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Fortune's top 50 NFT influencers

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The driving force behind NFT

Source: Fortune

Compiler: 0x13, rhythm BlockBeats

In 2021, NFT is out of the loop like never before, from NBA Top Shot to Beeple to Axie Infinity and CryptoPunks, Bored Ape Yacht Club, Various NFT segments, from blockchain games to crypto art to collectibles, are coming into the mainstream.

At the same time, as we marvel at the NFT's emergence after years of hibernation, we can't forget the people behind it. BlockBeats has compiled Fortune's list of the 50 most influential movers and shakers in the NFT space.

1, Beeple

The Picasso of digital art. The South Carolina-based digital artist sold his "Everydays" collage for $69 million at Christie's in March, a record NFT sale. He is known for his unsavory depicdepicts of pop culture and political leaders, such as Joe Biden as a variation of Buzz Lightyear.

2, CryptoPunks

It's one of the most coveted collectibles in the crypto world. Larva Labs, based in New York City, distributed the 10,000 pixelated avatars to the community for free in 2017, and some of them sold for millions of dollars starting in late 2020. Each of these pixel heads has a unique combination of features, such as being an alien, wearing sunglasses or smoking.

3, Roham Gharegozlou

The CEO of Dapper Labs brought NFT into the mainstream with the development of NBA Top Shot. His startup is reportedly in the process of raising money at a valuation of $7.5 billion. Dapper Labs shot to fame in 2017 when it launched CryptoKitties.

4, Mark Cuban

The billionaire investor said that if he were younger, he would start a blockchain business. Cuban, the owner of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks, has even considered putting game tickets on the NFT. He is also a supporter of Mintable, an NFT trading platform.

5, Pplpleasr

Emily Yang has worked on visual design for Batman v Superman, Wonder Woman and has helped create moving graphics for several DeFi projects, including a Uniswap-related video that led to the creation of PleaserDAO, an NFT fund. In addition, she designed honey for Fortune's August/September 2021 issue, which will be sold as a limited-edition NFT.

6, jay-z

The HipHop mogul is one of the most famous celebrities to use CryptoPunk as a Twitter avatar, and he's also on Square's board of directors. With the help of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Square acquired Jay-Z's business and music streaming service Tidal for $300 million earlier this year.

7, Paris Hilton

The Hilton heiress believes the NFT is "the future of the creator economy". Her work with Los Angeles-based artist Blake Kathryn sold for more than $1 million. She is also a strategic advisor to Origin Protocol, a blockchain project.

8, 3 lau

The electronic DJ made a fortune early on in the NFT craze. He sold the world's first NFT album, earning $11.6 million in March. Kings of Leon, RAC, and Jay-Z followed in his footsteps.

9, Grimes

The 33-year-old Canadian singer-songwriter has sold more than $6 million worth of NFT art, and Grimes occasionally collaborates with her brother Mac Boucher. Of course, the father of her own children, Elon Musk, prefers dogecoin.

10, Gary Vee

Marketing guru Gary Vee hand-painted 268 stick figures as the basis for 10,255 VeeFriend NFT. These sketches come with exclusive benefits such as gift boxes, mentor meetings and conference tickets.

11, Itzel Yard

Itzel Yard is one of the best-selling NFT female artists. Tor, who builds privacy-focused web browsers, commissioned Dreaming at Dusk, which was sold to PleasrDAO on the Foundation platform for about $2 million. Itzel Yard's work is usually generative art, that is, patterns and shapes formed by automation and computation.

12, Pak

The true identity of the mysterious artist is a mystery. He has created many NFT artworks that are dynamic, constantly changing and even contain puzzles. Pak sold a gray pixel block to a Bay Area investor in April for nearly $1.4 million.

13, XCOPY

XCOPY, an artist from London, was one of the early pioneers of crypto art because he thought it was "the first and only way to really sell my art". The early pioneers of the NFT reveal little about themselves, but their work stands out among all artists. Statically saturated graphics often flicker wildly and are themed around death or utopia.

14, Fewocious

Victor Langlois is an 18-year-old transgender NFT artist who goes by the stage name FEWOCiOUS. The son of Salvadoran immigrants, he first appeared at Christie's when so many bids crashed the website that Christie's had to postpone the sale for two days.

15, Krista Kim

Krista Kim is the creator of Mars House, an NFT digital home that sold in March for 288ETH, or about $663,000, more than even the current median selling price for a HOME in the United States. Krista Kim is the founder of the Techism movement, which aims to bridge the gap between technology and art.

16, Josie Bellini

Josie Bellini, a crypto artist with a financial background whose work is often related to the inner workings of the digital asset world, is currently working with CyberBrokers, a project that will include a 10,001 crypto art collection. A CyberBroker owner will have access to MirrorWave, which Bellini is creating "a metacosmic fashion brand," as she writes in her Substack newsletter.

17, Micah, Johnson

After years in major League Baseball, Micah Johnson transformed himself into a successful digital artist, selling $1 million worth of art in just 60 seconds. Micah often deals with black children in her work. He says he wants to inspire young people and show them they can do things themselves.

