Modest is probably one of the most prolific and successful artists in our space right now. Equally anonymous as he is present, he has built an ecosystem of art, systems, and community that feels unlike anything else in cryptoart. Jediwolf sat down with him to talk about identity, consistency, monkeys, and what it actually means to succeed as an artist on the internet.



You are very cryptic - basically a fully anon artist. Can you tell us a bit more about yourself and your journey with art and crypto?

I think anonymity became less about hiding and more about freedom.

People treat masks like deception, but sometimes the mask is the only way you can finally tell the truth.

Before cryptoart, I spent a long time making things that disappeared. Sketches, campaigns, ideas, projects, businesses, moments. Digital work has this strange quality where it can consume your life and leave almost no evidence you were ever there. Crypto changed that for me. Suddenly digital work could persist. It could belong somewhere. It could matter materially.

I didn't come into this world through fine art institutions. I came through the internet. Message boards. Memes. Failed startups. Weird obsessions. Doomscrolling. Late nights. Anxiety. Humor as self defense.

The work is basically just all of that compressed into images and systems and stories.

Modest is probably the most honest version of me, which is ironic considering I basically exist on the internet.



All artists are facing the same tailwinds and struggles yet you've managed to achieve major success over the last two years. What do you think is the secret ingredient?

I don't think there's a secret ingredient.

I think most people dramatically underestimate consistency and emotional honesty.

I made art every single day whether people cared or not. Especially when they didn't care. I think a lot of creators unknowingly create for applause or recognition or to sell something. The problem is that applause is seasonal. If that's your fuel source, eventually you stop moving.

I also never really separated the art from the internet itself. The conversations, the collectors, the memes, the mechanics, the systems, the tension, the jokes, the pain, the speculation, the community. All of it became part of the medium.

A lot of people were trying to preserve old art world structures onchain. I became more interested in asking what native internet art actually looks like when you stop pretending it's a painting hanging in a white room.



What does "success" mean for an artist?

Success is making the thing you actually wanted to make before the world taught you to censor yourself.

Everything after that is secondary.

Money matters. Survival matters. Recognition matters. Pretending otherwise is dishonest. But those things are unstable. They come and go. I fully expect the attention I am so lucky to have to wane, and support to rotate elsewhere. In fact, it's something I hope for - because that means the attention is rotating to other creators who deserve the light. If I am able to lift up another artist, or have some small part in pushing all of us forward, that is also success by my standards.

Further, I think I would also say that the times I actually "feel" success is when my work starts functioning like a mirror for other people. When someone sees themselves inside something I made. When a collector tells you a piece carried them through a hard moment. When strangers start using your language to describe their own lives.

That's the part that stays with me.



You release what I would call an insane amount of artworks and collections. It feels like supply is not something that bothers either you or your collectors. How do you approach the topic of supply if at all?

I think people confuse supply with meaning.

Scarcity can create value, but it cannot create resonance.

I make a lot of work because I have a lot to say and because the internet moves at internet speed. Some ideas deserve a museum-sized release strategy and some ideas deserve to exist for twelve minutes and punch somebody in the chest before disappearing into the timeline.

I also think collectors are smarter than the market gives them credit for. They know the difference between output and extraction.

I've never approached art like "how little can I release to maximize price." I think that mindset slowly poisons the relationship between artist and audience. It turns creation into inventory management.

The goal for me is to create living ecosystems where different entry points exist for different people. Some works are intimate. Some are expansive. Some are experiments. Some are systems. Some are jokes that accidentally become philosophy six months later.



In one of our conversations you mentioned that art to you feels like love letters you are sending. What does that mean? Please elaborate.

I think all art is an attempt to close distance.

Distance between people. Distance between inner and outer worlds. Distance between who we are and who we wanted to become.

When I make work, I'm usually trying to articulate a feeling I don't fully understand yet. Loneliness. Ambition. Fear. Grief. Absurdity. Hope. Guilt. Whatever it is.

The amazing thing is sometimes somebody across the world sees it and says: "wait... I thought only I felt that."

That's the moment the letter arrives.

A lot of my work looks cynical on the surface, but underneath it's actually deeply optimistic. Because making anything at all is optimistic. It means some part of you still believes connection is possible. And what better way to make a connection than through a love letter.



Monkeys are one of your most popular motifs and they clearly resonate with collectors, with Monkey Miners being one of the most sought-after collections released in 2025. What is it about monkeys?

Monkeys are us.

That's the joke and the tragedy.

We build financial systems, governments, artificial intelligence, religions, social hierarchies, and then panic because somebody unfollowed us on the internet.

There's something beautifully humiliating about remembering we are still just highly emotional primates wearing expensive shoes and staring at glowing rectangles all day.

The Monkey Miners specifically were about labor, obsession, extraction, belief systems, and the absurdity of modern work. People saw monkeys, but honestly I think they were really about all of us endlessly digging for meaning, status, money, love, validation. Whatever keeps us moving.



I'm part of your X group chat where around 100 collectors of your works communicate a lot. I would say this group is part of your art and it feels almost as active as you are. How did it come about and how do you keep it so active?

I wouldn't say it happened organically. I'm actually pretty intentional about it.

There's a concept I've always loved called "1,000 true fans." The idea that you don't need millions of people paying attention. You need a small group of people who deeply care about what you do. Real fandom is a powerful emotion. And candidly, around here I think the 1,000 true fans number is probably closer to 100.

100 people who are emotionally connected to the work, engaged in the ideas, advocating on your behalf, pulling new people into the orbit, building things around the art, sharing it, defending it, living with it. That's enough to completely change an artist's life. It has changed mine. Unquestionably.

