{"id":4236,"date":"2023-05-03T10:38:19","date_gmt":"2023-05-03T15:38:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sikaoer.com\/josie-bellini-nft-creator-cointelegraph-magazine\/"},"modified":"2023-05-03T10:38:19","modified_gmt":"2023-05-03T15:38:19","slug":"josie-bellini-nft-creator-cointelegraph-magazine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sikaoer.com\/josie-bellini-nft-creator-cointelegraph-magazine\/","title":{"rendered":"Josie Bellini, NFT Creator \u2013 Cointelegraph Magazine"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Who is Josie Bellini?\u00a0<\/h2>\n

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, being featured at Christie\u2019s and on just about every NFT marketplace platform available, including SuperRare, ASync Art and Nifty Gateway.<\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\n

Born and raised in Chicago, Bellini always had a passion for art. But growing up in poverty, she wanted to live a life of plenty, leading her to major in finance at college and take a job at a TradFi company.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Weirdly enough, her desire to learn more about finance led her to crypto\u2026 which led back to art\u2026 which led to making money.<\/p>\n

Still image of \u201cFilter\u201d GIF by Josie Bellini. (OpenSea) <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cGrowing up in poverty, you don\u2019t hear about stocks and investing,\u201d she says. \u201cI was thinking, \u2018I have all these clients that were investing, and they were making money, while they were asleep.\u2019 I kept thinking, \u2018How can I do this?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

She didn\u2019t have enough money to invest in half the things she recommended for clients, as she wasn\u2019t an accredited investor. A spark reignited about a paper she\u2019d written in college about Bitcoin, and she fell down the rabbit hole of Ethereum in 2017.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI started to think deeper about crypto and how this could potentially be my breakthrough. I got obsessed,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019d ask myself questions of why Bitcoin was invented, why Ethereum came along, and what the differences between the two were.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

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, \u201cbut I absolutely hated it, I don\u2019t remember any of it. What I did love was the design side of it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI started making websites, logos and materials for blockchain conferences around the world and also crypto companies. That was my foot in the door to getting work in the industry.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cBy the end of 2017 is when I made my first personal crypto artwork; that piece was called \u201cGenesis,\u201d and it blew up on Reddit. At the time, the term \u2018crypto art\u2019 wasn\u2019t really a thing, and I wasn\u2019t using it then myself. What I was doing was creating themed art to spread awareness of cryptocurrencies.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Crypto art to NFTs<\/strong><\/h2>\n

It was nearly two years between Bellini making her first piece of crypto art (\u201cGenesis\u201d) to minting her first NFT as an artist (\u201cTune In\u201d) on June 23, 2019. \u201cTune In\u201d was a physical painting with the NFTs accompanying 21 prints. It\u2019s a timestamp for the NFT ecosystem in early 2019.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIn 2019, there were all sorts of NFTs at that time, CryptoPunks, CryptoKitties, Chain Breakers; you also had Cryptovoxels, Decentraland, Neon District and Autoglyphs had just come out, so I snuck those into the piece last second,\u201d Bellini says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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Read also<\/p>\n

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Attack of the zkEVMs! Crypto\u2019s 10x moment<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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Features<\/span><\/p>\n

The trouble with automated market makers<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Influences<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Having grown up in the neighborhoods of Chicago, Bellini has developed a love for street art and graffiti, which shines through in her work, particularly the CyberBrokers collection.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI grew up around a lot of street art. I was always interested in graffiti and all the different fonts.\u201d<\/p>\n

A collector as well as an artist, Bellini collects a lot of other Chicago-based artists\u2019 work and draws inspiration from the likes of Kayla Mahaffey (artist\/illustrator from Chicago), Bisa Butler (award-winning African-American textile artist) and Hebru Brantley (contemporary American artist using anime and graffiti).\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI fell in love with a lot of local Chicago artists like Kayla who\u2019s amazing. Also, Hebru [Brantley] who\u2019s really famous and does Flyboy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m also obsessed with Bisa Butler. I\u2019d die and go to heaven if I could own anything by Bisa, but everything is going to museums,\u201d Bellini says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Notable sales to date<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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\"Genesis\"
\u201cGenesis\u201d sold at Christie\u2019s for $400,000 on June 3, 2021. (Christie\u2019s)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Onward\"
\u201cOnward\u201d sold on Async Art for 100 ETH ($307,484 equivalent on date of sale) on Feb. 10, 2022. \u201cOnward\u201d was a layer from the very first NFT launched on Async Art titled \u201cFirst Supper,\u201d which was a collaboration of 13 artists. (Async Art)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Tune
\u201cTune In\u201d sold on the secondary market for 100 ETH ($309,362 equivalent on date of sale) on Aug. 27, 2021. (OpenSea)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n

CyberBrokers<\/strong><\/h2>\n

While NFT insiders were well aware of Bellini prior to 2022, CyberBrokers caught the attention of the newer collectors on the block in NFT land.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It shot out of the gates in March 2022 after a carefully curated allowlist process in February where Bellini and her team rewarded existing collectors of her art and Twitter and Discord followers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Minting at 0.35 ETH, the floor on the secondary market pushed up to the 4\u20135-ETH range within a month, including some massive sales for rares in the collection, such as \u201cGnash\u201d for 150 ETH on March 31, 2022, and \u201cTempo\u201d for 120 ETH on April 4, 2022.<\/p>\n

