The collector

This collection exists because one person kept buying. Jamie Thingelstad is a technology executive in Minneapolis who has kept a public record of his life and work for decades: a blog, a newsletter called The Weekly Thing, and a habit of writing down what he is enjoying. In March 2022 he wrote that he had found a drawing board called Nifty Ink through a grant listing and "loved it as soon as I discovered it." The appeal, in his words, was that it was not about money: "This isn't about buying NFTs and going to the moon. This is about a super-simple low-barrier platform that allows anyone to create, sell, buy created images for very low costs. Many are a dollar. All about fun."

He made things on it before he collected much. In April 2022 he drew the word UKRAINE in block letters, his "one talent," minted fifty copies at ten dollars and matched every sale with a donation. At the end of May he bought a hundred copies of a stranger's ink that said HELLO and sent one to every reader who held a newsletter token.

His first nnxyz drawing was a face. On April 14, 2022 he bought Nifty Faces #109 for twenty xDai, and the record of this collection begins there. Eleven days later the artist minted "200 nifties," the drawing made to mark two hundred inks on the board, straight into his wallet. nnxyz gave the milestone pieces to the collectors who were paying attention, and by late April Jamie was one of them. On May 10 he bought the three summer figures for a single xDai each, and the next day he wrote: "I'm the top collector on Nifty Ink. I just have so much fun here." On May 23 the artist minted New Nifty on the Block #100 into his wallet, unpaid, and on June 20 did the same with "300 nifties." The milestones of the artist's year went to him as they happened.

From there the collecting became a project of its own. Jamie bought nnxyz inks all summer, and in August and October 2022 the artist delivered the complete sets of Nifty Faces and New Nifty on the Block by direct transfer, hundreds of drawings at a time. Each set followed a purchase of the series' origin work, the one titled #0000. Jamie bought Faces #0000 for 500 xDai on the evening of August 13, 2022, and within hours the artist sent him 126 Faces and the first five of New Nifty on the Block. He bought New Nifty on the Block #0000 for 750 xDai on the morning of October 16, 2022, the day after the series ended, and that afternoon 275 drawings arrived in his wallet over four hours. In September he had drawn "nnxyz fan art #0001," his block letters spelling the artist's name over a scribbled ground. On Thanksgiving morning he explained chains and bridges to two friends over brunch by moving an nnxyz ink from Gnosis to Ethereum.

In January 2023, when the artist came back to the board after two months away, he wrote "I was excited to see nnxyz, one of my favorite artists, publishing again," and bought Rawblocks #49 "to celebrate." In March 2023, with the series ending, he bought Rawblocks #0000 for 300 xDai and the artist sent the sixty-three Rawblocks to a wallet he had named for the board, and Jamie moved the rest of his inks there too. In May he bought Abstract #0000 and with it the fifty-two paintings, "the fourth nnxyz collection that I have now." The artist's later work, on other chains, reached the same wallets as it was made: a pixel twin for every Face he held, a cat club membership, the index collection's first drops, and in time the Tezos pieces. Those hang in After Nifty Ink.

He built a gallery for them on his own site, five pages of images with the dates and the transactions, and kept it there for three years. This site replaces it. His statement on the front page says why: "I always intended to share these collections. I wanted to give them a proper home where the art could be experienced fully, including the rare ability to watch each image being drawn, stroke by stroke." The drawings earned their maker about four thousand dollars in three years. About half of that came from his wallets. The ledger does not record enjoyment, but his blog does, and by his own account there was a lot of it.

On the artwork pages, the details panel says when each work reached him and how: bought from the artist, sent with a complete set, or minted into his wallet by the artist as a gift. The rooms say it where it matters to the hanging. What the artist was doing in those same months is on the next page.