NFTs Promised Architecture. We Got Extraction.

What was meant to empower artists was gutted by speculation before it had time to mean anything.

We were promised a revolutionary system that could finally give artists control. A way to establish provenance, prove ownership, and get paid in ways the traditional art world rarely allowed. NFTs offered the potential for a fundamental shift - not just in how work was distributed, but more importantly, in how it was valued. An infrastructure where digital art wasn't just infinitely replicable but verifiably owned. Where artists could track and sell their work without losing authorship. Where the systems themselves—the ledgers, the royalties, the metadata - were built with the artist in mind.

It was a rare moment when structures aligned with needs. But the promise didn't hold. It barely had time to suggest itself.

The space was quickly overwhelmed—not by artists, but by opportunists. The conversation shifted almost immediately from art to assets, creativity to speculation. Instead of exploring what the technology could enable, we were pushed to financialize it before it had time to mean anything—rug pulls, pyramid schemes, and hollow hype cycles. Molly White’s Web3 Is Going Just Great chronicled the chaos in real time. The tools meant to empower artists were hijacked by people looking to extract value from a system they didn't care to understand, let alone nurture.

And honestly, I get it. Who wants to wade through all that - bad actors, worse aesthetics - to experiment? Most artists care about form, context, and meaning. The NFT space cared about floor price, FOMO, and vibes that felt pulled from a crypto casino. It wasn't just the scams. It was the atmosphere.

When I released Hypercomplexity and Perspective—a series of generative stills minted as NFTs on Foundation—I wasn't chasing returns. I was testing possibilities. The work explored recursion, language, and fractured digital space. The drop sold out, but I barely made any money. That wasn't the point. The point was the potential, which makes this so frustrating.

Because the potential was real, and unfortunately, the vultures got there first.

They picked the blockchain clean before many artists even had a chance to explore it. What could have been a new framework for creative control and authorship became a churn of hype merchants and vaporware peddlers. Instead of building something meaningful, the space was stripped for parts.

And now? The noise has collapsed under its own weight. The speculative pile-on has slowed. As ArtReview put it in their review of On NFTs, the NFT moment may already be over—but it could still serve as “a portal to other, more radical forms of cultural production.”

Hypercomplexity and Perspective was my attempt to engage with what could have been—and if we're lucky, stubborn, or both, still could be.