On February 18, 2026, I bought my first NFT. An Alien Normie, and I’m still holding it today.
My alien Normie and me. Next stop : Copenhague!
Six months is not a long time in crypto years. But I spent several hours per day to dig this ecosystem, to meet artists, trying to understand it all so I think it’s good enough (to me) to give an honest opinion about all of my experiences here.
I heard NFTs were just expensive JPEGs at first. I did not disagree then. Now, I’m “forced” to say that’s a lot more than that (but sometimes it’s still expensive as fuck!)
It was random, but it was good!
I was not in crypto before September 2025. I got in as a CMO for a Web3 dev shop, which is a weird door to walk through I know, but this is how I’m getting really good at understanding things: deep diving in it.
NFTs were not even the plan. I do YouTube on the side, on Web2, about markets and consumer behavior and business.
I wanted to make a video about the NFT ecosystem as the artistic corner of crypto and talking about the speculation around it too. That was the pitch I heard, week after week, from the people around me here: this is art, this is culture, the money part is secondary.
So… Black or White huh?
I bought a Normie because I liked it and I felt that, with a doxxed artist like Serc and the concept of its project, it could be big.
5 months ago, I knew nothing about NFTs. Since then, a lot of things happened. > I joined Normies on mint day as my first NFT project ever > I talked to so many artists and collectors > I joined the French Normies chat group and help them grow stronger > I created content about Show more
I never made the video (I will, I will). I made something else instead: six months of actually being in it. And the “it’s just art” pitch did not survive contact with the ecosystem. Neither did the other pitch, the one you hear from outside: that it’s just overpriced JPEGs and gas fees.
I have heard both stories told with total confidence. I think they are both wrong AND right for the same reason.
Three ecosystems in one
Here is where I put my CMO hat back on.
NFTs are not one market. They are three, with three different audiences, three different codes, three different reasons to buy.
The PFP layer.
This is the speculative core: quick flippers, the occasional rug, real traction, because that is what traction looks like when a lot of people show up at once.
I will not pretend this layer is not art either, plenty of PFP projects are genuinely artistic, technical and all but its center of gravity is speculation. It is also where the strongest community mechanics live.
Normies had a builder culture from very early on. OnChainHoodies built its entire identity on builders and community. Youkies leaned hard into gamifying its own features, quietly, without the loudest marketing in the space.
Want to know more about @OnChainHoodies? Few stats to do so. And if you want strong knowledge...I wrote an article about the project here : x.com/… OH and if you want useful tools of content creation and data viz for this project, I built a whole website for Show more
Examples are legion.
This layer also has a real cost. When your whole market lives on one social platform, you inherit its algorithm and its incentives.
Add the anonymity that made crypto attractive in the first place, and you get fifty Discord and Twitter chats to manage with also a lot of scams, plus the alpha groups, plus the KOLs who are both a lifeline for visibility and a structural bias, because they make money from attention and rarely say exactly how :)
The “traditional-art” layer.
Photographers, painters, people who already had a practice and brought it onchain, sometimes with a physical piece attached.
Warnah, an artist whose work I bought on Transient, deserves a lot more exposure than he gets.
Time was ended 🙏✨ Lyra the blue resonance is sold 🌻✨ Thanks for your suport Steven Klinger an congratulation for get it 🌻✨ Gm ✨
Pauline Faieff, a French photographer, told me something I keep coming back to: NFTs let artists in developing countries reach an audience and actually live off their art, not just show it.
A letter from me to you, the Alphabet took its first breath. Its first breath became yours. Every texture, every word, every letter, invited us to slow down. To look closer. To (re)discover ourselves. To (re)connect with the language that has always lived within us. Show more
and a handful of other artists I met along the way, who are all creating something unique and are deeply rooted in Web3.
SOKHNA
This “layer” targets collectors, not flippers. I mean, nobody quick-flips a photograph or a painting. The holding horizon is different, the intent is different, it’s closer to physical art collecting than to investing.
And yes, there is gatekeeping and a bit of elitism here too but I do not think that is unique to Web3. Every art form has some version of it. The difference crypto brings is distribution: how far your work travels, and how directly you can sell it and have a true relationship “Collector-Artist”, like Pauline said to me!
