The bids began last March as Jaiden Stipp watched a Star Wars movie with his afternoon youth group in Tacoma, Washington. At first, it was a piece of an Ethereum token, which was then worth roughly $300. There was then more Stipp, who is 15 and about to enter his second year of high school, eventually sold one of his pieces of art, a digital depiction of a waving cartoon astronaut figure, for 20ETH. (That was turned into more than $30,000; it was exchanged for nearly $60,000 a month later.) “No way this is legitimate money,” Stipp recalls her father saying. “It appears like a lot of phoney money is being distributed. So, we withdrew some funds to determine what was real. Afterward, at the bank. I exclaimed, “Whoa.”

For $20 to $70, Stipp created and sold logo designs for clients he found via the social software Discord. He turned his astronaut cartoon into an NFT (non-fungible token) on a whim, placed it up for auction, and became a renowned cartoonist overnight. Since then, he has sold four more works, earning enough money to assist his parents in paying off their mortgage and vehicles. The remainder is invested in the early works of other emerging NFT artists who are eschewing the conventional art market in favor of the blockchain-based world of Crypto art.

Since becoming popular in the spring, NFTs, like Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, have experienced periods of volatility. Early art market speculation peaked when artists like Beeple sold their creations for $69 million. But what’s left is a gradually expanding market for collectible digital memorabilia and art. For instance, a well-known marketplace named OpenSea just topped 26,000 users and recorded sales of over $3 billion in August alone, a tenfold increase from July.

The wave may not have even crested for some of the younger artists in this Wild West of painting. The head of Christie’s internet sales, Noah Davis, is optimistic about the future, especially for the influx of young NFT artists. They possess the castle’s keys, according to Davis. It’s not just an aesthetic game, either. The same ideas and objectives that once guided fine artists are no longer relevant. In a way that wasn’t nearly as significant before, this space values community and the individuality of the artists who created the project. Davis describes the past several weeks as “unmitigated lunacy,” with record sums paid for works by emerging artists like 12-year-old Benyamin Ahmed and his Weird Whales series. According to Davis, there is a premium for artists who appear and act as if they belong to this society and its culture. For the purchasers willing to invest in these NFTs—buyers whose mentality is that “the future is now,” according to Davis—whether or not it is a bubble is irrelevant.

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Victor Langlois, a fellow NFT artist and 18-year-old who goes by the name FEWOCiOUS and has won praise for his vibrant, identity-centered work, was one of the first to bid on Jaiden Stipp’s artwork. (He is said to have made over $18 million from his own NFT sales in the last year, but Langlois chuckles and claims he doesn’t know how much he made.) Langlois, Stipp, and a growing group of young NFT artists are learning that having grown up in the digital age provides them an advantage in the NFT market. We spent our formative years playing video games, watching YouTube videos, and wasting time on social media. As a result, we know the concept of exchanging virtual goods in video games and trying to get items like armor and leveling up, according to Langlois. Because trading NFTs is similar to exchanging collectibles or your work, it just makes sense.

Did you know that Teen Artists are making millions on nfts? #NFT #Artist #teeneger #Crypto #Bitcoin #NFTs pic.twitter.com/GTijzTsnd5

— NFT Raider (@nftraider) September 24, 2021

Additionally, there are no entry or investment barriers due to the free-for-all environment. To create an NFT, you must first submit an application to be displayed on a website like SuperRare; Stipp’s application took roughly a month to get approved. Then, after paying a minting charge, you access a website where you upload the digital file you want to list and “tokenize” it. The next step is creating buzz and establishing connections with other NFT artists and collectors who compete for their business by bidding against one another. To iterate on a concept, some artists like Ahmed of Weird Whales and 12-year-old Nyla Hayes sell collectible series of thousands of works.

According to Stipp, anyone can meet on the blockchain anywhere, at any time. And it’s simpler to draw attention to your work than if you were in a conventional gallery or art space. It implies that teenagers can avoid the stuffier aspects of art sales and the challenges presented by more established gallery procedures. They can also establish a community free from outside tastemakers’ influence.

Not everybody believes in this future. Artist and art instructor Cat Graffam, who has spoken out on Twitter and YouTube about their worries, issues a warning about the possible predatory character of the stock market and investors. According to Graffam, those who stand to earn the most are those like the Winklevoss twins, who are already extraordinarily wealthy and have an NFT platform. “The vast majority of unestablished musicians attempting to break into NFT sales are the biggest losers,” Artists pay to mint their work on the blockchain, whether it sells. The operators of sales platforms invariably profit from this influx of NFT art. The tricky aspect of NFT art is that, by its existence, it flattens artistic expression, which certain NFT artists will always resent. Graffam echoes criticisms of the larger contemporary art market: “Valuing art only based on how much money you make people truly is reductive and detracts from the personal value, the cultural significance that art may have. Ultimately, not everyone’s narrative is as compelling as Stipp’s or Langlois’. Other issues include the possibility of fraud and art theft and the usually mentioned environmental drawback.

Graffam is aware of the art world’s fascination with young people; at the time of their first article about them, which hailed them as a rising stars and gave them the impetus for their first exhibition, they were only 19 years old. Graffam, now 28 years old, applauds NFT artists like Langlois, but they are still dubious about the possibilities in general.

The future is promising for Langlois, Stipp, and artists like North Carolina’s Erin Beesley, 14, who hasn’t even begun high school. While playing the online game Cryptokitties in 2017, she became familiar with NFTs. (Consider Neopets, but less complex.) She has been creating art since she was a young child, learned how to code in 2019, and now creates generative art, which consists of images and movies created using code she has developed. Generative art forms have been present for years, but coded works like Beesley’s are especially well suited to today’s digital world. The most recent price for her work on the same marketplace SuperRare that Langlois and Stipp have utilized is 14ETH, or roughly $50,000. She claims she is attempting to release and sell items “slow and meticulously” and has reinvested in both NFTs and natural works of art. What about her family and friends? According to her, they may be amazed but not fully understand the technical aspects, which complicate them.

Like Beesley, Stipp has kept his digital celebrity quiet; he recently enrolled in a new high school and believes that no one outside his best friend, who has assisted him with sales, is aware of his NFT accomplishments. Additionally, he has stuck to his plan of fewer, one-time distributions. For him, the money is merely a perk. When crypto values crashed in June due to the summer’s “crash,” maybe brought on by Elon Musk’s reluctance, he didn’t notice much of a shift. Since then, the markets have increased to over $2 trillion across exchanges, but they are still prone to intense volatility; on September 7, for example, they fell by almost 15%. The ups and downs are just a sideshow for young NFT performers. The community is what is essential.