We started Foundation with the vision of empowering digital creators with crypto. We were guided by the belief that tokens and smart contracts would become powerful tools in the hands of creative people on the internet. In our minds, the artists, musicians and storytellers of the world would realize crypto’s true potential.

It turns out we were right. Since our founding, Foundation has facilitated the sale of hundreds of millions of dollars of digital art across every medium and genre imaginable. Memes, music videos, animation, generative art, illustration, photography and AI-generated imagery have all found a vibrant home on Foundation.

In early 2020, when Foundation was first getting off the ground, our vision felt distant because there were very few artists seriously engaged with crypto as a medium. Crypto was an alien technology with little to no mainstream appeal. To make the technology more palatable, we attempted to abstract it away — to make it invisible.

In the process, we learned an important lesson: crypto wants to be seen. Abstraction led to poor user comprehension, and, in turn, poor engagement and retention. In an abrupt pivot, we opted to invite our early community to engage with the technology directly, and something marvelous happened: things started to click. One by one, artists and collectors started to see crypto’s true promise: immutable, eternal provenance, digital ownership, and global markets denominated in a currency native to the internet.

When compared with 2020, the space has made enormous progress but we also acknowledge that the space hasn’t grown tremendously since its big bang moment in 2021. We believe the space is ready for its next leap forward. And the next leap forward entails moving the digital art ecosystem to Ethereum L2.