J1mmy.eth once minted 420 Bored Apes… and had NFTs worth $150M: NFT Creator
When the history books are written, and the documentaries are made on the formative days of NFTs, Jimmy McNelis, aka j1mmy.eth, will hold a special place in history as a creator, as a passionate advocate, and for having one of the greatest NFT collections of all time.
An NFT OG who started his journey on Dec. 5, 2017, when he purchased his first CryptoKitty, the 45-year-old American is also the founder of Avastars, an early PFP project from February 2020 that set the scene for intellectual property (IP) rights being given to holders.
That was popularized by Bored Ape Yacht Club and the 2021 PFP mania that saw IP rights for holders becoming the standard for most projects. Avastars was also a pioneer in putting the project on-chain, inspired by Autoglyphs, which minted 10 months earlier.
J1mmy also has an almost unrivaled NFT collection worth around $150 million at the peak. The astonishing collection includes eight Autoglyphs, 19 Chromie Squiggles, 30 Bored Apes, five CryptoPunks, 11 Gazers, 61 Meebits, 114 CyberBrokers and a Twin Flame by Justin Aversano.
“At its peak it was about $150 million. Whether or not that was actually liquid but $150 million was on one of the wallet portfolio sites. Today, it’s probably 1/10th of that,” says j1mmy.
“One thing that I maybe don’t do a good enough job really talking about is the collector aspect of my NFT journey and the art collector that I am as well. I believe that I have one of the best art collections in existence.”
“I see a lot of funds out there trying to recreate essentially what I already have and what other people already have as well, but to a lesser extent. I used to have 30 Autoglyphs but still have held onto eight of them. If you use those as an example, if a fund owns one single Autoglyph, that’s considered pretty significant.”
Not afraid to speak his mind as a key voice in often heated debates, j1mmy has also been one of the biggest advocates for creator royalties, watching what was once a key value proposition of NFTs fall by the wayside in recent times. Whether pro royalties, on-chain champion or defending IP rights, j1mmy doesn’t mind a debate while keeping perspective as a new husband and dad.
“I’ll be the angry old man yelling at a cloud meme. At the end of the day, I hope people understand that I’m very passionate about this stuff, that should be very obvious to everybody at this point,” says j1mmy.
“I love debating, so sometimes I’ll start an argument,” he admits. “I love hot takes because it’s interesting and not just agreeing with everybody and WAGMI and all that shit. All of this, I hope, leads to evolution of what we’re doing. I want us to evolve. I want us to continue to improve, and I think that’s the point of all this.”
Avastars – The project for the future
Avastars, j1mmy’s pride and joy as a creator, is often overlooked for the role it played in an array of different areas, including being arguably the first true intentional PFP project (Punks were an experiment at the time of mint), being on-chain and giving IP rights to holders.
Inspired by j1mmy’s frustration of discovering his CryptoKitties collection wasn’t stored on-chain and by Larva Labs Autoglyphs, which was the first generative art stored fully on-chain, Avastars was born in February 2020.
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According to j1mmy, he saw it as a hybrid of CryptoKitties and CryptoPunks with their ability to create replicants.
“To me, they [CryptoKitties] had made a huge mistake right from the beginning, and it set a bad precedent. I was out there trying to fight that precedent so when the time came, we would have on-chain NFTs, and people like Elon Musk couldn’t say, well, they’re all fucked because they’re not stored on the blockchain.”
“I was literally anticipating the comments about NFTs from Musk on Rogan in January and February 2018. It was so ridiculous. You mean to tell me we have this blockchain and we have these NFTs, and we’re not storing the information on the blockchain? That’s the stupidest shit ever.”
J1mmy does feel strongly that his Avastars project is underappreciated.
“Avastars is still a better NFT project than 99% of the stuff out there. Technically speaking and historically speaking. To be honest, the only project that I really feel like is a spiritual successor to Avastars is CyberBrokers.”
J1mmy’s mouth-watering NFT collection
The collection is enough to make an NFT collector drool in awe, including pieces from just about every big artist in the space, including XCOPY, Beeple, Matt Kane, Snowfro, Hackatao, Josie Bellini and one of his personal favorites, Australian VR artist Giant Swan, who j1mmy commissioned to do a work to commemorate his wedding to wife, sunrise.eth.
But unlike some of his collector contemporaries who focus primarily on art-only NFTs, j1mmy enjoys collecting and trading PFPs and other interesting projects. He once minted 420 Bored Apes alongside his good friend and well-renowned trader, Pranksy, which helped set the BAYC mint on fire, and the rest is history.
