Top 50 most influential people in NFT
List of 50 most influential people in NFTs by Fortune
1. Beeple
The Picasso of pixels. This South Carolinian digital artist sold a collage of his daily sketchbook, Everydays, for $69 million at Christie’s in March—the top-selling NFT to date. He is known for his obscene mash-ups of pop culture and political leaders, including a mutant sketch of President Joe Biden as Buzz Lightyear from the Pixar film Toy Story.
https://twitter.com/beeple
2. CryptoPunks
Nothing signals one’s crypto cachet quite like owning a CryptoPunk. NYC’s Larva Labs gave away the 10,000 pixelated faces for free in 2017, years before they started selling for millions. The characters all have unique combinations of traits, like being an alien, wearing sunglasses, or smoking.
https://twitter.com/larvalabs
3. Roham Gharegozlou
Dapper Labs’ CEO is making NFTs accessible to the masses through NBA Top Shot virtual basketball cards. His startup is reportedly fundraising at a $7.5 billion private valuation. The company built its name early on, in 2017, with the success of CryptoKitties, a game that lets people breed digital cats on a blockchain.
4. Mark Cuban
The billionaire Shark Tank TV host and investor says if he were younger, he’d start a blockchain biz. Also owner of the Dallas Mavericks, Cuban has even considered turning game tickets into NFTs. He’s also a backer of the NFT marketplace Mintable.
5. Pplpleasr
Emily Yang designed visual graphics for motion pictures, like Batman v Superman and Wonder Woman, before helping to define the decentralized finance movement’s look. One piece, a video for DeFi project Uniswap, inspired the formation of PleasrDAO, a prolific NFT investment club. She also designed the cover for Fortune‘s August/September 2021 issue, which will be sold as a limited series of NFTs.
https://twitter.com/pplpleasr1
6. Jazy-Z
Born Shawn Carter, the hip-hop icon is the most prominent celebrity to adopt a CryptoPunk (#6095) as his Twitter avatar. He is also a board member at crypto-loving fintech firm Square. Helmed by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Square bought Jay-Z’s music-streaming service Tidal for $300 million earlier this year.
7. Paris Hilton
Hilton Hotels’ socialite scion says NFTs are “the future of the creator economy.” One collab with LA-based artist Blake Kathryn—called Iconic Crypto Queen—sold for more than $1 million. She’s also a strategic advisor to the blockchain project Origin Protocol.
https://twitter.com/ParisHilton
8. 3LAU
The electro dance DJ made an early killing on the NFT trend. He sold the world’s first-ever tokenized album, earning him $11.6 million in March. Kings of Leon, RAC, and, yes, Jay-Z all followed.
9. Grimes
The 33-year-old Canadian singer-songwriter has sold more than $6 million worth of NFT artwork, typically featuring flying babies. Born Claire Elise Boucher (her fictional alter-ego is “War Nymph”), Grimes occasionally collaborates with her brother, Mac Boucher. Her own baby daddy, Elon Musk, prefers Dogecoin, of course.
10. Gary Vaynerchuk
Marketing mastermind “GaryVee” hand-drew 268 characters as the basis for 10,255 VeeFriend NFTs. The sketches come with exclusive perks, like gift boxes, mentorship sessions, and conference tickets. Some of the characters include “Gratittude Gorilla” and “Spontaneous Seahorse.”
11. Itzel Yard
Itzel Yard is one of the top-selling female NFT artists. The Tor Project, which builds a privacy-focused web browser, commissioned her to create “Dreaming at Dusk”—which turned the cryptographic key used to create the non-profit’s first so-called onion service into a piece of art. It sold for roughly $2 million to PleasrDAO, a group of collectors, on Foundation. Yard’s works usually deal in generative art—where automation and computing form the patterns and shapes.
12. Pak
The mysterious artist is an enigma wrapped in a riddle inside a computer screen. The “Pied Piper of virtual art,” as the Wall Street Journal described them, has sold dynamic, changing art and works that reward people for solving cryptographic puzzles. Pak sold an NFT of a single gray pixel for nearly $1.4 million to a Bay Area investor in April.
13. XCOPY
An anonymous, London-based artist with a name that sounds like a keyboard operation, XCOPY was one of the early artists to delve into the cryptoart space, largely because it was “the first and only way to sell my digital artwork in its true form,” they say. The NFT early-adopter reveals little personal information, but their works rank among the top-selling of any artist. The static-saturated graphics usually flash frantically and are death- or dystopia-themed: Epileptics ought to steer clear.
