Yam Karkai’s Illustrations Made Her an N.F.T. Sensation. Now What?
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On September 24, 2021, Yam Karkai opened Twitter to see a direct message from Reese Witherspoon. Karkai is a digital illustrator in her late twenties with a warm smile and pale-blue eyes. During the pandemic, she and her partner, Raphaël Malavieille, had decided to pack up their home in Paris and live as nomads; they were staying with Malavieille’s mother in the South of France when Karkai received Witherspoon’s message. Having an actress whose movies she had grown up watching slide into her D.M.s felt “magical,” Karkai told me.
Witherspoon was writing to ask for recommendations of female artists making non-fungible tokens, or N.F.T.s. Sales of N.F.T.s in the first half of 2021 had reached $2.5 billion, and the field had a distinct boys’-club sensibility. The actress was one of a number of Hollywood women who felt excluded from the crypto boom. They wanted to learn more, and—in the grand tradition of minting Susan B. Anthony coins and casting female Ghostbusters—to stake a claim for women in a sphere dominated by men. “I’m definitely on a mission to make more women more money,” Witherspoon told Gayle King in an interview, which aired on the day she messaged Karkai, touting the sale of her media company, Hello Sunshine, for nearly a billion dollars.
Karkai had caught Witherspoon’s attention with a project that she and Malavieille had launched two months earlier, called World of Women: an N.F.T. collection made up of Karkai’s drawings of glamorous cartoon sylphs. The WoWs, as she came to call them, had full lips and strong brows, and were variously outfitted with fluffy party dresses, spiked collars, purple lipstick, Princess Leia buns, and 3-D glasses. Karkai used a splashy, saturated palette that suggested Lisa Frank for grownups, and the kind of flat, graphic style seen on beach-read covers. World of Women’s female artist and subjects distinguished it from most other N.F.T. enterprises. (A collection called Fame Lady Squad had previously claimed to be a woman-led project selling the first line of female avatars, but Karkai, unlike the founders of Fame Lady Squad, was not eventually revealed to be three Russian-speaking men.)
N.F.T.s have been likened to works of art, to trading cards, to investment vehicles, and to virtual streetwear. In general terms, an N.F.T. is a permanent digital record of ownership—that is, an entry in a decentralized public ledger, called a blockchain, saying that someone owns something. Very often, the thing in question is a JPEG image, purchased with cryptocurrency. In the breathless days of early 2021, twenty months before the spectacular implosion of the crypto exchange FTX threw the entire sector into crisis, N.F.T.s were trading at a rate that inspired comparisons to tulip mania. Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter, made an N.F.T. of his first tweet and sold it for the equivalent of more than $2.9 million. N.F.T.s were the stuff—along with cryptocurrencies, other blockchain applications, and the metaverse—of a hypothetical future Internet that tech evangelists had newly branded “web3.”
During this time, the most popular N.F.T. category was the profile pic, or P.F.P.: a digital portrait used as a social-media avatar. These were usually generated in batches of thousands by automatically reshuffling a limited number of features; certain features were “rarer” than others, and therefore theoretically more valuable. Monkeys with goofy accessories from a collection called Bored Ape Yacht Club brought in around seven million dollars during their first week of sales. Jay-Z reportedly spent some hundred and twenty-seven thousand dollars on a CryptoPunk, from a collection of pixelated faces in the style of nineteen-eighties video games. And, beyond the world of P.F.P.s, in March, 2021, an N.F.T. by a digital artist who goes by Beeple (his real name is Mike Winkelmann) sold for sixty-nine million dollars at Christie’s.
“From the beginning, it was just dudes everywhere,” Karkai told me. Like Witherspoon, she saw an opportunity. N.F.T.s united a range of fields and subcultures—tech, finance, comics, sports—in which men predominated. “I was, like, ‘What if I want to be part of this digital P.F.P. revolution, but I can’t, because I don’t find anything that looks like me?’ ” she said.
As Karkai surveyed an emerging menagerie of male Bored Ape imitators, an idea took shape. What if she were to create a P.F.P. collection? She says she liked that she would be “doing something for all the people who are being left behind.” Her goal was inclusivity, but, in her view, this was as much a matter of eliding differences as of embracing them. “The base woman had to be a person that could pass for almost any ethnicity,” she said. “I needed a neutral kind of avatar.” There would be no accessories with religious or political significance, and no hair styles that could be construed as culturally appropriative. Skin tones would range from beige and brown to “Avatar” blue. “This was a collection that I wanted any woman and diverse person to feel represented by,” Karkai told me.
