Anil Dash & Kevin McCoy

The 26th Annual Webby Awards is honored to recognize Anil Dash and Kevin Mccoy with the 2022 Webby Lifetime Achievement Award for developing a block-chain powered way for artists to own and monetize digital work, which laid the groundwork for what would be known as Non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

Since creating their pivotal monetized graphics project in 2014, and forming the first prototype of a system that uses blockchain technology to authenticate and sell unique digital artworks, Dash and McCoy’s efforts have revolutionized a new era for the Internet, ownership and collaboration. From offering people a way to store digital artworks in a blockchain, to using NFTs to fund DAOs focused on community development, the system Dash and McCoy created are one of the most important technological inventions of the decade that is fostering a new era of digital collaboration.

Moreover, they continue to advocate for the original purpose of NFTs: to empower artists with the ability to have agency over their work, monetize it, and protect it against plagiarism and appropriation. Dash and McCoy’s work has inspired a huge discourse, across industries, of how to foster new collaborations and how artists can take back ownership of their work in a world that loves to devalue artists’ labor while simultaneously consuming their creations. For their remarkable work inventing the first NFT and the system that allows artists to protect and be compensated for their labor, it is our great privilege to honor Anil Dash and Kevin McCoy with the 2022 Webby Lifetime Achievement Award.