1. hello
AI AI AI AI AI AI AI
Hi, how are you?
AI has taken over my social time feed.
Every single person on the Internet or rather planet earth is talking about AI.
And I don’t blame them.
I am a curious person too.
I was once curious about NFTs.
It was 2021. Covid pandemic led to the first lockdown in New Delhi. I was single and broke. I had to move back to my parents house after quitting a copywriting gig at a small advertising agency.
NFTs had Twitter on its chokehold. It was the pre-Musk’s X times, happy times! Beeple had just sold his art as NFTs for 69million dollars. Cryptopunks were auctioned at Sotheby’s.
My burning curiosity led me to work at a London based studio Vertical Crypto as their inhouse writer. I transcribed the interviews of many leading artists who were popular in NFT communities, wrote essays and did interviews with many up and coming crypto artists.
*Tidbits of what i learnt while researching and writing articles in my NFT era:
Rare Pepe
I learned that Rare Pepes plays a much more essential role in NFT history than you realize. Joe Looney’s Rare Pepe Wallet, created in 2016 on Counterparty, introduced many core features that NFT platforms still use today, before Ethereum NFTs even existed. I was struck by how community-driven the project was, with artists, coders, and meme enthusiasts worldwide contributing purely out of creativity and fun. I also discovered how the artwork evolved across the series and how political misuse of the Pepe meme later overshadowed the project’s cultural value.
History of Cryptoart
Jason Bailey and Martin Ostachowski helped me understand that cryptoart started long before NFTs became mainstream, with early experiments like Rhea Myers’ 2014 smart contract and NILIcoins redefining what digital art could be. The discussion also highlighted the tension between decentralization ideals and the practical role of platforms, as well as the ongoing challenges around royalties and artist autonomy. I was especially intrigued by DADA’s universal basic income model for artists, which reframes cryptoart as a collaborative ecosystem rather than a market race. Researching for the article made me aware of how parts of cryptoart history like Rare Pepes have been unfairly sidelined due to political controversies, even though they were foundational. One big takeaway was a feeling that cryptoart is a long-running, experimental, and culturally meaningful movement.
EtherPoetry
Etherpoetry was pioneering a completely new literary movement on the blockchain, proving that poetry can thrive in a space long dominated by visual NFTs. Etherpoems launched in 2021 as one of the first fully on-chain poetry projects, and I was struck by how intentionally it was created,not just as a collection of poems, but as a new publishing model where writers are actually compensated fairly through a collectively deployed smart contract. I learned how the second edition, Etherpoems 2: Spoken Word, expands poetry into multimedia forms with audio, video, AI collaboration, and experimental digital storytelling, showing how blockchain can evolve literature itself. What also stood out to me was the diversity of the 21 Etherpoets, each pushing boundaries in different ways from AI-generated verse to conceptual metaverse poetry to intimate spoken-word loops, highlighting just how rich and varied crypto-literature can be. Overall, the article made me realize that Etherpoetry isn’t just a niche NFT project; it’s a bold reimagining of how poetry can be created, shared, collected, and valued in the future.
It is 2025. NFT craze has died down.. X’s Grok had a public MechaHitler breakdown. American society has collapsed. Delhi is a polluted gas chamber. Genocide is televised on our phone screens.
I am in Berlin. I am married and probably having a mid-life crisis. I am in awe of Generative art. I understand that we are in an AI bubble. I am amazed by the brilliance of LLMs, and neural networks. I am disgusted by AI slop. I am in the flux about chatGPT.
I am in my AI era.
(well, as long as it lasts.)
So here is the thing…
I want to unpack my curiosity about AI, my fascination with the people behind it.
And I want to share it all with you.
Cheers,
Nitika.
* Please message if you want to read the full articles. I have all of them in Google Drive. For reasons unknown to me, the verticalcrypto website is down.
** Here is a spotify link to a poetry reading I did with other NFT poets.