How Erick Calderon Turned NFT Squiggles Into a $6M Funding Round

The Art Blocks founder took on venture capital in August before NFTs reached peak “insanity.”

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ABOUT

Art Blocks CEO Erick Calderon has turned generative NFT squiggles into a digital art behemoth. This week on “Opinionated,” we speak with “Snowfro” about the artists whose algorithms power one of the hottest corners of the metaverse. Their NFT sales recently helped Art Blocks raise $6 million from equity investors, Snowfro told “Opinionated.”

Ben and Danny (Anna’s out this week) sort through the term sheets to find what makes Art Blocks tick. Their conversation begins with its cap table. Galaxy’s an investor; so is FlamingoDAO, the crypto-native community of NFT investors. Believe it or not, the DAO apes into equity rounds, too.

Snowfro helps demystify the philosophy underpinning the digital art scene. He doesn’t define success by making it to the MoMA – though that would be cool, he admits – or by billion-dollar transaction volumes – a milestone Art Blocks already crossed. He’s more interested in providing an outlet for really cool and unique art.

Speaking from his home in Houston, Snowfro walks “Opinionated” through his entrepreneurial history, which began with a college snow cone stand and evolved into an artisanal tile import business. His NFT side-hustle, Art Blocks, is less than a year old. And it’s not quite a side-hustle anymore.

This episode is produced, announced and edited by Michele Musso with additional production support from Eleanor Pahl. Our Theme Music is by Elision.

HOSTS

Dan Ilett

Dan Ilett writes on tech, money and energy. He advises business on digital strategy and technology messaging for large deals. He is founder of Erbut - an advisory company - and Greenbang - a smart technology research company.

Danny Nelson

Danny is CoinDesk's managing editor for Data & Tokens. He formerly ran investigations for the Tufts Daily. At CoinDesk, his beats include (but are not limited to): federal policy, regulation, securities law, exchanges, the Solana ecosystem, smart money doing dumb things, dumb money doing smart things and tungsten cubes. He owns BTC, ETH and SOL tokens, as well as the LinksDAO NFT.

Benjamin Schiller

Benjamin Schiller is CoinDesk's managing editor for features and opinion. Previously, he was editor-in-chief at BREAKER Magazine and a staff writer at Fast Company. He holds some ETH, BTC and LINK.

Danny Bradbury

Danny Bradbury has been a professional writer since 1989, and has worked freelance since 1994. He covers technology for publications such as the Guardian.

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