14. Fewocious
Victor Langlois is an 18-year old transgender NFT artist who goes by the nom de pixel, FEWOCiOUS. The son of Salvadoran immigrant parents, he was responsible for crashing Christie’s website for the first time after an influx of buyers bid on his digital art. The auction house had to reschedule the event for two days later. His artwork commonly features a collage-like style with the disjointed abandon of ransom notes made of magazine-clippings.
15. Krista Kim
Krista Kim is the artist behind “Mars House,” an NFT digital abode that in March sold for 288 Ether, or $663,000 at the time—more than the median price of a home for sale in the U.S. today. Kim is the founder of so-called Techism, a movement dedicated to bridging the gap between technology and art.
https://twitter.com/krista_kim
16. Josie Belline
A cryptoartist with a finance background whose work often relates to the inner workings of the digital asset world, Bellini is currently working on CyberBrokers, a project that will include 10,001 cryptoart collectibles. A CyberBroker’s owner will then have access to MirrorWave, “a metaverse-native fashion brand” that Bellini is also creating, as she writes in her Substack newsletter.
https://twitter.com/josiebellini
17. Micah Johnson
After playing for several Major League Baseball teams, Micah Johnson became a successful digital artist. One of his feats: Selling $1 million worth of art in 60 seconds. NFTs were, at first, just a way for Johnson to pay the bills and support a newborn. Johnson, who paints, often characterizes Black children in his images. He says he hopes to inspire youth—and everyone—to see what they’re capable of becoming. Aku—Johnson’s Black astronaut kid NFT character—was recently optioned for TV and film projects.
https://twitter.com/Micah_Johnson3
18. Metakovan
Vignesh Sundaresan stormed the art scene earlier this year when he bought the most expensive NFT ever sold: Beeple’s Everydays. He and “Twobadour,” his partner at Metapurse, an NFT-focused investment fund, spent $69.3 million on the work. “The point was to show Indians and people of color that they too could be patrons, that crypto was an equalizing power between the West and the Rest, and that the global south was rising,” he wrote about the pricey acquisition.
19. Davin Finzer
Devin Finzer, formerly a Pinterest engineer, cofounded OpenSea, a decentralized NFT marketplace, in 2017. In July of this year, the startup raised $100 million in funding at a $1.5 billion private valuation. Today, OpenSea is the largest NFT marketplace in the industry, racking up record sales even as revenue at rival sites has slipped. The company has launched projects with the NBA’s Golden State Warriors and singer-songwriter Shawn Mendes.
20. Katie Haun
Katie Haun, a former federal prosecutor, co-leads venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz’s multibillion-dollar crypto fund alongside investor Chris Dixon. The fund, a16z crypto, is a major backer of top NFT-related startups. Portfolio companies include NBA Top Shot-seller Dapper Labs, NFT marketplace OpenSea, and digital horse-racing game ZedRun.
https://twitter.com/katie_haun
21. John Legere
T-Mobile’s former chief executive is one of the world’s top NFT buyers. The ex-telecom bigwig plunked down more than $2 million on psychedelic music videos by DJs 3LAU and Steve Aoki. In March, he teased that he might buy an NFT of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s first-ever tweet. (Someone else beat him at auction, spending nearly $3 million.)
22. Dylan Field
Dylan Field is the CEO of the $10 billion visual design software startup Figma. A longstanding believer in NFTs, he bought a pipe-smoking alien CryptoPunk he found “totally magnetic” for $15,000. This year he flipped that avatar—which he believed “has potential to be the digital Mona Lisa,” he told tech blog Protocol—for $7.5 million worth of Ether. And that’s just one of at least 10 CryptoPunks in his personal collection. Field is also an investor in the NFT marketplace OpenSea.
23. Hackatao
Nadia Squarci and Sergio Scarlet—the duo behind Hackatao—reside in the mountains outside of Milan, where they have been making digital art since 2018. Squarci told the Museum of Contemporary Digital Art that they are “two opposite yet complimentary souls.” The pair frequently depict little cartoon monsters in their surrealist pop art. The team recently put a digital spin on Leonardo da Vinci’s “Head of a Bear” drawing, calling it “Hack of a Bear.”