The earning layer.
The newest one, and the one closest to pure speculation and trading again.
StonkBrokers basically defined this meta on Robinhood Chain: hold the NFT, earn by doing so, etc etc. It’s not a community access nor a whitelist farming spot. Actual yield for holding.
It’s a smart move actually, because it targets DeFi money directly, and DeFi money is where the liquidity already is. If you want capital in crypto, you go where institutions and serious capital already sit.
Know that is not cynicism, that is just where the money is, especially in a bear market.
There are art-first projects on Robinhood too of course, but it’s not the place for that imo.
Piopio comes to my mind first!
But if I were launching something purely artistic today, I would not launch it there. The Robinhood meta is not built for that.
So… three ecosystems and three audiences. But also three communication strategies that should not be copy-pasted from one to the other! Marketing 101 guys: know your target to bring the best product possible to them. NFTs are a product and it’s not an insult.
Which brings me to the thing I actually think is missing everywhere: strategy.
Most NFT projects do not have a real marketing plan.
No clear branding, no real narrative, a website vibe-coded in an hour and never touched again.
The projects that actually last have a long-term vision, they do not rush, and they keep a steady flow of communication that says something and builds something, instead of farming engagement or just throwing some “GM” and “LFG” on X.
A holder is not that different from a shareholder. And it’s even real now that more and more projects are handing out royalties now.
What I actually did with six months
I got scammed, like everyone does. I felt FOMO, despite literally teaching FOMO to my own students.
I lost money. I made some back.
But I am not, and never wanted to be, a big investor profile. My actual goal was (and still is) knowledge, and figuring out how to sell what’s in my brain to builders, founders, and artists.
Selling my brain has always been the job. Getting rich off NFTs was never the plan, and honestly I do not think it’s realistic for most people who did not start with serious capital.
Normies was the door in, and I will never deny that, even on the points where I disagree with the project. It gave me a community, and I am genuinely grateful to the people who taught me things there and keep doing it. I’m still a huge supporter of the project!
Gm everyone, come hangout with Normies! And curate Art, always.
In fact, I represented the project during the Normies edition of the NFT Morning show.
In June I went to Lisbon, for the NFC event, because I wanted the IRL version of this, living the full experience, not just X promises.
Daily recap of @NFCsummit ! I met @serc1n for the first time and took some @normiesART merch of course! I stayed with @LaurentMoulin and @Kingface_13 my favourite french normies 🫡 and had a great talk with @dopemind10 ! It was so great talking with @0xxSpring about her Show more
That is where I met Laurent, and my work with him started: Zeta Call, a live show about the NFT ecosystem, no alpha calling, just honest conversation about projects we care about and we find interesting.
That period also taught me about sell-shaming.
Everything is transparent onchain, wallets get tracked, and when you sell and talk about it, sometimes people applaud, sometimes they come for you. Fair enough.
I learned to do it with respect on both sides, buyer and seller.
I talked to a lot of artists over these six months, on purpose, traditional-art ones and crypto-native ones.
I got pulled into building a French Normies Holders chat into something more structured, a place to actually learn from each other.
That community is probably the real reason I stayed in crypto.
Shoutout to the whole group!
In NFT's, community is everything. That's why I encourage you to follow these @normiesART's members! - @Fv20000 - @Gathi32 - @imafckretard - @laurentCastell - @LaurentMoulin - @0xFlorent_ I'm talking with them everyday, learning a lot and sharing a lot with them 🫡 If Show more
And it is what pushed me into building Normies Nexus, which came from a strange but natural place: I have a software engineering background, I came back to dev through AI, and Normies pulled me into using it seriously.
So I built a full on-chain portfolio manager gated to Normies holders. I built it for the French holders, then submitted it to the Normies hackathon. First real win as a builder: $1,000 USDT.
Looking at wallets more closely since then, I noticed something obvious in hindsight: this space has produced a lot of losses and a few real wins, and people remember the wins a lot harder than the losses, classic.
“Conviction” is a powerful engine… It can also be a curse, the one-more-coin casino feeling, you know.
