Josie Bellini, NFT Creator – Cointelegraph Magazine
Who is Josie Bellini?
Crypto artist Josie Bellini is most famously identified by her iconic Bitcoin gas mask from Filter. She has become one of the most prominent NFT artists, showing at Christie’s and on just about every NFT market platform available, including SuperRare, ASync Art and Nifty Gateway.
Born and raised in Chicago, Bellini has always had a passion for art. But growing up in poverty, she wanted to live a life of abundance, which led her to major in finance in college and take a job at a TradFi company.
Oddly enough, her desire to learn more about finance led her to crypto… which led back to art… which led to making money.
“When you grow up in poverty, you don’t hear about stocks and investments,” she says. “I thought, ‘I have all these clients who invested, and they were making money while they slept.’ I kept thinking, ‘How can I do this?'”
She did not have enough money to invest in half the things she recommended to clients, as she was not an accredited investor. A spark rekindled about a paper she had written in college about Bitcoin, and she fell down the rabbit hole of Ethereum in 2017.
“I started thinking more deeply about crypto and how this could potentially be my breakthrough. I became obsessed,” she says. “I would ask myself why Bitcoin was invented, why Ethereum came, and what the differences between the two were.”
Bellini would attend Bitcoin meetups in her hometown, and before long she quit her job to work in crypto, aiming to become a full-stack developer by attending a coding bootcamp, “but I absolutely hated it, I remember none of that. What I loved was the design side of it.”
“I started creating websites, logos and materials for blockchain conferences around the world and also crypto companies. That was my foot in the door to get a job in the industry.”
“At the end of 2017, I made my first personal crypto artwork; that piece was called ‘Genesis’ and it blew up on Reddit. At the time, the term ‘crypto art’ wasn’t a thing, and I didn’t use it even then. What I did was to create themed art to spread awareness about cryptocurrencies.”
Crypto art for NFTs
Almost two years passed from Bellini creating his first piece of crypto art (“Genesis”) to imprinting his first NFT as an artist (“Tune In”) on June 23, 2019. “Tune In” was a physical painting with the NFTs accompanying 21 prints. It is a timestamp for the NFT ecosystem in early 2019.
“In 2019, there were all kinds of NFTs at the time, CryptoPunks, CryptoKitties, Chain Breakers; you also had Cryptovoxels, Decentraland, Neon District and Autoglyphs had just come out, so I snuck them into the piece at the last second,” says Bellini .
In early 2022, CyberBrokers was born, a 10,001-NFT collection Bellini had been cooking up for years. Josie is the founder and CEO of the project, which considers itself a media and entertainment company focused on the metaverse. The art was hers with help from Azamat Khairov.
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Growing up in the neighborhoods of Chicago, Bellini has developed a love for street art and graffiti, which shines through in her work, especially the CyberBrokers collection.
“I grew up around a lot of street art. I’ve always been interested in graffiti and all the different fonts.”
A collector as well as an artist, Bellini collects the works of many other Chicago-based artists and draws inspiration from the likes of Kayla Mahaffey (Chicago artist/illustrator), Bisa Butler (award-winning African-American textile artist) and Hebrew Brantley (American contemporary artist who uses anime and graffiti).
“I fell in love with a lot of local Chicago artists like Kayla, who is amazing. Also Hebru [Brantley] who is really famous and does Flyboy.”
“I’m also obsessed with Bisa Butler. I would die and go to heaven if I could own something from Bisa, but everything goes to museums, says Bellini.
Notable sales to date
Cyber brokers
While NFT insiders were well aware of Bellini before 2022, CyberBrokers caught the attention of the newer collectors on the block in NFT land.
It shot out of the gates in March 2022 after a carefully curated permission list process in February where Bellini and her team rewarded existing collectors of her art and Twitter and Discord followers.
Minted at 0.35 ETH, the secondary market floor pushed up to the 4-5-ETH range within a month, including some massive sales for rares in the collection, such as “Gnash” for 150 ETH on March 31, 2022, and ” Tempo” for 120 ETH on April 4, 2022.
Despite a sharp decline in the NFT market in May, CyberBrokers remains focused on content, collectibles and experiences. “We are born from crypto art and the metaverse. These are the things I am obsessed with and have been living since 2017,” says Bellini, who says the project is focused on innovation.
“This includes us being 100% stored on-chain. We’ve released mechanisms that are fully 3D, rigged and interoperable with many different virtual worlds. There are 17 billion combinations of the way people can mix and match NFT. We’re always trying to push the next so much longer.”
“We’re building out a hugely beautiful universe that you can peek into through our website. We have some of the most talented people to ever set foot in this space on our team, and we’re not going anywhere.”
Why on-chain NFTs matter
An often overlooked nuance to NFTs is whether they are stored on-chain or whether the art/image points to a third party, such as IPFS. Bellini is a great advocate of true digital immortality.
“What we’ve done specifically with our art is to create it in vector format, which means the vector is translated into code. The code knows where the points are, where the shapes live, where the colors live. I simplify this a lot, but basically that code is written into a contract, says Bellini.
“For example, let’s say 200 years from now, I’m gone, my team is gone; hopefully I’ve uploaded my brain to the internet and I’m living through an AI dupe of myself, but if somehow that doesn’t happen as long as someone has access to the code that was launched and you can still access Ethereum, you will be able to generate the art simply from the code. You can generate every single 10,001 CyberBrokers from code.”
While her digital art has already achieved a form of immortality, she really wants to live forever in the metaverse.
“My husband and I joke about it all the time. If one of us gets ahead of the other, we should figure out how to upload each other to the internet so we can live forever, and our family. We joke about it, but in all seriousness, I think about this thing often, and I sure would love to live forever.”
Which hot NFT artists should we be aware of?
Giant swan (A_giant-swan) — VR artist based in Melbourne, Australia. A world builder through art.
“When I look at Giant Swan’s work, you can’t stop thinking and you start to feel a certain way. I can see blood, sweat and tears. I can see that he has put his heart into his canvas and the way he builds them in VR with every stroke.”
“They have so much depth and so much emotion to them. Every coat of paint he puts on there has a purpose, and it looks like these people are turned inside out. You literally see that they’re wearing their emotions — they’re wearing himself this scene that he builds around them. It’s just incredible.”
DominikG (@0xDominikG) — Freelance concept artist.
“I recently found and tried to buy this part of him. It takes you through a journey where you think, ‘Is this guy tripping on drugs? Is he going crazy? Is this what his brain is really like? It’s chaos, but it’s beautiful . It’s scary, but it’s cool. I just love being caught up in such an amazing journey.”
Notable collectors
As an OG and such a respected artist, Bellini not only has a number of notable collectors, but many other renowned artists also collect her work.
“It is much. I don’t want to forget people, and these are in no particular order, but Steve Wand is a. Steve is an amazing person and was one of the first to see my artwork in person at a conference and fell for it. He told me he loved what I was making and wanted one of everything to be my biggest supporter. It meant the world to me, says Bellini.
“Also J1mmy and Pranksy. J1mmy is one of the only people I have ever done a commission for. I painted one of his CryptoKitties and that’s how we met – in the CryptoKitties channel. Pranksy has become a very good friend over the years. He is absolutely amazing and such a beautiful person to know.”
“It’s a lot more honestly. It makes me smile that some of my friends who are crypto artists themselves are collectors of my work. People who Matt Kane and Coldie. It means a lot that they are interested in my work.”
Links
Twitter: https://twitter.com/josiebellini
Website: https://josie.io/
Behind The Art YouTube series: https://www.youtube.com/@JosieBellini/playlists
CyberBroker’s website:
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