Katie is the Cofounder and Chief of Strategy at Cent.co, an online platform where creators build their own branded page to sell or gift NFTs.

GBA: What does Web 3.0 mean to you?

Katie: It's a spirit of openness, interoperability, freedom of choice, ownership, and the control of one’s data and digital identity. We’re still in the primitive stage, and we’re all sort of figuring it out together. No one can say what direction the web is headed, so we just have to strap in and see where it goes. 

GBA: When the average person thinks about NFTs right now, it’s pretty niche and exclusive. It’s difficult for independent artists to break into the market, and the culture hinges on discreet, private sales. How has Cento.co pushed against this prevailing attitude? 

Katie: While many platforms talk about ownership, we are truly artist-centered, with a 95/5 percent split. And when a creator organizes their page on our platform, they see who their subscribers and audience are and retain that information. Creators have been fighting against a lack of transparency in the art world and music business for a century, and it's exciting to see many competitors (competition is healthy!) in this space providing tools to change the status quo.

We loved how the GBA artists Sue Huang and Jonah King deployed our platform — giving away a free Honey Fungus specimen to educate their community on their work: interspecies culture. And we can’t wait to see how they continue to evolve with their NFT specimen collection.

 

 

GBA: What is the current climate of the NFT space right now?

Katie: A healthy society can be measured by the art and culture produced. And we are not so healthy right now. We are being controlled by people that don’t care about art but care about money and clout. NFTs aren’t simply crypto and digital art. They can be anything, even physical goods. NFTs are simply a certificate of authenticity, like a receipt, rendered in metadata. The media (and not for any nefarious reason) may misrepresent the potential of the NFT ecosystem and what the technology can do. And the artificial hurdle of requiring crypto before doing anything on the blockchain doesn’t help either. 

I’m optimistic about the future of NFTs. While many are finding their place in Web 3.0, whether it be finance, content creation, or AI, Cento.co has found a niche helping creatives in this rapidly evolving ecosystem. We’re all riding up the backside of a wave together, so we’ll have to see where it goes. From the plague came the renaissance.