In the 18th and Metakovan

Earlier this year, Vignesh Sundaresan bought the most expensive NFT ever, Beeple's Everydays. He and his partners at Metapurse, an investment fund focused on the NFT, Twobadour, paid $69.3 million for the piece. "The point is to show Indians and people of color that they can also be sponsors and that cryptocurrencies are an equal force between the West and the rest of the world." "He wrote in an article about the auction.

19, Devin Finzer

Devin Finzer is a former Engineer at Pinterest and co-creator of OpenSea. In July, the startup raised $100 million at a private valuation of $1.5 billion. Today, OpenSea is the industry's largest NFT market, Posting record sales even as rival sites' revenues decline.

20, Katie Haun

Former federal prosecutor Katie Haun is co-leading venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz's multibillion-dollar cryptocurrency fund with investor Chris Dixon. The fund, called A16Z Crypto, is a major supporter of top NFT-related startups. Portfolio companies include NBA Top Shot producer Dapper Labs, NFT marketplace OpenSea and digital horse-racing game ZedRun.

21, John Legere

The former CEO of T-Mobile is one of the world's top NFT buyers. The former telecom mogul spent more than $2 million on psychedelic music videos by DJS 3LAU and Steve Aoki. In March, he joked that he might buy the NFT of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey's first tweet (someone beat him at auction, paying nearly $3m).

22, Dylan Field

Dylan Field is the CEO of Figma, a $10 billion visual-design software startup. A longtime BELIEVER in NFT, he bought a pipe-smoking alien called CryptoPunk for $15,000, which he found "super attractive." This year, he sold the head, which he once considered "potentially the Mona Lisa of the digital world," for $7.5 million ETH, just one of at least 10 CryptoPunks in his personal collection. Dylan Field is also an investor in OpenSea, an NFT marketplace.

23, Hackatao

Hackatao is a group made up of Nadia Squarci and Sergio Scarlet, who live in the mountains outside Milan, where they have been making digital art since 2018. They are "two opposing but complementary souls," Squarci told MOCA. The pair often depict small cartoon monsters in their surrealist Pop art.

24, Neda Whitney

Neda Whitney is Christie's head of marketing for the Americas. She helped push the 254-year-old auction house into the digital world. She is best known for helping to sell Beeple's Everydays, which attracted the attention of the art world when it sold for nearly $70 million in March.

25, Cuy Sheffield

Visa's head of cryptocurrency is an NFT collector and has been bullish on the technology's prospects for years. Cuy Sheffield believes that cryptocurrency art, in particular, can help less well-known creators make a living; In 2020, he wrote in a blog post that it could help fuel a "black digital Renaissance."

26, Ben Nolan

Ben Nolan is the founder of CryptoVoxels, a virtual world filled with digital art galleries. The site is a key part of the NFT world's burgeoning blockchain metauniverse, where people can buy digital land and display their collections.

27, FlamingoDAO

FlamingoDAO, a group of wealthy cryptocurrency investors who pool funds to bid on NFT works, has amassed quite a collection in less than a year since its launch. FlamingoDAO also has a rare alien collection called CryptoPunk, which it purchased in January for OVER $750,000 worth of ETH. The fund's sponsors include Aaron Wright, a professor at Cardozo School of Law and co-founder of OpenLaw, a blockchain protocol for legal protocols, and Priyanka Desai, who leads OpenLaw's operations.

28, John Crain

John Crain is CEO of Crypto art market SuperRare. SuperRare launched on the Ethereum network in 2018, allowing users to make and trade NFT art.

29, Duncan & amp; Griffin Cock Foster

Former rowers, the Cock Foster brothers are co-founders of Nifty Gateway, one of the top NFT art sales platforms. The brothers sold their site to cryptocurrency company Gemini in 2019. Now they are employees of Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, another pair of twins.

30, Marguerite DeCourcelle

Marguerite DeCourcelle is CEO of Blockade Games, a blockchain game studio, and an avid NFT collector. Marguerite DeCourcelle studio's first game, "Neon District," allows players to earn and buy NFT items. She even tokenized herself to measure how influencers create ownership for their brands.

31, Lindsay Howard

Lindsay Howard is community director for Foundation, an NFT marketplace launched earlier this year. Lindsay Howard curated The first ever digital art auction at Forbes in 2013. She has curated exhibitions for museums including the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City.

32, Jen Stark

The los angeles-based artist's "Multiverse" NFT was auctioned in March for a whopping 150ETH ($343,071). Its sale makes Jen Stark the first female artist to make the Foundation's top 10 best-selling creators list.

33, Diana Sinclair

It didn't take long for the 17-year-old artist to make his mark in the crypto art world. On June 1, Diana Sinclair curated "The Digital Diaspora," an NFT exhibition and auction dedicated to celebrating The work of black artists. Its proceeds go to Herstory DAO, a group she co-founded to collect the work of marginalized creators, such as gay people.

