Coldie is an American mixed-media artist whose stereoscopic 3D collage portraits have been part of the visual language of crypto art since 2017. His series Decentral Eyes renders blockchain pioneers as stereoscopic 3D collage portraits, beginning in 2018 with Vitalik Buterin, whose technology powers the token the works are minted on.
Before the NFT market emerged, Coldie was among the digital artists who struggled to find opportunities in the traditional art world because there was no way to prove scarcity for work that could simply be copied. He traces his fascination with three-dimensional imagery to childhood memories of View-Master reels, and first used the digital painting tool MacPaint at his grandparents' house in 1986, at age four. In 2019 he sold his genesis piece, Vitalik Buterin - Decentral Eyes, for 1.5 ETH, and bought it back two years later for 17.5 ETH after it resurfaced on the secondary market. Since 2018 he has also built a personal collection of blockchain art, reinvesting roughly 30 percent of his own sales into work by other artists.