Transforming her idea into a reality required technical expertise that neither Karkai nor Malavieille possessed. Over beers in Paris, they pitched World of Women to two of Malavieille’s friends, Loïc Kempf and Thomas Olivier, former co-workers from his time at a cloud-gaming company, who had since become interested in web3. They signed on to help. (Though Karkai is not herself three men, she did end up with three male co-founders.) Kempf and Olivier set to work on the face-generation technology and the “smart contracts” that would enable the images to be created and then sold on the Ethereum blockchain. Meanwhile, Malavieille began to develop the project’s strategy and social-media presence, and Karkai started drawing the hundred and seventy-two visual assets—lips, eyes, jewelry—that could be swapped in and out, Mrs. Potato Head-style, to generate ten thousand distinct N.F.T.s.
World of Women launched on July 27, 2021, the same day that Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis released their N.F.T. collection, Stoner Cats. The “minting” process—publishing a record of each newly available image to the blockchain—went smoothly, and for the first two hours sales were brisk. Buyers paid a fixed price of 0.07 Ethereum (then a bit more than a hundred and fifty dollars) for a high-resolution version of their WoW; they also received the intellectual-property rights to the image, a WoW soundtrack, access to a museum in the metaverse, and the possibility of WoW giveaways. Around twelve hundred WoWs had sold and things seemed to be slowing down when Karkai, pleased and relieved, went to bed.
She had been asleep for an hour or so when Malavieille burst into the room. “Yam Yam!” she remembers him saying. “There’s this guy called GaryVee, and he’s in our Discord!” Discord is a chat server, and GaryVee is Gary Vaynerchuk, a serial entrepreneur, an early N.F.T. influencer, and the author of “Crush It!” Vaynerchuk was online talking up World of Women, and the rest of the collection sold out within hours, bringing in more than $1.5 million.
“The feeling was like nothing I had ever felt in my life before,” Karkai said. Her mother cried and prayed when Karkai called her with the news. Her father expressed incredulity. “This is not normal,” she remembers him saying. “No one does things like that overnight.”
A few weeks after D.M.’ing Karkai, Witherspoon acquired a WoW with aviator sunglasses and blue skin and made it her Twitter avatar. Eva Longoria, Shonda Rhimes, and Gwyneth Paltrow followed. Moj Mahdara, the onetime C.E.O. of Beautycon and a co-founder, with Paltrow, of the investment fund Kinship Ventures, remembers thinking, “Oh, this is gonna be my son’s lunchbox.” The licensing potential of WoWs seemed obvious. “This feels like a cartoon that my kid might watch on Netflix,” Mahdara said. “It just feels like a piece of I.P.”
Guy Oseary, who manages Madonna and had recently begun working with the creators of Bored Ape Yacht Club, took on World of Women as a client. In January, around the time the lowest-priced WoWs were selling for 9 Ethereum (or some twenty-seven thousand dollars), Witherspoon showed off a second WoW, this one with red lips and purple skin. Hello Sunshine soon announced a deal to, Witherspoon told Variety, “partner with WoW to expand their universe of characters and to develop innovative scripted and unscripted content.” A month later, Karkai and her partners released World of Women Galaxy, or WoWGs, a sci-fi-inspired N.F.T. collection twice as big as the first, which also sold out promptly. Witherspoon, Paltrow, and Longoria tweeted their support. “Out of this world!!” Longoria wrote.
Christie’s celebrated Women’s History Month, 2022, by auctioning a tuxedo-clad WoW with star-spangled skin. The buyer was the crypto payment service MoonPay, which bid three-quarters of a million dollars on behalf of an unnamed client. “May the sale of this incredibly special NFT signal to all creative women across the globe that your vision is relevant, valuable and unique,” the Christie’s lot essay declared. “The time is now; the time is WoW.”
Portugal, sunny and affordable, has become a European haven for crypto enthusiasts: for the moment, the country does not tax cryptocurrency profits, and several startups, such as the crypto-based fantasy-football app RealFevr and the N.F.T. platform Exclusible, have set up shop in the Lisbon area. Karkai and Malavieille moved to the city on December 31, 2021. Kempf and Olivier, their two French co-founders, soon joined them there. Olivier is known online as Toomaïe; Kempf is BBA, or Boring Bored Ape, a character he has developed around his N.F.T. avatar, who makes boring jokes on Twitter. (“A very famous Bored Ape,” Karkai told me, when she introduced us.)