34, Jimmy McNelis

Jimmy McNelis is an avid NFT collector and the CEO and co-founder of NFT 42. His company is best known for creating AvaStars, a digital collectible project that sells generated avatars of quirky science fiction. McNelis is also a co-founder of Nameless, a project that works with brands to launch NFT.

35, Colborn Bell

Bell, a former investment banker and trader, now collects and curates cryptocurrency Art as director and co-founder of the Museum of Crypto Art. The agency helped solidify the NFT art market last year, buying Picasso "s Bull" on Nifty Gateway in 2020 for $55,555.55 ETH.

36, Gisel Florez

Gisel Florez is a photographer and co-founder of Women of Crypto Art, a community of Women who love the Crypto world. Gisel Florez sells his digital art and has participated in traditional and cryptographic-centric exhibitions, including NFTNYC, ETH Denver and PROOFOFART Museum, among others.

37, Denis Nazarov

The former Andreessen Horowitz partner is trying to build an encrypted publishing platform, unlike Medium or Substack. In the new model, readers help fund writers in exchange for the NFT. Mirror.xyz recently raised $10 million at a $100 million valuation from Union Square Ventures, Andresseen Horowitz, and others, according to The Information.

38, Paris Rouzati

According to IDEO CoLab Ventures, the firm's new partners focus on the firm's investments in "metaverse, NFT, social tokens and DeFi." Paris Rouzati has also invested in companies such as Fei and Showtime.

39, Jeff Zirlin

Jeff Zirlin, nicknamed "Jiho," is the co-founder of Axie Infinity. The NFT based game, in which people battle chubby fantasy beasts, plays a bit like an encrypted Pokemon, and its marketplace allows players to earn substitution coins in the game. Jeff Zirlin has been collecting insects and fossils since he was a child.

40, Gabby Dizon

Gabby Dizon is co-founder of Yield Guild Games. The company invests and works with people who play games, like the blockchain-based Axie Infinity, to earn NFT rewards. Dizon sees it as a way to narrow the gap between rich and poor, since in his hometown, players can earn three times the local minimum wage. Dizon also co-founded Altitude Games, a southeast Asian mobile game studio, in 2014.

41, Bored Ape Yacht Club

Bored Ape Yacht Club is made up of 10,000 collectible NFT's, and the benefits of holding these 'boring Ape' heads include access to a digital graffiti wall known as the 'bathroom wall' or the adoption of a virtual puppy.

42, Maria Shen

The 30-year-old partner at Electric Capital has a soft spot for Metaverses. Avalanche by Neil Stephenson is one of Maria Shen's favorite science fiction books, so when an encryption-based metauniverse appeared on her radar, she said she was "very excited." Now, Maria Shen helps oversee a portfolio of different crypto companies and believes art represents only the "tip of the iceberg" for NFTs.

43, Gmoney

The Puerto Rican-based, karaoke loving investor paid 140 ETH (about $170,000) in January for a CryptoPunk avatar, the influential NFT booster uses the online name "Gmoney." Gmoney is also the general partner of Delphi INFINFT, a fund established by Cryptocurrency research and investment firm Delphi Digital to invest in NFT projects.

44, Pranksy

Pranksy, an anonymous NFT investor pioneer with a large following and collection, is one of the Top hoarders of NBA Top Shot.

45, Erick Calderon

Erick Calderon is the founder and CEO of Art Blocks, a platform for generative Art. Since its launch a year ago, Art Blocks has gained attention from a number of people, including Sotheby's, which recently sold 19 works from the platform in a sale totaling $81,000. Erick Calderon, a Houston native, uses the name Snowfro online after an ice cream stand he once owned.

46, Cooper Turley

Cooper Turley helped launch Friends with Benefits, an exclusive token threshold community on chat app Discord, where only people with FWB tokens can join the club. Cooper Turley is also a strategic advisor to Audius, a decentralized music streaming alternative to Spotify and Pandora, and to Variant Fund, It's a cryptocurrency investment firm founded by former Andreessen Horowitz partner Jesse Walden.

47, Artchick

"Artchick" is a powerful and rising voice in the NFT collecting world, known for calling attention to female creators, collectors and gay people in the crypto world. According to its Twitter profile, the pseudonymous account had a requirement. "Never send me a private message."

48, Andrew Steinwold

Andrew Steinwold is a crypto analyst and founder of Sfermion, an investment firm focused on digital asset projects. Steinwold's influential newsletter and podcast series, called Zima Red, is an important part of metaverse lovers' mental food, through which Steinwold explores virtual worlds with people and discusses all of NFT.

49, CHerie, Hu

Cherie Hu writes an influential newsletter, Water & AMP; Music, on the intersection of Music and technological innovation. In addition to assessing the future use of the NFT in the industry, she has published research that quantifies the income earned by musicians in the NFT economy.

50, Nicole Buffett

Nicole Buffett, granddaughter of famed investor Warren Buffett, and her fiance Justin Aversano are top NFT photographers who donate most of the proceeds of their work to charity.