When I say I make NFTs, I already know what's coming...
An uncomfortable silence. A “what?” look. A subtle change of subject.
I worked for years in agencies of different sizes. I helped train professionals more junior than me. I have a certain level of credibility in the “traditional creative world”. And I also make NFT collections on Solana; I built my own platform to launch and sell them. And I can now say part of my living comes from that.
Standing in both worlds gives me a point of view almost nobody has: the conversation we need to be having about NFTs isn't the one we're having.
Yes, there are real problems in the space. Scams. Generative slop. Pure speculation. I've watched colleagues lose money, collections that were scams in disguise, markets that collapsed.
But yesterday, in 2026, someone cloned a card of mine from a traditional bank here. A scam that happens to millions of people every day. And it occurs to nobody to tell me: “close the account, stop using cards, the whole system is a fraud.”
Writing off the entire digital art ecosystem because of its worst actors is like writing off all music because of one genre you think is “bad”. It isn't an honest argument.
What almost nobody in that “traditional creative world” hears, or wants to hear:
I'm a Dominican designer and artist. No gallery in New York or Paris. No fancy art school. No inherited network of collectors. For years, traditional art told me that if I wanted distribution, an audience, a living out of this, I had to ask permission from structures that were never designed for someone like me.
When I released my first NFT collection, it sold to collectors in countries I've never been to. No gallery in the middle. No curator validating it. Nobody telling me my work isn't “digestible” or “commercial enough”. Just me, my work, and an infrastructure that for the first time lets me reach a global audience from the Caribbean as an independent artist.
Four collections later, I have full control. I decide what I make, when, and at what price. I'm building a real community. All of it in a space the “mainstream creative world” decided to write off completely.
And there's something they didn't see: the space changed. The days of collections of 10,000 generated images are over. Even the 2,000-piece ones barely work now. What works are small collections. With a concept. With a story. With something real behind them. Made by a person, not by a script, a prompt and ai.
I'm not here to put the space on a pedestal. It had its boom; it can fall again. A year from now this may no longer work for me. I don't know. But right now it's working for me. It lets me illustrate freely whatever I want, with no filters and no permissions.
Even if it's temporary, for artists like me it's the first distribution infrastructure that doesn't require asking permission, only love for what you do.
And that's the conversation I'd like to have.