“I have a really, really ridiculous NFT collection. I have three wallets now that I collect from — my original j1mmy.ETH, my vault wallet and my cold wallet. That’s where I basically hold all of my Ethereum NFTs. I think of it as a giant NFT mutual fund, just my own personal collection,” j1mmy says.
“I hope one day that I link up with an institution that wants to put my stuff on display because I think I have a really interesting collection that could be curated into quite a museum exhibit. The history of NFTs or something of that nature basically.”
Many of the NFT collector DAOs and funds like Flamingo DAO and Curated are very deliberate in their approach, but for j1mmy, the majority of his collection was sparked from sheer curiosity.
“There’s so many things in my wallets, I don’t even have a handle on it at this point. My NFT collection is so extensive, I’ve forgotten so many things that I’ve minted,” j1mmy says.
Inside the mind of a top-tier NFT collector and trader
J1mmy’s top collecting and trading tip is to treat the market as being based on sentiment, not on reality.
“This is a sentiment based like economy right now. Everything right now is unfortunately not rooted in reality. Value is not rooted in reality. It’s based on sentiment and how people feel so the key to trading is to understand people’s feelings and how close they are to changing those feelings,” says j1mmy.
“Trying to read that sentiment and selling to people while the sentiment is really high is important and not being the last one. It’s a game of musical chairs sometimes. That could be a short-term game of musical chairs. Prices go down, prices go up. The one constant is, prices don’t stay the same. That’s the one constant that I constantly remind myself of.”
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Similar to the great Warren Buffett quote, “Be fearful when others are greedy and be greedy when others are fearful”, j1mmy has a similar philosophy to his NFT buying and selling.
“My approach is when everybody else is buying, I want to be selling and when everybody else is selling, I want to be buying. It’s not an original strategy, I’m pretty sure it’s a Warren Buffett-like saying. I just apply that to NFTs,” he says.
“I was a buyer during the 2020-22 bull market but I also sold some stuff too. During this bear market, I actually spent all my ETH. I’ve been a consistent buyer during this bear but just more selectively this time.”
From zero to hero
J1mmy reflects that his NFT journey has been truly enriched by still being surrounded and supported by a group of friends with curious minds from the early CryptoKitties days. Their mantra was they were either going to spend all of their money on CryptoKitties, and it’ll go great or not so well.
Ironically, it wasn’t CryptoKitties itself that worked out but the lessons they took from those days that put them in a strong position to capitalize on the 2020-22 bull run.
“It’s extremely satisfying to sit back and see where we are today versus where we were. We talked about zeros or heroes in 2018. A few of us ended up being heroes with NFTs, it didn’t end up being necessarily with CryptoKitties but we shot our shot, and came out on top,” j1mmy says.
“It’s really great to have gone through that with a group of people and not alone. Being successful is often a solo journey. We all went in our own directions, but having the camaraderie and the peers to succeed alongside of has been really the most rewarding part of all this.”
“I’m very grateful for the entire space, all of the creators, all of the community, everybody around. It’s been the best years of my life so far and I’m looking forward to what’s to come.”
Rapid fire Q&A
Favorite art NFT you own?
“My favorite one of one is my Twin Flames #19 by Justin Aversano. I’ve got the two punk rock twins.”
Favorite NFT in your total collection in general?
“My Avastar #141, which is my PFP.”
Are you still in Flamingo DAO?
“I am. I just recently put that back into my Twitter profile because I didn’t think people recognized that I was a part of it. I traded an Autoglyph to get into Flamingo. That turned out to be one of my best trades, even though it was a really rare Autoglyph. I traded an NFT, and now I own nearly 1% of one of the best collections in the space. Flamingo definitely rivals my own collection.”
What do you think is an undervalued or underappreciated NFT project right now?
“My answer is CyberBrokers. The level of detail, the extreme cost of putting all that stuff on-chain, and their continued building efforts are pretty incredible. The whole experience as a participant in CyberBrokers has been even better than that of Yuga Labs from an execution standpoint.”
“I think I have put more raw ETH into that than any other individual project and if I’m wrong about that one being a huge success on the market, then so be it. I still own all of this amazing on-chain art.”
What’s your advice to someone that’s just discovering NFTs today?
“This is one reason I really love Gary Vee. He’s a polarizing figure at times, but he gives really good advice I think, generally speaking. One of those things that he was telling people in 2021 was to do 40 hours of research before you make any purchases. I would even double that at this point. I would say spend a month or two learning what all this is before you decide that you’re going to put anything into this.”
