The Covid-19 pandemic hit artists like Cam Rackam hard. The 42-year-old artist from Huntington Beach, California saw his entire money-making enterprise suffer — art exhibitions got canceled, sales slowed and his commissions dried up.
So Rackam pivoted to the digital art world.
Up until 2021, the most money Rackam had made by selling a piece of his own art was $11,000 for a painting and sculpture piece he sold in 2015. But that quickly changed after Rackam started creating digital art as NFTs, or nonfungible tokens.
Rackam tells CNBC Make It he’d seen the success of popular NFT art collections, like the Bored Ape Yacht Club and Beeple’s $69 million NFT project, and decided it could be a fun – and lucrative – space for him to explore, as well.
“I realized being able to see all of your clients on the blockchain at the same time, you could start doing some real interesting stuff with it,” Rackam tells CNBC Make It. “I started getting some crazy ideas.”
His launch into selling digital art started when Rackam reached out to a popular meme page on Instagram called @wallstmemes and asked if they wanted to collaborate on an NFT collection. They agreed and Rackam created thousands of iterations of a Wall Street-themed cartoon bull.