24. Neda Whitney
Neda Whitney is the head of marketing for the Americas at Christie’s. In her role, she has helped push the 254-year-old auction house into the digital world. Her biggest claim to fame: Helping sell Beeple‘s Everydays, which captivated the art world when it sold for nearly $70 million in March.
https://twitter.com/nnamiranian
25. Cuy Sheffield
Visa’s head of crypto is an NFT collector who has been bullish on the tech’s prospects for years. Sheffield believes crypto art, in particular, can help underrepresented creators make a living; in 2020, he wrote in a blog post that it could help propel a “Black Digital Renaissance.” His latest purchase: An NFT piece by former baseball player Micah Johnson.
https://twitter.com/cuysheffield
26. Ben Nolan
Ben Nolan is the founder of CryptoVoxels, a digital art gallery-laden virtual reality. The site is a key part of the NFT world’s burgeoning blockchain “metaverse,” where people can buy digital land and display their collections.
https://twitter.com/cryptovoxels
27. FlamingoDAO
FlamingoDAO is a collection of crypto-rich investors who pool funds to bid on NFTs works. The group, a so-called decentralized autonomous organization, has already amassed a sizable collection in less than a year since its launch. One example acquisition: a rare alien CryptoPunk, which the group bought for more than $750,000 worth of Ether in January. The fund’s originators include Aaron Wright, a professor at Cardozo Law School and cofounder of OpenLaw, a blockchain protocol for legal agreements, and Priyanka Desai, who leads OpenLaw’s operations.
https://twitter.com/FlamingoDAO
28. John Crain
John Crain is the CEO of digital art marketplace SuperRare. SuperRare went online in 2018 as a social network sitting atop Ethereum blockchain—users can make and trade tokenized artwork. The project recently said it would collaborate with Playboy to release a curated collection of original animated works.
https://twitter.com/superrarejohn
29. Duncan & Griffin Cock Foster
Former rowers, the Cock Foster brothers are cofounders of Nifty Gateway, one of the top NFT art-selling platforms. The pair sold their site to crypto company Gemini in 2019. Now they’re employees of another pair of identical twin businessmen, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss.
https://twitter.com/DCCockFoster
https://twitter.com/gcockfoster
30. Marguerite DeCourcelle
Marguerite deCourcelle is the CEO of blockchain game studio Blockade Games and is an avid NFT collector. She goes by the online alias “coin artist.” deCourcelle’s first game for the studio, Neon District, allows players to earn and buy NFT items. She even tokenized herself to gauge how influencers can create ownership for their brand.
https://twitter.com/coin_artist
31. Lindsay Howard
Lindsay Howard is the head of community at Foundation, an NFT marketplace that launched earlier this year. Howard curated the first-ever digital art auction at Philips in 2013. She has curated exhibitions for museums including the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City and has four NFTs in her personal collection.
https://twitter.com/Lindsay_Howard
32. Jen Stark
The Los Angeles-based artist’s “Multiverse” NFT auctioned for a whopping 150 ETH ($343,071) in March. Its sale catapulted Stark onto the leaderboard as the first female artist in Foundation’s top 10 highest selling creators. Stark’s work has also appeared outside of the digital universe in the form of a mural on a Sweetgreen shop in Miami, in a Neil deGrasse Tyson book, and on a white wine can label.
33. Diana Sinclair
It has not taken long for the 17-year-old activist-artist to make a mark in the crypto art world. On Juneteenth, Sinclair curated “The Digital Diaspora,” an NFT exhibit and auction dedicated to celebrating the work of Black artists. Its proceeds went toward Herstory DAO, a group she cofounded to collect the works of marginalized creatives, as well as the Gays and Lesbians Living in a Transgender Society.
https://twitter.com/dianaesinclair
34. Jimmy McNelis
Jim McNelis is an avid NFT collector and the CEO and cofounder of NFT 42. His company is best known for creating AvaStars, a digital collectibles project that sells computer-generated avatars with a wacky sci-fi premise. McNelis also cofounded Nameless, a project that partners with brands on NFT launches.
35. Colborn Bell
A one-time investment banker and trader, Bell now collects and curates crypto art as director and cofounder of the Museum of Crypto Art. The institution has helped solidify the NFT art market over the last year, having bought up “Picasso’s Bull” on Nifty Gateway for $55,555.55 worth of Ether in 2020.
https://twitter.com/colbornbell
36. Gisel Florez
Gisel Florez is a photographer and a cofounder of Women of Crypto Art, a crypto-loving community of women. Florez sells her own digital artwork and has participated in both traditional and crypto-centered exhibitions including NFTNYC, ETH Denver, and PROOFOFART Museum, among many others.
https://twitter.com/GiselFlorez
37. Denis Nazarov
The former Andreessen Horowitz partner is working to build what can be described as a crypto publishing platform, not unlike Medium or Substack. In the new model, readers help fund writers in exchange for NFTs. Mirror.xyz recently raised $10 million from Union Square Ventures, Andresseen Horowitz, and others at a $100 million valuation, The Information reported.
https://twitter.com/Iiterature
38. Paris Rouzati
IDEO CoLab Ventures’ newest general partner is focused on the firm’s investments in “the metaverse, NFTs, social tokens, and DeFi,” according to the company. Rouzati, whose first foray into NFTs began with digital cabbages, has also invested in the likes of Fei and Showtime.