World of Women now has a staff of nineteen, and daily business is conducted over Zoom—Karkai and Malavieille join video chats from separate rooms of their apartment, in the city’s picturesque historic center. In August, however, the leadership team decided to meet in person. It was still summer, but “crypto winter” had descended—bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies had collapsed, wiping out some two trillion dollars in value since crypto’s market peak, in November, 2021. N.F.T. trading volume had fallen by more than ninety per cent since January. Selling cartoon women on the blockchain was no longer a sustainable business model.
The team gathered in the basement conference room of a Lisbon co-working space, lush with fake plants, to discuss the future of the company. World of Women’s new chief operating officer, Shannon Snow, had flown in from Miami. Karkai, who had once made mood boards of her visual influences (“Blade Runner,” “The Fifth Element,” Pierre Cardin), now needed to do some world-building. Wearing slouchy pants and a scrunchy around her wrist, she stood in front of a whiteboard that displayed a diagram mapping such concepts as “WoW Universe,” “Present,” “Future,” “Portals,” and “Villain.” Five of her colleagues sat around two long tables. Karkai and Malavieille’s shaggy dog wandered at their feet.
Karkai looks a bit like one of her illustrations, but, where the WoWs have an uncanny blankness of expression, she has a shy, flickering intensity. She had been in discussions to create a line of WoW dolls with Jazwares, the toy company that makes Squishmallows stuffed animals and merchandise for the video game Fortnite. The company had had a breakthrough when Karkai explained that the “night goddesses”—WoWs with starry purple-blue skin—were inspired by the ancient Egyptian sky goddess Nut. Sometimes, she said, partners “just need a little tiny bit so they can come up with great ideas.”
All summer, crypto advocates had been spinning the bear market as an opportunity to “build.” Karkai and Malavieille assured me that World of Women had enough money in the bank to weather the current downturn, assuming it followed the same one-to-two-year trajectory as previous crypto winters. “The partners that are reaching out to us now, they’re not looking at our floor price or what the market looks like,” Karkai told me.
In the basement, the team was discussing an upcoming World of Women Monopoly set, with each color on the game board corresponding to a different planet. “Are there only women on these planets?” Olivier asked. The presence or absence of men in any WoW-inspired universe would require an explanatory backstory. Now the group’s task was to brainstorm possibilities. “Something must have happened,” Karkai said. “We need a conflict.” Perhaps, she suggested, “there was a terrible revolution where all the women were hunted, and, basically, men wanted to take over.” But if the goal was inclusivity, she noted at one point, “this has to be a positive transition.” Maybe, she proposed, the women had escaped to form their own civilization, and the men would eventually be inspired to “reach out” and merge. It was starting to feel as if George Lucas had sold the rights to “Star Wars” action figures before conceiving of what had happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
Online, Karkai speaks the lingua franca of gracious executive enthusiasm. “I want to thank everyone that has been part of our journey in any way,” she tweeted in a thread celebrating World of Women’s first anniversary. (Her followers often reply to her tweets with “gm”—“good morning,” the web3 world’s preferred expression of content-free positivity.) In person, Karkai’s reliance on the language of “empowerment” and “creativity” comes across as either carefully inoffensive or guileless.“She doesn’t quite know how to bullshit people,” Malavieille told me.
Helping set the leadership tone was Snow, who’d left her job as the director of entertainment at Meta in May. Snow started out at Google under Sheryl Sandberg, and followed a path she’d seen taken by many other “Lean In” acolytes: from corporate tech director to “cool startup” C.O.O. Even dressed down in a tropical-print dress and sneakers, she stood out amid her new colleagues in WoW T-shirts. She had finalized the company’s first org chart, and the team had begun interviewing marketing firms. The goal, she said, was to take World of Women from N.F.T. project to “global web3 brand.”
The pivot is by now a time-honored plot point in startup origin stories: a company starts out selling one service, only to become a payment app or a rideshare platform instead. Another tech company in World of Women’s situation might have drawn on a deep bench of programmers or on an unexpectedly useful scrap of code, but World of Women lacked these assets. What it did have was a growing brand and a small but devoted cohort of fans—perhaps none more devoted than its new C.O.O. Snow bought her first WoW in January for 10.8 Ethereum (about thirty-two thousand dollars), just as N.F.T. sales reached giddy new heights. “I still feel like it was amazing money spent,” Snow told me. “No matter what the price paid, it was completely worth it to be in this community.”
