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For Eli Scheinman, building communities is not just about fostering conversations around art—it’s about creating meaningful connections that resonate with life itself. As Head of Art at Proof and Director of Art at Yuga Labs, Scheinman discusses the importance of authentic relationships in the art world and how they enrich the experience of collecting.
The best art relationships are not transactional - they are forms of genuine connection. Eli Scheinman has spent his career at the organisations most directly responsible for defining what community means in the digital art space: first at Proof, then at Yuga Labs. What he has learned is that the connective tissue of any lasting art culture is not the platform - it's the authentic human relationships that form around it.
Eli Scheinman is Head of Art at Proof and Director of Art at Yuga Labs, two organisations that have played central roles in shaping the culture of NFT collecting and community. He brings to those positions a deep conviction that authentic relationships - not clever tokenomics or platform mechanics - are what make art communities last. His work focuses on building the conditions under which genuine connections between artists and collectors can form, and his perspective reflects years of watching what makes those conditions work.
Community is the word that gets used most often and explained least carefully in the NFT space. Eli Scheinman's version of community is specific: it's not a Discord server or a token holder group - it's a set of authentic relationships that connect people through a shared love of art and the genuine experiences it produces. This conversation explores what it takes to build that kind of community at the scale of organisations like Proof and Yuga Labs - what works, what fails, and what the difference is between community as marketing and community as something real.
Authentic relationships as the foundation
Scheinman's central conviction is that authenticity - in relationships between collectors, between collectors and artists, between organisations and their communities - is not a nice-to-have but the only thing that actually lasts. Manufactured community always shows.
Art at Proof and Yuga Labs
These two organisations have made different bets about what digital art culture should look like. Scheinman's dual position gives him an unusual perspective on what both bets share and where they diverge.
Collecting as relationship
For Scheinman, collecting is not primarily an aesthetic or financial activity - it's a relational one. The works you collect connect you to the artists who made them, and those connections enrich the experience of owning the work over time.
Building community at scale
The tension between scale and authenticity is real: the larger a community gets, the harder it is to maintain the quality of relationships that made it worth joining. Scheinman has thought carefully about how organisations navigate that tension.
If you've ever wondered whether the community around a project matters as much as the work itself, this episode gives you the most thoughtful answer available. Scheinman's experience building art communities at scale produces genuine insight into what makes collecting meaningful beyond the transaction - and what you should look for when evaluating whether a community is real.
Unlocked is the podcast by 100 collectors - the global network for digital art collectors. Each episode, we speak with artists, curators, collectors, and builders shaping the digital art world. No market speculation. No hype. Just honest, substantive conversations about art, practice, and what it means to collect today. New episodes release throughout the year. Find Unlocked on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. 100 collectors is a membership network. [Explore membership →]