So I take those relationships very seriously.

I show up every single day. Not because I feel forced to, but because I genuinely care about the people in that room. I think there's also a little bit of performer in me. I like dropping into the chat to light a fire, make people laugh, create chaos, start discussions, post unfinished ideas, test concepts, stir emotion.

The chat stopped feeling like "community management" a long time ago, if ever. Now it feels more like an ongoing performance piece mixed with a support group mixed with a late-night internet dive bar.

And honestly, some days the group inspires me as much as the artwork itself.



Mementos, Death and Taxes are examples of networked art systems you've released. Do you think this type of systemic art where collectors are not merely holders but active participants is a direction our space and art world will move toward?

I do.

I think we are still very early in understanding what programmable media actually enables culturally.

For centuries art was mostly one directional. Artist makes object. Audience consumes object.

Now the artwork itself can evolve through participation. Ownership can become expressive. Collectors can influence outcomes. Communities can become part of the narrative engine. Systems can create emotional experiences instead of merely visual ones.

That doesn't mean every artwork needs mechanics or tokens or game theory attached to it. A lot of that stuff is gimmicky.

But I do think "networked art" becomes one of the defining native art forms of the internet era because the internet itself is participatory. Why wouldn't the art be?



We had a few millennia of static art. Now it feels like we are in a dynamic and participatory era. Did you ever mint a static piece? Do you think static art is "dead" in a digital world?

I've minted static pieces and I still love static art.

A single frozen image can still destroy you emotionally. There's a reason paintings survived this long. The challenge for me, is that I don't feel like I am all that skilled as a traditional artist. Sure, I draw and paint and write music, but I feel like my best works are those that take an idea I've come up with physically, and bring that to life with the tools that are available to us in this age.

But I do think digital art has been artificially constrained by inherited expectations from physical media. People kept trying to force digital work into the shape of paintings because that's what the market understood.

Meanwhile digital media can respond to time, decisions, markets, memory, participation, other artworks, live data, conversation, emotion, movement. It can evolve endlessly.

So no, static art isn't dead.

But I think dynamic art is finally becoming native to its medium instead of pretending to be something else.

(For what it's worth, one of my favorite works started on my iPad in Procreate, and then I was asked by a collector to create a physical painting from it.)



Do you have any galleries, intermediaries or anyone else supporting you professionally from an art perspective? Have you ever felt that you needed any of this and how do you feel about it today?

I've been incredibly fortunate to have amazing people and platforms support me along the way, and honestly I would not be here without them.

Most of the opportunities I've had, including things like Sotheby's, came through collectors first. People who believed in the work early, advocated for me in rooms I wasn't in, shared the art obsessively, and opened doors that otherwise never would have existed for an anonymous cryptoartist. That's something I carry a tremendous amount of gratitude for.

While I haven't had a ton of traditional gallery or IRL experience yet, it's definitely something I'm interested in exploring more deeply. I think there's still something incredibly powerful about physical space, physical presence, and shared human experiences around art.

At the same time, cryptoart fundamentally changed the psychology of being an artist because it gave creators direct rails to audiences for the first time at scale. You no longer need permission to exist before beginning. You can build your own world first and let the institutions catch up later.

That said, I don't think galleries, curators, producers, or intermediaries are inherently bad at all. Great collaborators can massively elevate the work. They can help artists realize ideas that would otherwise remain impossible.

The issue is only when the system becomes gatekeeping instead of amplification. When the goal shifts from expanding the work to flattening it into something safer, cleaner, or easier to sell. I'm interested in partnerships that expand possibility. People who see the strange thing you're trying to build and say "go further." Not "make it smaller."



What would you suggest to other artists who are struggling during these difficult times? What advice would you give?

Make the work anyway.

Seriously.

Most artistic careers die in the valley where nobody is watching yet.

The dangerous thing about the internet is it constantly tricks you into believing visibility equals value. It doesn't. Some of the most important work of your life might happen in relative obscurity.

Also, stop trying to predict the market perfectly. Trends move too fast. By the time you optimize for one, it's already over.

Build depth instead of chasing relevance. Build worlds instead of posts. Build relationships instead of audiences.

And maybe most importantly, protect the part of yourself that actually loves making things. The internet will try very hard to turn your creativity into a performance metric.



Who does Modest want to be five years from now? What's your ultimate goal if you have one?

I don't think the goal is becoming bigger. I think the goal is becoming truer.

I want to build things that couldn't have existed without this era of the internet. Experiences that blur the line between art, story, software, systems, music, community, performance, memory.

But more than that, I think we're heading toward a world where creators rely less on generic platforms, subscriptions, and mass-market software and more on worlds of tooling they build for themselves. Tools shaped around their own aesthetic, process, philosophy, and obsessions.

Over the last few years I've probably built 25+ weird little apps and systems that help me arrive at what I consider a complete work. Some generate images. Some manipulate motion. Some create interactions. Some are basically emotional instruments disguised as software.

I think that becomes increasingly normal. The modern artist isn't just learning Photoshop anymore. They're building ecosystems. Interfaces. Creative engines. Living processes.

So part of my goal is simply to be a good example of what's possible in this new era.

To show younger artists and creators that you don't need permission to build your own world anymore. You can invent your own tools. Your own systems. Your own economies. Your own mythology.

And honestly, I want to leave behind proof that digital life was real life.

That all of this mattered.

The jokes. The timelines. The late night conversations. The strange little internet communities. The art. The obsession. The hope.

All of it.



The wisdom and depth @m0dest___ shared here are truly invaluable.

I'm proud and honored to help carry it further. If you enjoyed this interview - please share it too.