If you were to take Nate Alex’s shitposting on X and his DIY hexagon rainbow cat Doodle on the surface, you might get him wrong. But underneath that flippant exterior lies a burning curiosity for NFTs as both a creator and collector and a passion for programmable art.
After originally minting his first NFT in 2017, Nate was captivated by CryptoKitties and the ability to breed crypto-cats. While still working as an engineer, Nate’s early NFT home was the CryptoKitties Discord as he went down the rabbit hole, before he went full-time in Web3 in 2020.
The Nashville, Tennessee, resident is one of the most prolific NFT collectors in the space but admits his portfolio could have been astronomically larger had he not let go of the 70+ CryptoPunks he sold and 30 Autoglyphs he minted and kissed goodbye to.
“I cycled through about 70 Punks; painful to think about. I have a single Punk (#2909) now, which I actually bought last year, so I had zero for a while. I sold most of my stuff too early,” says Nate explaining his mindset initially was to try to make a little extra money and try and survive.
“My thinking early was if you invest $100 in something and it’s worth $300, take that money out and find the next thing and just keep trying to do that. That was really my strategy rather than buy something for $100 and just hope it’s worth $100,000 one day.”
“Autoglyphs was a tough one. In hindsight, it’s tough to take that on the chin. I was at work and bought 30 of them in total for a little over $1,000 back in 2019. The very next day they’re selling for 5-10x more. In my mind, I’m like, oh my god, I’ve just turned $1,000 into $7,000 or $8,000. This is great, so I’m just selling them and trading them.”
Autoglyph #196 – owned at one point by Nate Alex (OpenSea)
“I fumbled and it was tough because I knew how significant and how special they were. It’s just the amount of money to me at the time — which doesn’t sound like a lot anymore — was too much…
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