Amid the broader downturn in the crypto market in recent months, the idea of community has taken on new weight among true believers. Participation breeds a sense of intimacy, and long-term success depends on drawing people in. Lana Swartz, an associate professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, has followed the communities around cryptocurrencies and web3, observing the way they rely on a “blurring between sociality and selling” that has long been present in multilevel-marketing schemes, and, more recently, in the business of influencing. “That’s the environment in which N.F.T.s for women touch down,” Swartz told me. “It’s not unfertile ground.”
According to ownership records, there are some fifty-six hundred unique WoW holders and some eleven thousand seven hundred WoWG holders, with significant overlap. The World of Women Discord, meanwhile, has about sixty thousand members. The company’s internal figures suggest that most members of the community are based in the U.S., the U.K., or Canada, and are in their thirties; slightly more than half of them are female. Malavieille told me that the company hoped to take cues from its community when it came to next steps. Did World of Women fans want to play games in the metaverse? So far, it seemed like they were eager to meet one another but not particularly interested in video games.
“Fandoms are what make projects happen,” Alex Hooven, the product-strategy director at FOX Entertainment’s web3 operation, told me. For Hollywood, an N.F.T. collection’s built-in audience, with its core of vocal supporters ready to provide free promotion, is appealing even in the absence of much narrative content.
When the World of Women team met in Lisbon, the ideal model—the one with the most ardent fan base, and enough plotlines to expand endlessly—seemed to be the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Kempf raised a brief objection. “We are not a story company or a movie company like Marvel,” he said.
But, for the moment, Karkai was adamant. “I think that, moving forward, being realistic, we really have to build a strong universe,” she said. Otherwise, she continued, “at some point, it’s not going to be relevant anymore.”
When Karkai was a girl, she believed that she could speak with her dog, Iris. As she tells it, her family couldn’t afford after-school activities or video games, and she was an only child who inhabited a world of fantasy. If she saw something shiny outside her window at night, she felt confident that it was a fairy. Magic seemed real. “I really believed in it strongly,” Karkai told me. “But I didn’t want to tell anybody, because every time I would try to say something like ‘Oh, magic exists,’ someone would be there to kill that for me.”
Karkai recalls that after her parents divorced, when she was ten, she escaped further into the imaginary. She watched epic franchises such as “The Lord of the Rings”; old favorites, including “Singin’ in the Rain” and “The Wizard of Oz”; and classic Disney films like “Cinderella” and “Pinocchio.” She thought she might like to make movies one day, too. “I always knew that I wanted to do something creative,” she said.
At seventeen, she took the money she’d saved working for six months on a farm and moved to New York. (Karkai, who grew up speaking three languages and now speaks five, was fluent in English.) She found an apartment near Washington Square Park, took long walks, and ate a lot of instant oatmeal. Once, she attended an open house at New York University. It would have been “a dream to study cinema there,” she said. “But obviously it was an impossible dream, because it’s so expensive.” Unable to find work in New York, she travelled as an au pair and then moved to Paris, where she shared a studio apartment and took film classes while waitressing, babysitting, and bartending. She met Malavieille at a Halloween party—she was dressed as Uma Thurman in “Pulp Fiction,” and he showed up without a costume.
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Karkai says that she grew up in Southern Europe and in the Middle East, but she now prefers not to share more than that publicly. An emphasis on pseudo-anonymity is not uncommon in the crypto world—famously, almost nothing is known about the purported inventor of Bitcoin, who goes by Satoshi Nakamoto. Just as Karkai sought to make the WoWs inclusive by effacing points of difference, she seeks to forge a public identity that is indeterminate.