Despite a sharp downturn in the NFT market in May, CyberBrokers remains focused on content, collectibles and experiences. \u201cWe\u2019re born of crypto art and the metaverse. These are the things that I am obsessed about and have been living since 2017,\u201d says Bellini, who says the project is focused on innovation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThis includes us being stored 100% on-chain. We\u2019ve released mechs which are full 3D, rigged and interoperable with many different virtual worlds. There are 17 billion combinations of the way people can mix and match their NFT. We\u2019re always trying to push the next thing that much further.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re building out a massive beautiful universe that you can peer into through our website. We have some of the most talented people that have ever stepped foot into this space on our team, and we\u2019re not going anywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\"Gnash
\u201cGnash\u201d from CyberBrokers. (OpenSea) <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Heaven
\u201cHeaven Dagger\u201d from CyberBrokers. (OpenSea)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Vengeful
\u201cVengeful Sam\u201d from CyberBrokers. (OpenSea)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n

Why on-chain NFTs matter<\/h2>\n

An often overlooked nuance to NFTs is whether they are stored on-chain or the art\/image is pointing to a third party, such as IPFS. Bellini is a big proponent of true digital immortality.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we\u2019ve done specifically with our art was to create it in vector format, which means that the vector gets translated into code. The code knows where the points are, where the shapes live, where the colors live. I\u2019m simplifying this a lot, but basically, that code gets written into a contract,\u201d says Bellini.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u201cFor example, let\u2019s say 200 years from now, I\u2019m gone, my team\u2019s gone; hopefully, I\u2019ve uploaded my brain to the internet, and I\u2019m living through some AI dupe of myself, but if that somehow doesn\u2019t happen, as long as someone can access the code that 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

While her digital art has already achieved a form of immortality, she really does want to live on forever in the metaverse.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy husband and I joke about it all the time. If one of us goes before the other, we better figure out how to upload each other to the internet so that we can live forever, and our family. We joke about it, but in all seriousness, I think about this thing often, and I would for sure love to live forever.\u201d<\/p>\n

Which hot NFT artists should we be paying attention to?\u00a0<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Giant Swan<\/strong> (A_Giant_Swan) \u2014 VR artist based in Melbourne, Australia. A world builder through art.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I look at Giant Swan\u2019s work, you can\u2019t stop thinking, and you start to feel a certain way. I can see the blood, sweat and tears. I can see that he\u2019s put his heart in his canvas and the way that every stroke he builds them in VR.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThey have so much depth and so much emotion to them. Every paint stroke he puts on there has purpose, and it looks like these humans are turned inside out. You literally see they\u2019re wearing their emotions \u2014 they\u2019re wearing this scene that he\u2019s building around them. It\u2019s just incredible.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"My
\u201cMy soul can\u2019t touch the ground\u201d by Giant Swan. (SuperRare)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

DominikG<\/strong> (@0xDominikG) \u2014 Freelance concept artist.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI recently found and tried to buy this piece of his. It takes you through a journey where you\u2019re thinking, \u2018Is this guy tripping on drugs? Is he going crazy? Is this what his brain is really like?\u2019 It\u2019s chaos but it\u2019s beautiful. It\u2019s scary, but it\u2019s cool. I just love getting caught up in that sort of amazing journey.\u201d<\/p>\n

Notable collectors<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\"Her
\u201cHer\u201d by Josie Bellini from the \u201cGrails\u201d series. (PROOF)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As an OG and such a respected artist, Bellini not only has a number of notable collectors, but many other well-respected artists also collect her work.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a lot. I don\u2019t want to forget people, and these are not in any particular order, but Steve Wand is one. Steve is an amazing person and was one of the first people who saw my artwork in person at a conference and fell over 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,\u201d Bellini says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cAlso J1mmy and Pranksy. J1mmy is one of the only people that I\u2019ve ever done a commission for. I painted one of his CryptoKitties, and that\u2019s how we met \u2014 in the CryptoKitties channel. Pranksy has become a really good friend over the years. He\u2019s absolutely amazing and such a beautiful person to know.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a lot more honestly. It makes me smile that some of my friends that are crypto artists themselves are collectors of my work. People like Matt Kane and Coldie. Means a lot that they\u2019re interested in my work.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Links<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Twitter: https:\/\/twitter.com\/josiebellini\u00a0Website: https:\/\/josie.io\/\u00a0Behind The Art YouTube Series: https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/@JosieBellini\/playlists\u00a0CyberBrokers Website: https:\/\/www.cyberbrokers.com\/<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Greg\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n
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Greg Oakford<\/h2>\n

Greg Oakford is the co-founder of NFT Fest Australia. A former marketing and communications specialist in the sports world, Greg now focuses his time on running events, creating content and consulting in web3. He is an avid NFT collector and hosts a weekly podcast covering all things NFTs.<\/p>\n