Hi there! My name is Glass, Glasspatch, Kit, or whatever you may or may not know me as. I’m halfway between a creator and a collector, although I must say I haven’t done a lot with either.

I just recently entered the space after months and months of constantly hating on NFTs without really looking into them; my curiosity got the best of me. I’m not even sure why I hated them in the first place, maybe it was the endless echoing cacophony of the same argument over and over (seems like the Dunning–Kruger effect is applicable here). I’m glad I took that leap, as I’ve met a ton of great people and seen endless amounts of talented artists in the very short amount of time that I’ve been here. I suppose to get a better understanding of why I’m here, I should explain why I’m here in the first place.

I’ve never really had a history with cryptocurrency, but I started on a very small scale back in 2018. I had heard of crypto before, but I didn’t know a lot about it. Because of that, I only knew that Bitcoin was popular and that Ethereum was less popular. I never saw it as an investment opportunity, rather just another type of currency that I could use for peer-to-peer trades. In that time, the highest amount of money I had ever put in was about $50 solely because I wanted to avoid going through the crypto buying process (I am quite the lazy individual).

Crypto is a very volatile asset. I knew this. Everyone else knew this. I just never really thought about how crazy it is. That $50 didn’t really mean a lot to me, but I felt the urge to check how much it held its value in the short amount of time that I still had it. $50 turned into $60, and $60 turned into $30. It felt like gambling to me, yet it felt detached from its monetary value. They were just numbers on a screen. The thought of me putting even more money into this scared me; I valued the money that I had.

From then on, I decided to stay away from crypto.

Years later in 2021, I would have never thought that the world would be undergoing a pandemic unlike most people have ever seen in their lifetime. Of course, quarantine meant staying inside and having nothing to do other than browse the internet. Like all major internet happenings, my Twitter timeline was flooded with pictures of a certain monkey collection. Nothing good was said and, to be honest, I didn’t think anything good of it either. I mean, the idea of monkey pictures holding more value than all of my possessions combined was incredibly weird to me. Even still, I struggle to understand the incredibly high value of some collections, but that’s something that I’ll get into some other time.

For the next few months, the cycle was the exact same. People see the funny monkey picture, make fun of it, and tweet something negative about it. At the time, it was the highest form of comedy. I never once considered getting an NFT for myself, yet the thought lingered in the back of my mind for quite a bit longer.

One night in early January, I was scrolling on Twitter (first mistake) and came across Azuki. Somehow, this time was different. I hadn’t seen a single bad comment about it, and I actually liked the art. It was such a stark difference from the ape invasion of 2021, so much so that I scrolled for a good hour. Post after post, picture after picture, I started to remember: these accounts have people behind them. People just like me who just so happened to have an interest in Ethereum-backed JPEGs. I knew I couldn’t just interact with these tweets without getting my online presence nuked, so I decided to bite the bullet and create a separate account on a whim.

I gave myself the moniker of “Heliophobia,” or just “Helio” for short, which is the word for the fear of sunlight. At the time, my sole interest was minting and selling photos from my vintage Polaroid camera. The film they take is very sensitive to sunlight while it’s developing, hence the name. I thought it sounded far enough from my main identity, so I stuck with it for a good while. As well as creating NFTs (as of writing this, I just sold my first FND piece), I started to look into projects that I could buy into. Of course, I didn’t know exactly which projects were good because I was a beginner. One of these projects I had found was “Shy Kitty Club,” a collection of randomly generated cats that I thought looked pretty cute. I followed the project up until release, and I even won a $100 giveaway from them to further boost my start in crypto (this isn’t any kind of endorsement or shilling, I’m just grateful for the push they gave me).

I tossed about $300 into a MetaMask wallet and bought a few NFTs from artists on OpenSea such as Yaanotfound and Sweetbread. Of course, this is when I learned about Polygon and their efforts to revolutionise Ethereum as a cryptocurrency (only if their servers weren’t hosted on a smart fridge from 2015).

I was having quite a bit of fun now, but there was this feeling of incompleteness that hung over my head.

After a while, I started to think to myself: what exactly do I want myself to come off as? I knew that I wanted my JPEG account separate from my main account, but to what extent? From the start, I changed how I typed. I ended sentences with a period and told myself that I would only post to announce drops. I tried my hardest to make it look like the farthest from me it could possibly be, but what was I getting out of it? I wasn’t really having fun with it. I wasn’t enjoying myself. From there, I decided to rebrand to a name that I had used on my private account for a while. I couldn’t really let a cute name go to waste (yes, I will call my own name cute), so “Glasspatch” was reborn into a new purpose.

I started to be myself again; I didn’t have to pretend to be someone that I wasn’t. It was a liberating feeling, not thinking about what my Tweets came off as before I sent them. I was having such a nice time that I used my main account less and less, choosing to use what was supposed to be and undercover alt-account instead.

Since then, I’ve worked on building up connections with other artists and people in projects that I enjoy. People such as Taidao and Scar have inspired me to stay in the space, and I don’t regret a single second of it. As of late, I’ve been hanging out in the Aiko Virtual Discord; I found interacting with people directly to be more fun. The door’s always open, and it would be nice to see a few familiar faces in there.

What initially started off as a simple dip to test the waters has turned into a pseudo-full dive into a community full of truly kind-hearted individuals. I appreciate you, readers, and those who have supported me along the way.

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