London has been at the forefront of one of the more creative disruptions accelerated by the pandemic - the explosion of interest in crypto art, or art turned into tokens on the blockchain, both as an asset class and as a global cultural trend. The majority of NFT marketplaces are hosted from New York or Silicon Valley but London and Berlin have emerged as an engine of cultural creation, validation and innovation.
The Decentralised Arts Lab (Decal), run by Furtherfield, epitomises the success of leaner, community-facing organisations in championing the blockchain as a more progressive ecosystem. Its director, Ruth Catlow, thinks Furtherfield has paved the way for critical and creative experimentation with network technologies through its 2017 publication, Artists Re:Thinking the Blockchain, and its DAOWO (Decentralised Autonomous Organisation with Others) initiative, which “seeks to produce a commons for arts in the network age”. Catlow says: “This is then turbocharged by London’s status as a financial centre and its rich connections with the artistic, technical and activist communities of the Berlin scene.”
https://www.ft.com/content/9c5a831f-4c3a-457f-b36e-950ba3a23b80