In early 2021 Amber Vittoria, a New York-based graphic designer and digital artist, first heard about nonfungible tokens (NFTs), or digital art tokenized on blockchain networks. She was smitten and by February she and her husband spent $33,331, the money they’d been saving up to buy a car, on CryptoPunk #589, a pixelated woman punk with a mohawk, bright red lips, and a pair of aviator sunglasses. CryptoPunks are a collection of 10,000 pixel portraits that were algorithmically generated to have random attributes like a mohawk or smoking a pipe. The NFT is now her Twitter profile picture.

“You know what, like YOLO I guess,” Vittoria told Morning Brew. “We could only get one obviously.”

Her CryptoPunk is nothing like her own artwork, which explores femininity, physical identity, and emotion. As a professional artist, Vittoria has collaborated with brands including Gucci and Louis Vuitton and she’s been recognized by the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. So she seemed like the perfect person to ask: Is a CryptoPunk art? She hesitated before responding.

“I think they’re more like collectibles in the sense of like, folks who collect baseball cards, or folks who collect like model car sculptures,” she said…read more.