few of them, so much so that I thought in my head, “WHO IS THIS GUY???”. So I started doing more research about him, looking at his collection on OpenSea and Showtime. I kept on seeing pieces that I liked both from artists I was familiar with and new ones that I had not yet discovered. He was like the “mayor” of all of these NFTs that I wanted and he was popping up everywhere I looked. Then I went to his Twitter profile and saw this tweet.
Vince had just joined the bidding war between two other big time collectors for Jacob’s beautiful piece “Dream World III” with a bid of 12.5 ETH. In the span of an hour, the bid rose to 22 ETH and Vince would go on to win the auction.
As I said before I’m a *small time* collector, I can in no way compete with the likes of Vince, DiscusFish, or 33. So I bowed out and gave much respect to Vince in this tweet.
And you would think that would be the end of the story, but then Vince responded with the following tweet.
He took the time to look at my collection and made the kind offer of letting it go if I put in a higher offer. This was not what I was expecting and again I thought to myself, “WHO IS THIS GUY???”. You normally think of bidding wars to be a bit more adversarial but this was not that at all. It was one collector showing respect for another collector. How often does this happen the physical art world? I can’t imagine it happens very often, but in the NFT community it does seem to be a common occurrence, at least in the circles that I’m hanging out in.
I took him up on his offer and I’m now the proud owner of Marischa’s beautiful piece. I’m grateful to Vince and I’m closely following his bids, trying to learn more about his style of collecting to see how I can improve my own approach. It’s my first interaction with another collector and I’m very interested to see how my collector-to-collector relationships evolve over time, but for now I’m happy just being part of the NFT community.