“It’s easy for me to say now from where I sit, but I also wouldn’t go into this with the expectation of profiting right away. The other thing I would caution is, pay very close attention to how taxes work.”
What’s the best Art Blocks project?
“I think Gazers is the best Art Blocks project by far. Matt Kane is an incredible artist, and he’s flexed his muscle on Art Blocks like no one else has. I’m still trying to find displays where I can actually see his artwork every day. He created something so cool that there’s not an easy solution here.”
What advice would you give to j1mmy just before he purchased his first CryptoKitty back in December 2017? Would you do anything different?
“Fuck no man. I would not give myself any advice because I needed to go into this with blind ambition like I did. I needed to misunderstand what CryptoKitties were to think that they were on-chain because if I hadn’t, I would have never created Avastars.”
“You know, naivety is sometimes our greatest gift, and ignorance is bliss. Truly, with NFTs, I went in far too heavy, far too deep and far too hard, and look where I’m at today. It’s not often in life that overindulgence pays off, but in this case it did for me, It’s one of those rare situations where I wouldn’t change a damn thing.”
Links:
Avastars website: avastars.io/
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Politics
Specialist teams and online investigators deployed across England and Wales to tackle ‘national emergency’ of violence against women and girls
Specialist investigation teams for rape and sexual offences are to be created across England and Wales as the home secretary declares violence against women and girls a “national emergency”.
Shabana Mahmood said the dedicated units will be in place across every force by 2029 as part of Labour’s violence against women and girls (VAWG) strategy due to be launched later this week.
The use of Domestic Abuse Protection Orders (DAPOs), which had been trialled in several areas, will also be rolled out across England and Wales. They are designed to target abusers by imposing curfews, electronic tags and exclusion zones.
The orders cover all forms of domestic abuse, including economic abuse, coercive and controlling behaviour, stalking and ‘honour’-based abuse. Breaching the terms can carry a prison term of up to five years.
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Govt ‘thinking again’ on abuse strategy
Nearly £2m will also be spent funding a network of officers to target offenders operating within the online space.
Teams will use covert and intelligence techniques to tackle violence against women and girls via apps and websites.
A similar undercover network funded by the Home Office to examine child sexual abuse has arrested over 1,700 perpetrators.
Abuse is ‘national emergency’
Ms Mahmood said in a statement: “This government has declared violence against women and girls a national emergency.
“For too long, these crimes have been considered a fact of life. That’s not good enough. We will halve it in a decade.
“Today, we announce a range of measures to bear down on abusers, stopping them in their tracks. Rapists, sex offenders and abusers will have nowhere to hide.”
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Angiolini Inquiry: Recommendations are ‘not difficult’
The target to halve violence against women and girls in a decade is a Labour manifesto pledge.
The government said the measures build on existing policy, including facial recognition technology to identify offenders, improving protections for stalking victims, making strangulation a criminal offence and establishing domestic abuse specialists in 999 control rooms.
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Labour has ‘failed women’
But the Conservatives said Labour had “failed women” and “broken its promises” by delaying the publication of the violence against women and girls strategy.
Shadow home secretary Chris Philp said that Labour “shrinks from uncomfortable truths, voting against tougher sentences and presiding over falling sex-offender convictions. At every turn, Labour has failed women”.
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood will be on Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips on Sky News this morning from 8.30am.
The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) published a crypto wallet and custody guide investor bulletin on Friday, outlining best practices and common risks of different forms of crypto storage for the investing public.
The SEC’s bulletin lists the benefits and risks of different methods of crypto custody, including self-custody versus allowing a third-party to hold digital assets on behalf of the investor.
If investors choose third-party custody, they should understand the custodian’s policies, including whether it “rehypothecates” the assets held in custody by lending them out or if the service provider is commingling client assets in a single pool instead of holding the crypto in segregated customer accounts.
Crypto wallet types were also outlined in the SEC guide, which broke down the pros and cons of hot wallets, which are connected to the internet, and offline storage in cold wallets.
Hot wallets carry the risk of hacking and other cybersecurity threats, according to the SEC, while cold wallets carry the risk of permanent loss if the offline storage fails, a storage device is stolen, or the private keys are compromised.
The SEC’s crypto custody guide highlights the sweeping regulatory change at the agency, which was hostile to digital assets and the crypto industry under former SEC Chairman Gary Gensler’s leadership.
