Derek Edward Schloss

Collector

Derek Edward Schloss · @derekedws ↗

Role

Managing Partner, Collab+Currency, with Stephen McKeon · collabcurrency.com ↗

Gallery

Co-founder, Glitch Marfa, an analog gallery for digital art · glitchmarfa.com ↗

Curation

Named to the Art Blocks Curation Board, which selects the Curated Collection

Also

Founding member, Flamingo DAO

Holdings

2,093 works · 248 projects · concentrated in the Art Blocks genesis layer

abTDH

45,132,553 · +58,830 per day · snapshot 9 August 2026 · method

Most collectors buy what they love. A few buy what they believe will matter. Derek Edward Schloss does something rarer: he funds the medium as a venture capitalist, collects its foundational works as a holder, and writes its history as an essayist. The fund, the wallet and the writing are not three hobbies. They are one argument made three ways.

The fund

Schloss is a managing partner at Collab+Currency, the crypto venture firm he runs with Stephen McKeon. Trained as an attorney, a former startup founder and an instructor at the University of Oregon's business school, he entered the blockchain space in 2018 advising startups and directing a blockchain research organisation, and by 2020 was running the fund.¹ Collab+Currency made early investments in the infrastructure of the digital-art economy itself: SuperRare, Art Blocks, Async Art, Rarible, Metaversal and PROOF.² He is also a founding member of Flamingo DAO, the collector collective that assembled one of the most valuable NFT collections in existence.²

This matters for how you read the wallet. A venture investor's discipline is to identify the foundational layer early and hold through the noise. Schloss applies the same discipline to art.

The gallery

In 2022, Schloss and his partners, Stephen and Michelle McKeon and Maddy Page, opened Glitch in Marfa, Texas: an analog gallery for digital art, a physical room in the high desert for objects that otherwise live only on-chain.⁶ The choice of town is not incidental. Marfa is where Donald Judd went to build a permanent home for minimalism, and placing a generative-art gallery there puts the medium in that lineage: artists and institutions claiming physical ground for work the established world was slow to house.

Glitch's signature format, Every 30 Days, exhibits a single culturally significant digital work for a month at a time, in the gallery window in Marfa and simultaneously over a livestream, paired with long-form writing about it. The first season ran a full year and included XCOPY's Right-click and Save As guy; a second season, 30 Days in Marfa, brought artists into the gallery for a residency.⁷ It is, in physical space, close to the act AB5D performs on the web: take one significant work and argue for it in words.

The genesis thesis

His stated view is precise about where the foundation lies. In his reading, the two artists who carried on-chain generative art into the mainstream are Larva Labs and Snowfro, the pioneers a future history will trace the medium back to. He calls the Chromie Squiggle an endlessly fascinating genesis project.³ He and McKeon argued the case publicly in an essay, "Punks, Squiggles, and the Future of Generative Media," placing CryptoPunks and the Squiggle at the root of a fifty-year generative-art lineage that runs back through Molnár and Nake.⁴

The wallet is that thesis in holdings. Of more than two thousand works, over half are authored by Snowfro: roughly five hundred of heart + craft, three hundred of send/receive, two hundred and twenty-eight Chromie Squiggles, and the LIFT self-portrait. This is not breadth-collecting in the manner of a completist. It is depth of conviction in a single origin point, accumulated the way an investor accumulates a position.

Four Snowfro works held in the wallet, rendered live from the chain.

Art as a network good

The investor's frame also explains why he thinks the foundation holds. Schloss treats the strongest on-chain works as network digital objects with few external dependencies, and reaches for the comparison most venture investors would: Bitcoin and gold. In periods of macro uncertainty, capital moves toward things that preserve value without counterparty or execution risk, and he sees that same behaviour beginning to reach the purely on-chain end of generative art. Snowfro's design choices are what make the comparison hold for him: resolution independence, minimal dependencies, and works that remain art objects without a team required to sustain their value in perpetuity.⁵

From there the argument becomes economic. The contemporary art market, he notes, is a roughly two-trillion-dollar asset class, sustained because hundreds of thousands of ultra-high-net-worth individuals use art to diversify and store wealth. His bet is that the same logic, supercharged by on-chain ownership, pulls that capital toward generative art over time. The leading indicator he watches is institutional: by his count the Chromie Squiggle now sits in eight or nine major museums, with digital work showing at the MoMA and LACMA.⁵

Why he matters to the argument

The AB[500] thesis is that this period will be read, later, as the moment a medium was founded. Schloss is the figure who is already acting on that reading from inside the market: funding the rails, sitting on the board that selected the Art Blocks Curated Collection, building a room for the work in the desert, holding the genesis works in depth, and writing about them as they enter the record. When he was named to the Curation Board, he framed the job as being there to help surface the generative artworks being made around the world.⁸ Where Trying makes the argument anonymously, through the structure of a complete set, Schloss makes it in public, through a fund, a board seat, a gallery, a DAO and a byline. He is the period's investor-historian, and his wallet is a thesis statement.

The collection is the argument; this is one of the people building the institutions that will carry it.