But that’s not unique to NFTs, or even to crypto.
It is just more visible here I guess.
The part where I started building in this market
I started making content, writing about projects I actually care about, about artists I find genuinely exciting.
For example, I spent two hours interviewing Archan Nair about his project and gave him more feedback than I expected to have!
That interview is part of what pushed me toward the Zeta Call format properly: building OBS scenes and tools and bringing here my live streaming expertise, that is where my actual professional value shows up too.
On the financial side, because I’ll always be transparent with you taking time to read and consume my content:
I still hold Normies of course, and a few older projects I have kept for months: Human Resources, MASKED, Koalified…
Projects I find genuinely interesting for many reasons.
I put in 1,300 euros of real money over six months.
The dashboard below shows $2,318.93 invested in total, and the difference is not a typo: that number also counts the crypto I earned along the way and reinjected, not just what came out of my own pocket.
Some of it went into projects I believe have real upside. Some of it went purely because I love the artist and want to support them, which does not stop me from selling sometimes. That is not a betrayal guys, it is just how a portfolio works :)
My biggest sale so far if from a project I always believed in, so I’m proud of it. It’s from Panorama, a 0.79 ETH sale (congrats to the buyer!)
Fun thing, once DeltaSauce mentioned it, I gained a lot of followers off the back of one sale getting attention. Know that I would rather grow because of what I create, not because someone assumes I am a whale… which I’m not.
I went to Basel too, for a Normies Brunch and I used the trip to see both the traditional and digital art galleries.
This, is Art Basel Zero 10.
“Traditional art” still has not clicked for me, maybe it will one day!
But I am somewhere between speculation and collecting now: I want to own digital art in physical form eventually, specific pieces, when the budget allows it!
I still want to do IRL meetups, still want to talk to founders and helping them as much as I could.
For example, I helped Youkies while talking to their founder ESH and I liked it, obviously!
I just had a talk with @ItsEshOnX from the @YoukieVerse project to help the team grow better in the future. We talked about marketing, sales, how important is it to target builders and create useful content around universes you want to build to create a real community around Show more
I’m also supporting other artists and founders from time to time so thank them for their trust! I am helping a couple of unreleased projects right now too.
Know that narrative is the thing NFT projects are missing the most to me, and helping with that is what actually keeps me interested.
In the PFP world and in the photography world, when artists are doxxed, they usually control their own branding extremely well!
Rocket Girl is a good example, her art is great, but her positioning and her sense of who her audience is might be even better. Worth checking out her part in the Magic Forest documentary too, I caught it at NFC Lisbon, a project connecting crypto, NFTs, and ecology. More on that soon.
This morning, we learned that a few questions had come up about our background and about how the funds move. We’re going to prepare a separate video where we’ll try to answer all of those questions in one place. This question about our background genuinely hurt us, because Show more
I keep building tools, for OnChainHoodies, for Normies, and I have a whole internal catalog of things I made to move faster now.
I probably owe you a proper piece on how I use AI as a builder in this space, and how you could too, whether you are an artist or a builder yourself!
So… what after 6 months?
Here is what six months actually taught me: this ecosystem is obviously not one thing. It is a lot of different things happening at once, different targets, different art, different tech, a different value proposition behind every project and every artist or founder.
Sometimes the value is monetary. Sometimes it is artistic. Sometimes it is both, at the same time, in the same token.
I keep my positions, I invest more where I already have conviction, and I got lucky enough to enter during a bear market, which spared me the violent swings that could have wrecked both a portfolio and a head!
I am going to keep bringing what I know to the projects, founders, and builders who actually matter to me.
I want to keep seeing physical art and like I said, I want to keep meeting people in person.
Follow along if you want to learn alongside me. Disagree with me please, because we MUST learn to communicate with each other and be able to disagree in order to truly evolve! Share your thoughts about what you just read, I’ll always learn from you guys! And you’ll learn from me too!
Shoutout to everybody I met along the way, and all the others I can’t mention here because you are a loooot!
NFTs are not only art. Not only JPEGs. It’s something in between, still being written. So let’s keep building all together!