At interviews for entry-level jobs in Paris, she remembers, the same thing kept happening. “People would ask me, ‘So, where are you from?’ ” she told me. “And then, when you get into detail about those things, people start judging you.” She found that Parisians were willing to be quite direct. “ ‘I think that, culturally speaking, there are too many differences,’ ” she recalls someone telling her. “You know, ‘We don’t have a lot of foreigners in the company, so you would not fit in.’ ” Karkai’s side projects proliferated. She started a cooking blog, and one of her pictures—of a rhubarb pie tiled in red and green stalks—got attention on Reddit. She became interested in photography and created preset filters for the photo-editing software Lightroom. Malavieille “believed in every single little thing that I started,” Karkai said. “He would tell all his friends, ‘So, Yam Yam has this new blog, or this new Instagram, go follow her and like all her posts and comment and stuff.’ ” But Malavieille also had the credentials and professional success that Karkai lacked: a college degree, steady work as a program manager. She felt the strain of relying on his financial support, and she believed that his colleagues looked down on her.
“Then I discovered my passion for digital art,” she said. She taught herself the entire Adobe suite and began doing freelance work—designing a small beauty brand’s Web site and a pet-sitter’s business cards. Browsing the work of artists she found on networking sites like Behance and ArtStation, she saw colors that were “more vivid and brighter” than those of any real-world painting. “They really made me feel a specific mood or feeling,” she told me. She was inspired by the work of the mid-century Danish interior designer Verner Panton: psychedelic fantasies filled with swirls and bubbles in fuchsia, orange, purple, and royal blue.
The first image Karkai sold as an N.F.T. depicted a woman with two overlapping facial expressions, one outward-facing and neutral, one inward and downcast. “We often feel two things at once,” her description on the N.F.T. trading platform OpenSea reads. A yoga teacher and wellness guru named Elena Brower bought “Woman n°001” for 0.1 Ethereum (then around two hundred dollars). At the time, this seemed to Karkai a remarkable amount of money to receive for something she had made.
In June of this year, “Woman n°001” appeared on a Times Square billboard celebrating the fourth NFT.NYC conference. Karkai tweeted a photo of herself pointing up at it and grinning. “Iconic,” Snow, the C.O.O., wrote in reply, along with a starry-eyed emoji.
The conference was reportedly expected to draw more than fifteen thousand people who had paid upward of five hundred dollars for admission. World of Women was hosting two events. The first was a daytime networking party at the venue 230 Fifth.
As I stood in the entrance line, which wrapped around the corner, I chatted with the woman in front of me, who was wearing Gucci sneakers. “I’m feeling jpeg rich and crypto poor,” she said. Upstairs, in the penthouse, partygoers waited their turn for WoW nail decals near a robot making pancakes in the shape of the WoW logo. In another room, spray paint and stencils with such messages as “Dream Big” and “Chase Your Dream” were available to decorate a wall-size WoW-branded cityscape. Karkai was scheduled to sign autographs, but she’d got sick right before the party—if she were in attendance, Malavieille told me, he was sure she’d be mobbed.
A few weeks earlier, Karkai had greeted fans in Minneapolis at another N.F.T. conference, VeeCon, an extravaganza orchestrated by Gary Vaynerchuk, the influencer who had ignited the first night of WoW sales. Admission to VeeCon was open to holders of Vaynerchuk’s own N.F.T.s, VeeFriends—naïve-looking pictures of animals and other characters, drawn by Vaynerchuk, with titles such as “Logical Lion” and “Gratitude Gorilla”—for which the venture-capital firm Andreesen Horowitz led a fifty-million-dollar round of seed funding this summer. (“Facetime Frog” comes with up to three annual five-minute video calls with Vaynerchuk.) The lineup of speakers at VeeCon included Karkai, Beeple, Snoop Dogg, Deepak Chopra, and Longoria. At a VeeCon party hosted by World of Women, many guests wore T-shirts from a line that Longoria had launched, featuring a flowing-haired WoW. “I don’t care what happens to the market,” Karkai said during her panel. “I know what I’m doing with my brand. I know where we’re going.” The audience cheered. “It’s like going to Comic Con,” the filmmaker Kevin Smith, another VeeCon speaker, told me. “You won’t find a non-fan in the room.”
This was also true at NFT.NYC, where the scene included cosplay. Leslie Wheeler, who works for one of Vaynerchuk’s companies and whose fiancé is a product manager at World of Women, was dressed as her WoW, in a white wig and blue body paint. “You feel like you’re supporting someone who could be—I obviously believe she will be—one of the greatest artists of our time,” Wheeler said of Karkai. She also liked that, instead of crypto-bro parties, World of Women hosted events like champagne brunches. (During NFT.NYC, a group of WoW holders attended a “Cool Blues” breakfast in honor of blue-skinned N.F.T.s, at the restaurant Maman, where they drank pale-blue lattes.)
