Kirk DeSoto

As far as Kirk was concerned half a decade later, music was forever behind him and he had no plans of being musical again. He discovered Bitcoin in 2011 but never got into the space or invested in it at the time, but eventually started his deep dive into cryptocurrency in 2016.

He started getting into NFT’s in 2021 and was subsequently introduced to the idea of adding music to an image and releasing it on a blockchain. Around April of 2022 he discovered a group of singer/songwriters, beginning with Violetta Zironi, selling their music for Ethereum and combining the idea of gamified collectorship with art and music using blockchain as the medium.

He started to become an avid collector of many musicians in the Web3 space, and the inspiration garnered by spending a lot of time engaged in the Web3 music space, inspired him to start getting back into music. By October of 2022 Kirk not only launched his first music NFT collection but also played live the following month for the first time in almost 11 years in London, UK at an event hosted by musician Josh Savage.

Through this time he really got involved in the gamification, tokenomics and drop strategy mechanisms of music NFT’s, leaning on the many prior years he spent delving deep into the tokenomics of cryptocurrencies, beginning in 2016. Kirk began advising many creators and artists in the Web3 space starting in 2022 about collection gamification and drop mechanics.

In 2023 TokenTraxx brought Kirk on as an advisor. Web3 has truly changed Kirk’s life and he loves helping and educating people about blockchain and the Web3 space in general.

His goal is to help build a new music paradigm, combining the concept of artists owning their own creations via staying independent and utilizing the tools that blockchain technology has to offer to help foster the principles of decentralization and self-ownership.

Kirk DeSoto is a singer/songwriter who quit music for about a decade but was brought back to music via the Web3 music space. 

He began singing in choirs when he was very young and performed in the Opera Carmen around the age of 10. He played piano as a child as well but eventually shifted to the guitar, taking inspiration from a childhood friend and starting a band with him in high school.

Kirk garnered a lot of inspiration for his early music from growing up near Seattle during the height of the grudge era. He interned at Sony Music Studios in New York City in 2000 for an audio engineering program and subsequently recorded 2 independently produced albums there.

After much touring in New York City during the early 2000’s he eventually got disaffected with the New York City independent music scene and the industry as a whole, much of which was a pay to play system. He left New York in 2012 and slowly became less and less active doing anything musically until eventually he stopped playing guitar and barely sang anymore.