From cube farm to comics to digital art: This artist has made $2.2 million at the first woman-run NFT marketplace

“Growing up as an Asian American,” he told Fortune, “creativity wasn’t exactly nurtured all the time, which is completely understandable if I look back. But it’s one of those things where I think I had a knack for art, but because it wasn’t nurtured I got quite a late start.”

He’s since made up for it, racking up over $2.2 million in NFT sales at the online marketplace Exchange.art. Although he says he did a bit of design work at age 16, he mostly shelved the idea and took a corporate job, where at 22 he discovered he loved to draw. Lê then became an apprentice at a screen printer in Los Angeles, where he’d work once a week after commuting from Orange County.

“I fell madly in love with what I can say, and what I can do, and the conversations that art would let me have with other people—and I just kind of have chased it ever since,” Lê told Fortune.

His next stage as an artist was livestreaming his illustrations on Twitch, at a time when non-gaming content was scarce. In 2019, after he’d moved on from Twitch, he got the chance to publish his comic, Giga, under Vault Comics. But, in 2021, after becoming frustrated with the financial framework of the comics industry, he began exploring crypto and NFTs.

“There were other projects that I actually had signed on for—comics with other publishers—and, at that time, it was really tough because I am in love with comics and the medium,” he said. “But the business has some primitive perspectives of how to run a business.”

Courtesy of John Lê

Discovering and using smart contracts—which can allow artists to receive not just initial sale proceeds but royalties from future sales—quite literally changed Lê’s life.

‘Making it accessible’

The same year that Lê was getting interested in…