39. Jeff Zirlin
Jeff Zirlin, who goes by the nickname “The Jiho,” is the cofounder of Axie Infinity. The NFT-based video game invites people to battle chubby, fantastical beasts—sort of like crypto Pokemon—and its marketplace allows players to earn tokens as they go. Zirlin grew up collecting insects and fossils.
https://twitter.com/Jihoz_axie
40. Gabby Dizon
Gabby Dizon is the Philippines-based cofounder of Yield Guild Games. The company invests in and works with people who play games, like blockchain-based Axie Infinity, to earn NFT rewards. Dizon sees this as a way to bridge the wealth gap, as players in his home country can make three times the local minimum wage by gaming. Dizon also cofounded Altitude Games, a Southeast Asian mobile game studio, in 2014.
41. Bored Ape Yacht Club
Bored Ape Yacht Club is not a typical sailing outfit. It’s a collection, created by Yuga Labs, of 10,000 collectible NFTs. Perks of holding one of these “bored ape” avatars include accessing a digital graffiti wall, known as The Bathroom Wall, or adopting a virtual dog. Trading volumes on secondary marketplaces for Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs are on the brink of reaching $100 million, according to blockchain-tracker DappRadar.
https://twitter.com/BoredApeYC
42. Marie Shen
The 30-year-old Electric Capital partner sort of has a thing for metaverses. Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash” is one of Shen’s favorite sci-fi books, so when crypto-based metaverses came up on her radar, she said she was “beyond excited.” Now, Shen helps oversee a portfolio of investments in different crypto companies and believes art only represents the “tip of the iceberg” for NFTs.
43. Gmoney
A Puerto Rico-based, karaoke-loving investor who paid 140 Ether (about $170,000) in January for a CryptoPunk avatar, the influential NFT booster, who goes only by the online alias “Gmoney,” called the move a “flex.” Gmoney is also a general partner of Delphi INFINFT, a fund built with crypto research and investment firm Delphi Digital that is dedicated to investing in NFT projects.
44. Pranksy
An early, pseudonymous NFT investor who has built a large following and collection, Pranksy is one of the top hoarders of NBA Top Shots. The person behind the avatar told Fox 5 NY that NFTs are, for today’s digital natives, “the collectible equivalent” of taking “photos for their mantelpiece.”
https://twitter.com/pranksyNFT
45. Erick Calderon
Erick Calderon is the founder and CEO at Art Blocks, a platform for creating on-demand, generative art pieces. Since its launch a year ago, Art Blocks has garnered the attention of many, including auction house Sotheby’s, which recently sold 19 of the platform’s pieces in a deal totaling $81,000. Calderon, a native Houstonian, uses the online handle Snowfro, which stems from a snow cone stand he used to own.
https://twitter.com/artonblockchain
46. Cooper Turley
Erick Calderon is the founder and CEO at Art Blocks, a platform for creating on-demand, generative art pieces. Since its launch a year ago, Art Blocks has garnered the attention of many, including auction house Sotheby’s, which recently sold 19 of the platform’s pieces in a deal totaling $81,000. Calderon, a native Houstonian, uses the online handle Snowfro, which stems from a snow cone stand he used to own.
https://twitter.com/artonblockchain
47. Artchick
A powerful and rising voice in the world of NFT collecting, “Artchick” is known for calling attention to female creators, collectors, and crypto-comrades. The psuedonymous account has, per its Twitter bio, one request: “never DM me.” (True to form, “Artchick” did not reply to Fortune‘s DMs—such is life in the metaverse.)
https://twitter.com/digitalartchick
48. Andrew Steinwold
Andrew Steinwold is a crypto analyst and the founder of Sfermion, an investment company focused on digital asset projects. Steinwold’s influential newsletter and podcast series, called Zima Red, are essential parts of the media diet for metaverse enthusiasts where Steinwold explores virtual worlds and discusses all things NFTs.
https://twitter.com/AndrewSteinwold
49. Cherie Hu
Cherie Hu writes an influential newsletter called Water & Music, which covers the intersection of music and tech innovation. In addition to evaluating future uses for NFTs in the industry, she has published research quantifying the amount of money musicians have made in the NFT economy.
https://twitter.com/cheriehu42
50. Nicole Buffet
Nicole Buffett, granddaughter of famed investor (and crypto-disser) Warren Buffett, sells NFT art for a living. She and her fiancé, Justin Aversano, a top NFT photographer, donate much of the proceeds of their work to charity. (Fun fact: Both were born as identical twin siblings, the subject of Justin’s Twin Flames NFT project.)