At 230 Fifth, Kashvi Parekh, World of Women’s community manager, wore a jean jacket with an image of her WoW painted on the back. A college student from Mumbai, she had become interested in N.F.T.s after learning about the Beeple sale. “I was mind-blown,” she said. “I’ve never heard of a creator getting paid that much. In India, artists don’t have much of an income.” Parekh serves as a liaison to such fans as Wheeler and Sakari Smithwick, a young New York chef who produces a spinach, pineapple, apple, and lemon juice branded with his “cyber green” WoW. Smithwick, who met the World of Women team at VeeCon, told me that he became involved in web3 after the Michelin-starred restaurant where he’d been cooking shut down. “For me, it’s a movement toward ownership, toward equal opportunities,” he said.
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While I often heard World of Women referred to as a blue-chip N.F.T. project, the attention the company has received tends to focus on its stated ideals (representation, inclusion) rather than on its financial potential. Vaynerchuk, who got his start as a businessman when he moved his parents’ wine business online, in the nineties, discovered World of Women on Twitter. He says his initial interest was personal. “My mom is my hero,” he told me. “And obviously there was a lot of conversation about George Floyd and MeToo,” he added, which made him feel a responsibility to be “thoughtful” in the way he used his influence. He saw in Karkai the potential to be an effective leader. “She, at least in my opinion, felt commercial,” he said, “but not willing to compromise—” He interrupted himself: “I’ve never said that before. That was good! I gotta remember that one.”
Philanthropy has always been one of Karkai’s goals for World of Women. The company has a fund that supports emerging N.F.T. artists, and it allocated a small percentage of each initial WoW sale to Too Young to Wed, a charity devoted to ending child marriage; She’s the First, an education nonprofit; and the medical expenses of an N.F.T. artist with chronic-fatigue syndrome, who went by Strange Cintia. Since then, it has put on a number of charitable auctions and fund-raisers, and has partnered with the climate nonprofit Code Green, whose co-founder Inna Modja now serves as World of Women’s head of philanthropy. Earlier this year, World of Women paid to offset its historical carbon footprint—blockchain technology can be notoriously energy inefficient—and Karkai was named an Ally of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals Action Campaign. But being charitable, as opposed to being a charity, requires a viable long-term business model. That will come in time, supporters say. “N.F.T.s and P.F.P.s and the communities around them, all that is in its beyond infancy stage,” Oseary told me. “You’ve got to look at these things as startups.”
Reflecting on the not so distant past, Karkai told me that she’d been surprised by the entertainment industry’s enthusiasm for her work. She knew that other projects had become successful in part by giving celebrities free N.F.T.s, or paying for their endorsements, but she didn’t feel she needed to do that. “The conversations and the calls, it all felt like you were talking to an old friend,” Karkai said. “None of it felt fake or forced or anything like that.” Paltrow was “super supportive, all the time—asking how she could help, how she could get involved.” Longoria, speaking with her “dear friend” Karkai on her podcast, urged listeners to educate themselves on cryptocurrency and N.F.T.s. “Women . . . need economic mobility, and we need economic independence, and I feel like this digital space is a fertile ground for wealth creation,” she said. (Through representatives, neither Witherspoon, Paltrow, nor Longoria agreed to be interviewed for this story.)
The software engineer Molly White, who runs a Web site called Web3 is Going Just Great, has written about a tendency in the crypto and N.F.T. worlds toward what she calls “predatory community.” She echoed Swartz’s comparison to multilevel-marketing schemes. Both “co-opt the language of friendship and feminism,” White has written, with members “promising to uplift one another, empower one another, and fight back against the male-dominated corporate world.” This is the sort of rhetoric that fuels not just World of Women but also such subsequent female-focussed P.F.P. collections as Boss Beauties, Women Rise, and the Flower Girls. White told me, “I think there’s something to be said for the inclusion of women in spaces that are beneficial to them.” But are N.F.T.s beneficial to women? “It’s one thing to sell off some Bitcoin if your ‘investment’ isn’t going as well as you hoped,” White has written. “It’s another thing entirely to do that when your asset is what makes you a part of a ‘World of Women’ community, and where selling may feel like a betrayal.” Karkai maintains an optimistic stance. “Lows are part of the journey to get to the highs,” she reassured her followers this summer. Swartz, examining a 2017 crypto bubble, noted, “A true believer is indistinguishable from a shill.”
