The Attention Ledger

Back when everything was 1/1
When I first started collecting digital art on-chain, it was 2019. Back then, everything centered around uniqueness. There were no drops like we see them today.
No 500-piece series. No choosing between hundreds of variations.
There was just one piece, tied to one token.

And that single piece was everything.

The 1/1 format wasn’t just a technical decision. It was a statement.
Owning a 1/1 meant holding a moment no one else ever would.
You weren’t just buying an image. You were locking in a digital event, something unrepeatable, a generative gesture frozen into a single token.

I still remember my first purchase. The stillness of it. The direct exchange with the artist. The time it took to really look, to want something, to make the move.
Everything felt intimate. Almost sacred.

Collecting was a selective act. And value was simple.
The rarer it was, the more it meant.

Then the AI wave hit
Things started shifting fast around 2021. That’s when generative AI made its entrance. At first it was niche, with VQGAN+CLIP, some glitch work, and a few early adopters. Soon came Midjourney, DALL·E, Stable Diffusion, and everything scaled.

Suddenly, I was scrolling through hundreds of images per artist, every day.
Series went from 50 to 200, 500, sometimes 1000. Prices dropped. Entry became easier.
And with it, the psychology changed.
I wasn’t buying the only one anymore. I was choosing one among many.

And I’ll be honest, I started enjoying it. The experience felt dynamic. I began focusing less on the individual artwork and more on the entire project, the pattern, the rhythm, the way a series held itself together.

My attention shifted. And so did my expectations.
A piece became more accessible, but it risked losing its iconic weight unless it fit into a cohesive vision.

The hierarchy flipped
It took me a while to see it clearly, but the value structure had changed. What used to sit at the top, the 1/1, was no longer automatically the most significant. It hadn’t lost its importance, but it had lost its dominance.

A 1000-piece drop floods your feed. It multiplies presence.
It builds recognition in a way a single artwork cannot.
And so I found myself adapting.

I wasn’t looking for rarity alone. I was looking for consistency, for visual confidence, for a sense that this artist could hold a space in the chaos.

What mattered wasn’t just how much they released, but how they did it, with what tone and with what vision. I started following not just pieces, but trajectories.

The 1/1 didn’t disappear. But it became something different, a prestige marker inside a broader system, not always the foundation.
Value stopped being about absolute scarcity. It became about perceived presence.

Fatigue, and maybe a return
Lately I’ve been wondering how long this will last. Serial formats work, they deliver visibility, momentum, engagement. But they also saturate quickly.

Every day, more images. More drops. More noise. And less time to truly see anything.

It’s possible we’ll hit a point of visual fatigue. I feel it sometimes, that overload, that sense that nothing sticks.

If a shift comes, I think it will come from that, the need to slow down. To return to something more deliberate. More intentional. Smaller releases, or even a renewed focus on the 1/1, could bring back that sense of intimacy.

I’m also starting to see hybrid models. Projects released in waves, broad openings followed by tight, rare moments. This kind of rhythm makes sense. It keeps things alive. It creates contrast.

And as a collector, I’ve realized attention is my scarcest resource.
When an artist slows me down, makes me look twice, that’s where value starts to build again.

Value is a relationship
If I’ve learned one thing in all this, it’s that value doesn’t live inside the file.
It lives in the connection it creates.

In a space where everything can be reproduced endlessly, where files can be copied without loss, what makes a piece matter is the story around it: the trust, the consistency, the way it ties into something bigger than itself.

Today I don’t collect pieces. I collect continuity. I collect artists who build memory, who thread their work into a longer arc.

The format, whether 1/1 or large-scale series, is just a code.
It signals intent. It frames the relationship.

And that’s what collecting has become: a conversation, not a purchase. A form of alignment.

Looking back, I won’t remember how many pieces I bought. I’ll remember which ones felt alive, which ones grew with me, which ones made sense across time.

Because in the end, value isn’t a number. It’s a bond. And the only thing that really lasts is the future an artwork manages to open inside you.