Sexy Mechsy Betzy 1/1 Auction End Party!

Host: Ethan S. Brewerton (@EthanSBrewerton), with Threeeyed (@monstermilady) co-hosting · Thu, Sep 24 · 54 min · 4 speakers

TL;DR

• Ethan ran out the final half-hour of his "Sexy Mechsy Betzy" 1/1 auction on XRP Cafe live on mic — three bidders total, no last-second sniping.
• Threeeyed won it at 11 XRP [36:10], which he considers poetic justice since he designed the on/off switches trait that ended up in the piece.
• Long pre-crowd stretch between Ethan and Threeeyed on NFT stigma in the art world, royalties, dead follower counts, and what they'd do differently post-2021.
• Ethan detailed his current life: building apps for nonprofits with AI, cancelling software subscriptions and having GPT build replacements, and using ChatGPT to prompt ChatGPT [31:34].
• WIZ joined late [41:04] with the state of the XRPL art scene — guest-artist traits, Japanese artists like ham (crunk cats) and Sienna (drop chan), and Bearchamp/Evernorth momentum pulling ETH people over.
• Idano dropped in just to congratulate the winner, explained he missed the bid war because he has a kid, and immediately had to leave [49:22].

Highlights

[04:27] "It's not my fault if spaces are terrible." Ethan, running his first Space in about a year and a half, opened with an honest assessment of the format. Threeeyed agreed it's fine as a listener and miserable as a host, and offered his preferred genre: infighting in the UFO community. They landed on a shared diagnosis of crypto Spaces — "just noise of like advertisements, basically. Disguised as like conversation" [05:17].

[08:51] The stigma finally cracking. Ethan noted that he can admit to doing NFT stuff again without the room turning on him; Threeeyed's read was that in the art community it had been the unmentionable word. Their theory for the thaw: artists are now uniting against AI, which reshuffled who the enemy was. Threeeyed added that he'd always thought royalties were the obvious win for artist friends and never quite understood the knee-jerk backlash.

[11:? → 12:08] Explaining NFTs to a hostile stranger. Ethan recounted a Whatnot stream where a viewer sniffed out animosity-first — "Oh, you did NFTs" — and Ethan walked him through the mechanics so thoroughly the guy assumed he was a developer. The reply: "No, I'm just an artist that likes to make things."

[14:26] The giveaway hangover. Both reflected on inflated 2021 follower counts full of bots and lapsed accounts, and the algorithm penalty that follows. Ethan's regret: he should have funnelled all the giveaways through the Mechsicko account instead of his own, "but back then we were just assuming that it was just gonna like always be on an upward trajectory."

[16:25] Ethan's actual day job. Most of his time now goes to building apps for nonprofits with AI, with art as the smaller slice. He's dropped his Photoshop subscription and had GPT build him a tiling-pattern tool and a drawing program that time-lapses only the linework. He uses his long-in-progress battler game as a stress test for AI capability — the failure mode being "like you're putting a fitted sheet on that's a little bit too small," where fixing one thing breaks another.

[29:25] Marketplaces on demand. Ethan's prediction: within a year or two you won't go to an NFT marketplace, you'll just ask ChatGPT to show you NFTs and it'll generate the interface. Threeeyed liked the idea of a personal window into everything. Earlier they'd agreed XRP Cafe is the incumbent and, whatever its quirks, "nowhere near as bad as OpenSea back in the day" [28:52].

[36:10] The gavel. Five seconds, then congratulations. Threeeyed's reaction — "I'm so glad because I made the on off switches" — came with a promise to hang it in his house and bring it up for the rest of his life. Ethan pointed out the alternative: if you didn't win, you couldn't tell anyone.

[37:56] The dark path to appreciation. Threeeyed's proposed next step for Ethan's market cap was to crucify him live on AI, "punished for having art that was too dope and you stuck around too long." Ethan's only condition: "Just drug me up first."

[41:31] WIZ on the collaborative trait pipeline. WIZ described Robin dropping guest artists' work into Betsy frames — Japanese artist ham's crunk cats tucked into corners like a pet, Sienna's drop chan collection — and how collectors discovering those artists through the traits has moved their own collections. The friction point: the trait names are the artists' X handles [46:24], so finding the maker of a piece is tedious but possible. WIZ also flagged art-focused Spaces (Freedom Phoenix, Mr. Jansen, Mr. Masterpiece) timed for the Japanese market, where artists shy about their English get coaxed into speaking.

[51:23] What's next. WIZ urged Ethan to have something ready, noting the XRPL is "fertile," Spaces are doubling and tripling overnight on the Bearchamp news, and ETH collectors are prowling around again. Ethan was candid that he doesn't keep up with Spaces because he isn't a crypto investor and gets nothing from listening — prompting WIZ's very practical marketing advice about parking your avatar in the bottom row.

Topic timeline

Notable quotes

• "No, I'm just an artist that likes to make things." — Ethan [12:08]
  ▶

  0:38
• "I don't like butter noodles, dude." — Threeeyed [17:01]
  ▶

  0:38
• "Right now I basically use Chat GPT to prompt ChatGPT." — Ethan [31:34]
  ▶

  0:38
• "The crazy part to me is like that people thought I was gone, and I'm like, dude, I've literally been here the whole time." — Ethan [38:36]
  ▶

  0:38
• "No, they didn't even look under a rock. They just looked outside and I wasn't there." — Ethan [39:04]
  ▶

  0:38
• "If you can do that in a couple of spaces and actually just listen to some punk rock or something and do your art, you don't have to listen to the spaces." — WIZ [52:25]
  ▶

  0:38

Who said what

• Ethan S. Brewerton (@EthanSBrewerton) — host and artist behind the 1/1. Ran the clock, narrated the bids, and spent most of the hour on why he stepped back from crypto Spaces, how he's rebuilt his workflow around AI, and whether it's worth launching another collection.
• Threeeyed (@monstermilady) — co-host, high bidder, and eventual winner at 11 XRP. Provided the market color on XRPL projects, the case for Ethan dropping something new on XRPL ("let's size up the raptors to Tyrannosaurus Rexes"), and the running bit about flipping his new on/off switches all night.
• WIZ (@WizXRP) — arrived after the auction closed with the connective tissue: guest-artist traits, the Japanese artist pipeline, collectors discovering new work through mutations, and a nudge for Ethan to be ready if momentum keeps building.
• Idano (@14IDANO) — the third bidder, who surfaced just long enough to congratulate the winner, accept "sloppy seconds" on a consolation offer, and leave.

Worth a full listen

• [29:25 – 33:22] — Ethan's most concrete stretch on building with AI: dropping Photoshop for a custom tiling tool, the fitted-sheet metaphor for where LLMs fumble on his battler game, and the GPT-prompts-GPT trick with an art-critique analogy that explains it better than any summary can.
• [34:08 – 37:12] — The actual auction ending: the countdown, the win, the realization that the winner designed one of the traits, and the immediate follow-up about royalties not applying because the piece lives in the Betsy collection.
• [41:31 – 48:33] — WIZ's tour of the guest-artist ecosystem. Dense with names and specifics (crunk cats, drop chan, rave traits, trait-names-as-handles) and the best picture anyone gave of how the collection is functioning as an artist discovery engine.