Building the Creative Crypto Community
By: Erich Grant
Tags: Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum, Brooklyn

The emergent cryptocurrency industry is beginning to make its impact felt on a variety of segments of society. While blockchain technologies are being deployed in the financial and fintech worlds, these technologies are increasingly making their presence felt in more nontraditional realms. The arts, design, and creative fields are one such space. Sndbox, founded by Michael Lee and Kirk Finkel, is a Brooklyn based crypto incubator, working to unite the blockchain, design, and creative fields.

Founded in 2017, Sndbox is managing an incubator program for creative crypto projects. Sndbox emerged from Lee and Finkel’s STEEM Park project, and the incubator is currently on its second cohort class of artists and creative entrepreneurs. Sndbox recently completed an exhibition in Bushwick, called The Crypto Renaissance, which showcased the various projects that emerged from their first incubator class. Sndbox also produces The Creative Crypto, a Steem powered digital magazine that showcases creative blockchain projects that emerge from both the Sndbox incubator program and the broader crypto community.

Lee and Finkel met and became friends during their undergraduate study at Cornell, were they both were studying architecture. After graduation, they both moved to Berlin, where they worked together with a design collective called Hither Yon. The design collective had an interdisciplinary approach, focused on how to create collaborative pieces that blended design and architecture.

“That kind of set the stage for a lot of the things we are doing now … our time in Berlin was focused on how we create collaborative artwork that informed through design and architecture,” Finkel elaborated.

Eventually they both returned to the United States for graduate school and reunited when they both moved to New York. Their mutual interest in collaborative and decentralized projects sparked their interest in Bitcoin and other blockchain based technology. They realized the power of these new technologies to fundamentally change how creative projects are created, distributed and ultimately consumed.

Lee and Finkel’s first blockchain project was STEEM Park. The idea behind STEEM Park was to use the blockchain to power the development of a public art exhibition in the Herbert von King Park in Brooklyn. A local park conservancy was looking for a new public art installation in the park but lacked funding. Lee and Finkel’s pitch was straightforward, they would fund the installation using the Steem ecosystem.

“We did everything entirely through the Steem community and the Steem apps that were available to us. We crowdfunded the installation through creating blog posts … on Steem about the history of the park, about the process of designing this public art installation and getting feedback from the community on the ground that Brooklyn, but also the community digitally within the ecosystem.” Finkel explained. “So there became kind of a balance of stakeholders that were … in Brooklyn but also digitally distributed all around the world. That project was built last year and that became really the premise of starting Sndbox.”

After the pair successfully launched STEEM Park, they were searching for a path that would allow them to continue to introduce members of the broader community to the blockchain ecosystem. Sndbox’s incubator program was designed to help introduce a broad swath of the public to how blockchain technology could help them with their projects. They designed the program to be accessible to people with no previous experience with blockchain technology, and to encourage collaboration within the incubator class. Sndbox purposefully targets a broad and diverse class for each cohort.

“A lot of people are complete beginners who we actually actively recruit in New York. Others are very fluent — they are developers or blockchain developers. We like to kind of clash and mix with people that way because usually, especially with our first cohort that finished up in June, there is a lot of really interesting organic collaboration,” explained Finkel.

The pair was full of praise for all members of their first incubator class, but some of the projects were particularly noteworthy. Sndbox recruited an architectural history professor from Temple University to their first incubator class. The professor used Steem to manage the entire workflow for his graduate school classes, with readings, assignments, and feedback all managed through Steem. The sheer volume of activity generated over $10,000, which was donated to Wagner Free Institute in Philadelphia. The museum is now a member of Sndbox’s second incubator cohort, working with the collective to try to find the most effective method for using the donation for public programming and grant giving.

Sndbox is based in Brooklyn, but their cohorts have participants across the world. Another member of the first cohort was a stay at home mom based in Korea who had been working as an illustrator as a side project. She began a series of cartoons aimed towards children, which explained how blockchain technology works. Her comics were eventually compiled into a book which was purchased by a major Korean publishing house. After its release, the book was sold out in bookstores throughout Korea.

Projects created by the first incubator class were showcased at The Crypto Renaissance, an exhibition held at a Brooklyn gallery space. The aim of the exhibition was to make the work created by the first cohort accessible to all types of New Yorkers.

“What we did this past summer for the Crypto Renaissance Exhibition, we took all of the tools we use in cohort one, along with a lot of the projects that came out of cohort one and then we made an exhibition out of it that anybody off the street could come into in New York City,” Lee said.

Managing a new venture is always challenging. Managing teams across the globe adds a unique managerial wrinkle.

“It is a challenge because we have a digital incubator, it’s really an online program we have our own chat room for… keeping people moving forward with their projects,” Finkel explained. “As a digital incubator as opposed to an office space where you have everyone in front of you — It’s a very different dynamic. We just found out that there are 22 countries in the second cohort. Everyone is in their own time zone. So it’s a lot of logistics!”

The Creative Crypto has been published using the Steem platform since spring of 2018. The magazines goal was to shine a lot on creative projects in the space, as well as showcase the ideas and projects that were percolating through the Sndbox incubator program. The Sndbox team saw a gap in the coverage these types of projects were able to generate from more established crypto news sources.

“Obviously there are the big sources, CoinDesk and Coin Telegraph, but even they are not extensively reporting on … all facets of the creative world,” Lee said. “We started the magazine and It was humble [to start], just us reaching out to different companies, giving interviews, doing some fun contests and community activities. The more we got into it, the more we would interview basically everybody in this space.”

Social Media has played a huge role in the growth of the crypto industry, but creates a “silo” effect, where companies and teams use their channels to discuss their unique projects. Sndbox saw their magazine as a tool for unifying these disparate streams of information.

“We wanted to bring it all together. We really call the magazine crypto agnostic. We just want everybody to have access to all the fun stuff that’s happening in cryptocurrency,” said Lee.

The Sndbox team recently announced a plan to begin publishing an annual physical edition of the magazine. Creating a physical edition of the magazine springs from Sndbox’s philosophical goal of creating tangible physical outputs from the digital ecosystem. The pair aims to release the physical magazine in early 2019.

“Our goal over the next couple of months is to play with every aspect of what a traditional magazine is — with a lot of the new technologies that are in the space. So obviously tokenization is one aspect, creating NFT tokens is another aspect. How do we create games and different social aspects, components to the magazine is another factor. The big experiment is how can we reinvent the magazine and then how we can create something of lasting value,” Lee said.

To keep up with the Sndbox team, you can check out their website, social media channels, and blog. You can track their projects, along with other interesting projects and events, using The Creative Crypto.

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