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The crypto community celebrates the SEC guide as a transformational change in the agency
“The same agency that spent years trying to kill the industry is now teaching people how to use it,” Truth For the Commoner (TFTC) said in response to the SEC’s crypto custody guide.
The SEC is providing “huge value” to crypto investors by educating prospective crypto holders about custody and best practices, according to Jake Claver, the CEO of Digital Ascension Group, a company that provides services to family offices.
SEC regulators published the guide one day after SEC Chair Paul Atkins said that the legacy financial system is moving onchain.
On Thursday, the SEC gave the green light to the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), a clearing and settlement company, to begin tokenizing financial assets, including equities, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and government debt securities.
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Greens leader Zack Polanski has rejected claims his party would push for open borders on immigration, telling Sky News it is “not a pragmatic” solution for a world in “turmoil”.
Mr Polanski distanced himself from his party’s “long-range vision” for open borders, saying it was not in his party’s manifesto and was an “attack line used by opponents” to question his credibility.
It came as Mr Polanski, who has overseen a spike in support in the polls to double figures, refused to apologise over controversial comments he made about care workers on BBC Question Time that were criticised across the political spectrum.
Mr Polanski was speaking to Sky News earlier this week while in Calais, where he joined volunteers and charities to witness how French police handle the arrival of migrants in the town that is used as a departure point for those wanting to make the journey to the UK.
He told Sky News he had made the journey to the French town – once home to the “Jungle” refugee camp before it was demolished in 2016 – to tackle “misinformation” about migration and to make the case for a “compassionate, fair and managed response” to the small boats crisis.
He said that “no manifesto ever said anything about open borders” and that the Greens had never stood at a general election advocating for them.
“Clearly when the world is in political turmoil and we have deep inequality, that is not a situation we can move to right now,” he said.
“That would also involve massive international agreements and cooperation. That clearly is not a pragmatic conversation to have right now. And very often the government try to push that attack line to make us look not pragmatic.”
The party’s manifesto last year did not mention open borders, but it did call for an end to the “hostile environment”, more safe and legal routes and for the Home Office to be abolished and replaced with a department of migration.
Asked why the policy of minimal restrictions on migration had been attributed to his party, Mr Polanski said open borders was part of a “long-range vision of what society could look like if there was a Green government and if we’d had a long time to fix some of the systemic problems”.
‘We should recognise the contribution migrants make’
Mr Polanski, who was elected Green Party leader in September and has been compared to Nigel Farage over his populist economic policies, said his position was one of a “fair and managed” migration system – although he did not specify whether that included a cap on numbers.
He acknowledged that there needed to be a “separate conversation” about economic migration but that he did not believe any person who boarded a small boat was in a “good situation”.
While Mr Polanski stressed that he believed asylum seekers should be able to work in Britain and pay taxes, he also said he believed in the need to train British workers in sectors such as care, where one in five are foreign nationals.
Asked what his proposals for a fair and managed migration system looked like, and whether he supported a cap on numbers, Mr Polanski said: “We have 100,000 vacancies in the National Health Service. One in five care workers in the care sector are foreign nationals.
Zack Polanski speaks to Sky News from a warehouse in Calais where charities and organisations provide migrants with essentials.
“Now, of course, that is both British workers and we should be training British workers, but we should recognise the contribution that migrants and people who come over here make.”
I’m not going to apologise’
Mr Polanski also responded to the criticism he attracted over his comments about care workers on Question Time last week, where he told the audience: “I don’t know about you, but I don’t particularly want to wipe someone’s bum” – before adding: “I’m very grateful for the people who do this work.”
His comments have been criticised by a number of Labour MPs, including Wes Streeting, the health secretary, who said: “Social care isn’t just ‘wiping someone’s bum’. It is a hard, rewarding, skilled professional job.
“This is immigration as exploitation.”
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Asked whether he could understand why some care workers might feel he had talked down to them, the Greens leader replied: “I care deeply about care workers. When I made those comments, it’s important to give a full context. I said ‘I’m very grateful to people who do this important work’ and absolutely repeat that it’s vital work.”
“Of course, it is not part of the whole job, and I never pretended it was part of the whole job.”
Mr Polanski said he “totally” rejected the suggestion that he had denigrated the role of care workers in the eyes of the public and said his remarks were made in the context of a “hostile Question Time” where he had “three right-wing panellists shouting at me”.
Pressed on whether he wanted to apologise, he replied: “I’m not going to apologise for being really clear that I’m really grateful to the people who do this really vital work. And yes, we should be paying them properly, too.”
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