All right, so I am originally Italian. However, I have been living in London for very many years, moved to the UK in 2001, and fell in love with the city, pretty much making London my home base for all these years. My background actually is in finance. I started as an investment banker, working in hedge fund, both primarily in London with a small stint in Milan and a year in New York. Then in 2014, I decided to completely change careers and become an entrepreneur, and had a tech business tax startup that I founded with a partner that was pretty successful at the beginning. However, cracks started to show a little bit here and there, and we were completely effectively killed by COVID since our business was in recruitment and we were very impacted. Like all fairy tales, at some point, they end.

And at the end of 2020, I took a step back from my company, hired someone else to manage it, and took a much-needed break. During this break, I discovered NFTs, and the first article I read was about NBA TOPSHOT, the Dapper Labs platform, and NFTs, and their potential. I was fascinated and started reading more and watching videos. At that time, there wasn't much available to learn and understand, but I fell into the rabbit hole headfirst, and I've been basically full-time in NFTs ever since, for over two years. It's been an amazing journey.

Now, the name “Lord Truffington” has a quite interesting story. My business partner, when I had the startup, always made fun of me because I dressed up nicely. Coming from finance, I would wear a suit and a white shirt, whereas he cared a lot less about his attire. He jokingly called me a lord. When we got our office lease, he registered me as lord instead of Mr. That's where the lord part comes from. Truffington is a "Britishized" version of my Italian last name.

When we created test accounts on our platform, we would often use "lord" before the name, such as "Lord Michael Truffington," which was easy for our British audience to understand. Lord Truffington stuck, and when I started entering the NFT world, I used it as my username. I built my brand around the name, even creating a Twitter account under it after using my real name for a while.

I really believe that NFTs as a technology will permeate every single aspect of our lives in the future. In 10 or 20 years, we won't be talking about NFTs, just like we don't talk about the Internet. You don't have a website 'in' the Internet, you just have a website. In the same way, your passport, medical records, credit score, and everything else will be in entity format. However, there are really big barriers to entry today. I know this may have been said before, but it's really hard to set up a wallet, use a wallet, understand gas fees, and complete transactions. Only a few people beyond those who are already in the crypto space are willing to put up with it. It's funny, I started with NBA TOPSHOT and then became an art collector on Nifty Gateway because both platforms have an easy on-ramp with credit cards, not with a wallet. If someone had told me at the beginning that I had to create a MetaMask, I would have said 'no, not for me'. It looks too difficult and complicated, and there's a big risk of making mistakes. But the on-ramp with a credit card was absolutely fantastic and really got me hooked before I started to learn about MetaMask wallets, hot wallets, cold storage, and so on.
For NFTs to become super important in the future, we need a tradeoff between security and usability. We need something that is easy to use, as easy as email. Email became widely used because you could set up an email address in two minutes. If I want to send you an NFT but you don't have a wallet, there should be a little link where you can click and create a wallet in two seconds to receive my NFT. This is what we need, and many people are working on various technologies. It will take time, but it's necessary.

On the more nifty side, we need to behave ourselves a little better as a collective group. There are too many scams and too many things that give us bad publicity and scare people off. This applies to crypto as well. The FTX problem was a big problem for the people who lost money, but it was also a problem for everyone who wasn't in crypto because it reinforced the idea that crypto is risky.

NFTs will be the building blocks of the Internet of tomorrow. They are an application of blockchain technology that helps to record something in a public, immutable, and secure way. NFTs are little entries into a big ledger that allow people to prove that they own something or have certain rights. It's similar to a login with your email, but much more secure. Ultimately, an NFT is just a technology that you can attach to anything you want, like an image, text, or video. It's similar to a PDF file that can contain anything. NFTs are shells that are registered and recorded on a public, safe, and immutable blockchain. That's the beauty of it. NFTs will just add another layer of security to the world and the Internet.

As I entered the NFT space, I primarily traded various tokens, whether they were gaming tokens or collectibles like PFPs. It was only on the side that I started to buy some pieces of art and FDs that I really loved. That was in a way the beginning of my art collection. I now own maybe over 1000 different art pieces and NFTs, and I'm very proud of the art I've collected. In this process, as I was collecting more and more, I also started collecting a lot of photography, which is something I've always been fascinated by and loved, even though I've always considered myself a person with zero artistic skills and zero creativity. NFTs have helped me question that narrative and embrace the creativity that was inside me, like it is inside everybody else, and to give it a little bit of a voice. It was a journey I'm very proud of and would recommend anyone to embrace and go in search of.

I've always taken photos as a tourist with compact cameras 15 years ago, and then with the mobile phone, but I've never shown my photos to anyone or talked about them. I have thousands and thousands and thousands of holiday snaps on my computer. Often they're not the photos of monuments and stuff that I always thought I could get online with a Google search. They might be something a little bit more peculiar, some particular people that I met in a city, or a certain angle, particular angle, etc. But again, I never really showed them to anyone.
Then I started collecting a lot of photos and curating my photos and my art in digital galleries like on Cyber. I started receiving a lot of compliments from people saying, "Oh, the way you created, the way you put together all the work is really nice. You really have a good eye," which is something that was very new to me. I had never even considered that. Then I said, "You know, maybe I should give this a try and try to express myself in a different way." With my phone, I started taking a few photos.

I have a friend who runs a major photography account on Instagram, and she saw some of my old pictures, and she said, "These pictures are very good. You really need to cultivate this a little bit more." That's when I began. In a way, it hasn't even been a year since I started putting a camera to use, and I never opened Photoshop until July 22 of last year, not even nine months ago. It was the first time I ever opened Photoshop or Lightroom.

I started taking my photos and putting them out there, getting feedback from a lot of very good professional photographers that I got to know, thanks to me collecting their work. They put me in a privileged position to explore and learn from the best in the space. Now I'm absolutely hooked. I'm addicted to street photography. Wherever I go, I have my camera, and I love it. I have to say I'm very proud to realize I do have a good eye, and I am picking up a lot of interesting images, angles, perspectives, and characters when I go around.

Now I'm working on a journey to understand my artistic identity. Why do I take a lot of black and white photos? I love very dramatic black and white tones, shadows, and silhouettes. Why do I shoot these and not something else? What does it mean? It's helping me understand myself even better. This is something that I have to thank NFTs and digital art for.