By Cassell Ferere

Jason Peterson has been an elusive creator within the advertising industry, innovating everything from iPhone photography to the way brands communicate with audiences. Peterson's latest venture and creative agency, The Times - which he operates alongside creative and partner Greg Weinstein since 2019 - is innovating the latest in the cryptocurrency market, NFTs.

With the idea based around a metaphysical world, Peterson has created a mural to remain up indefinitely in his hometown of Chicago, living identically to its digital form with support from one of the leaders in crypto, Avalanche. 

The mural is of the infamous Chicago rapper Kanye West, located at Lake and Sangamon. A QR code is located on the mural that will link to the owner of the NFT once purchased. No stranger to the NFT market, but still a student of the industry, Peterson has already manifested thoughtful ways of offering digital assets through ‘Nifties.’

Peterson explains his entry point into the crypto canvas.

“I got into [NFTs] in November [2020], [Jay N Silva] is big into cryptocurrencies - he hooked me up with Nifty Gateway. I did a drop with Nifty Gateway in March [2021]. The timing was right when everyone was getting introduced to NFTs. I didn’t fully understand it at first. ‘Was I going to get paid?’ I thought it was going to be Candy Crush money or something.”

Peterson and the “centralized, USD-based marketplace for buying and selling Nifties,” Nifty Gateway, made what Peterson describes as “trading cards” in the NFT space. Nifty Gateway was acquired in 2019 by crypto-entrepreneurs and Facebook’s most formidable legal opponents, identical twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss.

This latest NFT drop from Peterson and The Times is available for purchase with the help of the digital currency platform Avalanche. Peterson recalls the moment,

“I did a release with [Nifty Gateway]. I did these ‘trading card’ packs for my photos. That’s all I could wrap my head around - if I make it like baseball cards. It was six images - you don’t know which one you were going to get. Nifty Gateway put them up in a one-hour auction for $1,999. And I sold 260 packs in an hour.”

Peterson, who often photographs with his Leica camera, created Nifties in his familiar black-and-white aesthetic, reinforcing the integrity of his art and the images he posts to his Instagram account, almost all of which are shot on his iPhone. Peterson remembers,

“It wasn’t until social media that I really had a vehicle for it. I shot stuff all the time - especially being in advertising - I wasn’t a ‘photographer,’ so I had nowhere to put [these images]. That’s when I first got on Flickr and Tumblr, like, pre-Instagram. I was like ‘Oh shit! I can put all my photos here.’” 

Today, the self-proclaimed ‘Trap Draper’ on Twitter, aptly named after the HBO series character Don Draper of Mad Men, a creative director at a fictional Manhattan advertising firm during the ‘60s and ‘70s, is immersed in crypto-culture. 

“The first thing I did was the Nifty Gateway drop. Then after that, I started taking it seriously. The community around NFTs - [getting] deep into all the Discords and all the Clubhouse [rooms]. The energy around this - the creativity is dope. It reminds me of when Instagram first started exploding, or pre-internet stuff,”

Peterson reminisces. 

A Nifty lives on the blockchain like an NFT and requires ownership of a digital asset in the same way. Peterson and The Times have more resources in teaming with Avalanche for this drop.

“I started getting hit up by people to do NFTs. That’s how I met the Avalanche people. I realize with them [that] they are deep-deep crypto. They're getting into the NFT space, bringing a whole audience of crypto buyers.” 

In the project titled “End Titles by Jason Peterson” on the Nifty Gateway platform, Peterson offered pop culture imagery like “Sicko Mode #1/1” which last sold at $3,600 and is now on sale for $9,700. Peterson's “Wires and Worries unravel #1/1” Nifty last sold for $2,950 and can be bought on sale for almost 2000 times that amount at $5,888,888.

“For me, as a creative guy, I’m thinking, ‘How do I build on this?’ ‘What else can I do with it?’ And that’s when we came up with the idea of a physical mural that you can walk by, scan the code, and see who owns it. You can buy it there - like the real world versus the meta-verse.”

An advocate for collaboration, Peterson continues to explore the crypto-space, especially as we move into the metaphysical, merging digital assets with real-world valued art. In creating the mural, Peterson commissioned other mural artists to help complete the painting and finalize the image of Kanye West, which Peterson photographed. Additionally, the mural highlights the City of Chicago with typography from Chicago-based artist Tubzilla.

Peterson concludes,

“collaborations are a good way for young creatives to get into [NFTs], working with friends or someone else who has a different set of skill sets. There are a lot of really talented people putting stuff out that aren’t really getting attention. I think there’s a lot of people that flood into the NFT market. I also think that a lot of people are taking their talent to make an NFT versus, ‘How do you really make something that is truly going to get buzz and talk-value?’ An NFT is a collectible. It’s gotta be more unique than that. Uniquely yours and uniquely sought after.”

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