Log 007 - My North Star
Abstract
In continuing the chronological thread of Proof of Art, I feel it is necessary to begin indexing origin stories of artists on Solana, starting with my own. If this project aims to be collaborative by nature, then the archive should contain more than timestamps and wallet signatures. It should also preserve hesitation, confusion, and the emotional residue that statistics tend to erase.
To Dickensian beginnings
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” However Dickens phrased it, that line captures how I remember looking in through the crack of the door before fully stepping inside. Exchange Art. Space Oddity. August 14, 2022, 17:33:11 UTC. Long wallet address. This is already documented in Log000, and it matters because writing it again helps me understand sequence. I was late to the party. Still pre-FTX. In retrospect I sometimes wonder whether arriving earlier or later would have changed anything. I cannot know. At the beginning I understood almost nothing. I had three friends from our Near days @sp_Aceee @soloMID_ @EV3_art and that was my entire bridge. I quickly realized the bird app was central. I barely had an account. What I did have was the EA profile and a refresh button I pressed compulsively.
My thinking was narrow. I was still applying physical-world logic to a decentralized arena. I was not an online content consumer until late 2021. I observed rituals from the margins: gm, gn, emoji codes, subtle hierarchies. If I had known that most of my future friends were one message away, I might have entered the conversation sooner. Instead I stayed in the passenger seat, speaking rarely, my opinions feeling like a sesame seed inside an industrial tahini factory when discussions revolved around whether pixel art was art or whether NFTs were alive or dead from hour to hour.
What surprised me most was the level of dialogue. If you had a decent amount of patience, threads revealed genuine artistic inquiry. It felt democratic in a way Web2 rarely does. People were serious about their practice, sharing knowledge and even secrets from their internal artistic kitchens. That was my first positive shock.
In order to survive the algorithmic noise of airdrops and obvious get-rich schemes that resembled outdated email scams, I began curating manually. I kept a notepad of artists to follow. List-making became a form of art journaling. By late 2022 I was submitting to open calls. On October 6, 2022, my first five-piece collection sold out, mostly to friends. It did not matter. I felt included. CODA Spaces followed. I needed liquid courage to request the mic, and “hello, can you guys hear me” became a repeated opening line. From my balcony after work, I found myself discussing culture with artists and collectors across continents. It felt like an agora.
FTX
Then FTX arrived. At the time I barely understood what it was. I had a wallet and fractions of SOL sent to mint. Financial collapse was not a language I wanted to learn. I had spent years moving away from cost-controlled architecture toward art, no ty. When the shock hit, my material exposure was minimal, but the psychological contraction was real. I felt bad for people and their unrest eventually rubbed off on me. Nights stretched into months. The joy ride stalled.
My convictions remained intact, yet stamina began to thin. Not in my convictions or core values, but rather at a psychological level. It was no longer working on inertia alone. You begin to feel the fatigue of climbing all that distance from Terra to Luna, only to fall abruptly.
To expand on that inertia I mentioned earlier, I felt a withdrawal from it. It had been such a high to step into the center of it all, even if it was not happening directly to me, I could see that it was possible. It was word of mouth, a shared frequency. I think that was the first time I heard the ringing in my ears in this space, so so quiet, revelatory. Revelatory in the sense that I began to see the people behind the keyboards and PFPs as people. Many started to show vulnerability as an act of kindness to themselves and others, almost as an offering to this interconnectivity, this pile of invisible cables at the ends of which each of us was sitting. That is how I became friends with most of those to whom I still leave a gm when I have time.
BONK
BONK, unexpectedly, functioned as a psychological reset. It gave me enough breathing room to imagine leaving my professional path, which at that time was physically affecting my health. I do not know exactly what or how it happened, but for me it meant just enough space to regain some trust in humanity and to begin planning a larger exit, one that would only fully materialize almost two years later. That was the true origin point of going full time into art . It felt like a breath of fresh air, or perhaps more accurately an oxygen tube, allowing me to build in silence, something I have grown to love over time.
NORTH
If I am asked why I stayed, the answer is intimate first, ideological second. My North Star was and is the memory of those balcony evenings when the flat screen started having textural depth , wen recognition that proof of ownership was also proof of authorship, the ability to say this is mine and I stand behind it. The legitimacy that I felt and needed from verifiable IP. The belief that digital art will consolidate somewhere on-chain feels inevitable. What kept me here specifically on Solana was alignment. The cadence of dialogue, the seriousness around practice, the willingness to remain available and present during collapse. When you lose your path for whatever reason, orientation becomes a form of survival. For me, this ecosystem provided that orientation. That is why I stayed.