In November, as the crypto world reeled from the FTX bankruptcy, which had left behind billions of dollars in debt and raised the distinct possibility that the C.E.O. had been running a Ponzi scheme, World of Women devoted a Twitter Spaces audio chat to the topic of “Mental Health in NFTs.” It had been “such a heartbreaking week,” Snow told listeners. “We know that the crypto community is hurting.” She said that the company’s finances would not be affected by what had happened at FTX, and she and Malavieille introduced a psychotherapist who discussed “grief, loss, and trauma.”
“Maybe N.F.T.s could emerge from the broader ash heap of crypto,” Lee Reiners, the policy director at the Duke Financial Economics Center, told me. Reiners previously worked for the New York Federal Reserve, and, in his view, the long-term success of the N.F.T. field will depend on its ability to separate itself—and any potentially valuable applications—from the problems of fraud and volatility plaguing cryptocurrency more generally. But he is wary of the argument that it’s too soon to judge blockchain technology. The iPhone, he points out, appeared in 2007; Bitcoin, in 2009: “It’s not early.”
Vaynerchuk says that he still has faith in N.F.T.s., and that he is “going to execute at the level of a Jim Henson and a Walt Disney.” He told me that he had recently discussed all this with his mother: “I said, ‘You know, I would be going through probably the most difficult time of my professional career right now had I not had the courage to do the right thing.’ ” He was referring to the fact that, in the summer of 2021, right around the time World of Women was launching, he’d started predicting that the majority of N.F.T.s would fail. “I believe that N.F.T.s are the single biggest consumer invention since apps on the iPhone,” he told me. “And I believe that ninety-nine per cent of the ones that came out in 2021 are going to zero.”
In the weeks before NFT.NYC, several celebrity web3 enthusiasts, including Jimmy Fallon and Witherspoon, removed their N.F.T. profile pictures from Twitter amid the cooling market. Witherspoon received a letter from the watchdog group Truth in Advertising warning that her posts about World of Women failed to properly disclose her connections to the company. (Truth in Advertising later sent similar warnings to seventeen other celebrities.) Karkai and Malavieille shrugged off speculation about the shifting winds of celebrity favor. People change their profile pictures all the time, they pointed out. In a bear market, a famous figure becomes “a big target,” Malavieille said. “I would do the same, to protect myself.”
It would be wrong to suggest that the entertainment industry has lost interest in blockchain technology. Movie studios continue to explore the promotional tools that web3 might offer, and there is curiosity about using blockchain technology to help unknown filmmakers secure funding. But these technical experiments do not rely on VeeFriends becoming a successor to Disney. Hooven, the FOX executive (who is also active in the web3 social club Friends with Benefits), told me that she didn’t think that N.F.T. collections of ten thousand profile pics were the future of web3, or even the future of N.F.T.s.
In June, Madonna, World of Women’s fellow Guy Oseary client, was still paying digital tribute to the brand. “It takes a lot to WoW me,” her account tweeted, above the image of a pink-haired WoW, one of two that were transferred to her wallet the night she headlined World of Women’s second NFT.NYC event. (Through a representative, Madonna declined to be interviewed for this story.) A celebration of Pride, NFT.NYC, and Madonna’s latest album, the party was held at Terminal 5, in Hell’s Kitchen. The “RuPaul’s Drag Race” winners Bob the Drag Queen and Violet Chachki were slated to perform alongside Madonna. Terminal 5 was plastered with images of Madonna through the years and of various WoWs, all in a kaleidoscopic array of outfits. (Earlier in the year, Karkai drew Madonna in the style of a WoW for Billboard.) Guests included Julia Fox, Zachary Quinto, Sia, and Oseary, one of the few attendees wearing a mask. World of Women had ordered five hundred bottles of Smithwick’s Cyber Green Juice to give to guests.
When I arrived at Terminal 5, I found Karkai and a cluster of World of Women colleagues waiting in frustration at the entrance, which they’d been trying for about fifteen minutes to breach. “Do you guys have a point of contact at all?” someone inside the barriers asked. They did, but it didn’t seem to be helping. Security was tight. For now, at the door, the usual rules were in effect, and the outsiders were still stuck outside. ♦
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Yam Karkai’s Illustrations Made Her an N.F.T. Sensation. Now What? - The New Yorker
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