The first thing you see is his forehead, because Nick “Nickmercs” Kolcheff is hunched forward and focused on his on-screen opponents. (Gamer stance, for the initiated.) The second thing you see is his crosshair begin to make its way, unerringly, to an opponent’s head. And this all happens live, in what feels like a split-second, broadcast to the tens of thousands who have opened up Twitch specifically to see this — forehead, crosshair — in real time. And he does this hundreds of times an hour, entertaining millions. 

It’s almost like magic, especially if you, like me, have tried streaming or playing first-person shooters. Being good at entertaining people (streaming) has almost nothing to do with the intimate knowledge of mechanics of good crosshair placement (FPS games). You can stream for hours to nobody, and you can put thousands of hours into a game and still fail to break into the highest levels of play. But Nick — always Nick, never Kolcheff, unless you were his commanding officer — is different. 

Built different, you might say. He started out as a Gears of War 2 national champion, back when American esports was figuring out how to professionalize; today, he’s one of the most subscribed-to streamers on Twitch. His journey — from there, if you like, to here — is fascinating, not least because it mirrors nearly exactly how gaming itself went mainstream. In a word: Nick is the blueprint. 

I should say here that we’ve never met — never video chatted, even. So I don’t have any beautiful scenes with him for you, no anecdotes that describe the kind of food he orders for dinner and what that says about his game sense, nothing about what it’s like to play in a squad beside him, or what it might say about his character if he declined to revive me at a particularly crucial moment. Which probably makes me a lot like you, the person reading this. 

I lied about the food thing, though. I can tell you about a steak. “We went to this really fancy LA-like restaurant, and they had all these weird things on the menu,” says Ali “SypherPK” Hassan, when I reach him by phone. The year was 2019; they were hanging out because it was TwitchCon, the annual convention the platform throws for its streamers and viewers. “But Nick is very traditional when it comes to food. He just wanted some steak. And that’s really all he came for,” Hassan says. “And there was no steak on the menu.” 

Even parsing the menu was difficult, Hassan told me, which is one way to know a restaurant is fancy. “They kept bringing out these strange menu items, like this salad that was frozen in liquid nitrogen or something like that. It was insane,” says Hassan. “And Nick absolutely hated everything. And every time [the waitress] came out, he was like, ‘Excuse me, miss, could you please bring me a steak.’ He just kept asking for a steak.” There was no steak.

By the end of that night, it seemed like the restaurant had finally heard Nick’s pleas: he got a steak. But it was too late. He’d lost his appetite from picking at all of the other more adventurous dishes sent their way. “He was really frustrated. And everybody had to share the steak so that it didn’t go to waste. He was super upset, of course.” He still tipped big on their bill, because obviously. “We ended up going and grabbing burgers, even though we had just spent probably like a couple thousand at this really fancy restaurant.”

Allow me to draw a few conclusions. Nick is intense about his goals (repeatedly asking for a steak), but he’s generous in their pursuit (tipping big), and he always brings his friends along for the ride even if it’s a little annoying (making them get burgers after spending thousands of dollars on a fancy meal). 

I didn’t get to have burgers with Nick, but I did manage to finagle a couple of calls with him. And while I had him on the line, he was very generous with his time. Whether I was talking to Nick or any of the people he knows, I always felt like I was getting the same guy — the guy who wanted a steak and who wasn’t going to stop asking until he got one. The same guy, in other words, as the one you see whenever you open up Twitch. 

Nick pulls in an average of around 50,000 concurrents every stream — meaning every time you tune in, on average, he’s got about as many people watching him as live in Bozeman, Montana (at least according to the 2019 census). His chat is always set to subscriber-only mode because, with that many people, it’s nearly impossible to recognize coherent sentences. Even so, the MFAM — that’s Mercs Family — keeps the chat moving pretty quick. According to the metrics site Twitch Tracker, Nick has more than 67,000 active subscriptions, which is good enough to make him the fourth-most-subscribed-to streamer on Twitch. (He’s currently 18th in terms of viewership.) 

All of this is to say that, in a lot of ways, Nick is Twitch. He’s been streaming on the site since 2010 when it was Justin.tv and when esports and live-streaming were still online novelties to most people. Back then, the biggest going concern was Major League Gaming (MLG), which organized and ran tournaments with significant cash prizes. Nick was playing with a professional team called TH3 NSAN3Z — stylizing theirs — when they won the Gears of War 2 national championship in 2009 and the team walked home $40,000 richer. They kept winning big at other tourneys, too.

But Nick has always been good at games. It’s his talent. His foray into online gaming started when he was 14 years old — a Detroit teen — he says, with Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory’s multiplayer mode, a 2 v. 2 battle between spies and mercenaries. (Because we’re just about the same age, I can tell you the year was 2005.) “And I got really good, man,” Nick says. “I mean, me and my buddy played gamebattles.com, man, and we hopped on the ladder, and we beat the shit out of everybody.” 

Everything changed for Nick that year because that’s when the original Gears of War came out. “I was 15 years old, and I was in high school. I was a freshman or sophomore,” he remembers. “I saw the commercial on TV, I rode my Haro bike up to GameStop to buy it.” Young Nick plays Gears and then plays it more via GameBattles, the best (and, at the time, just about the only) place for competitive online gaming. He falls in love. He meets and befriends fellow streamer CDNThe3rd, and their teams fight against each other in Gears’ 2 v. 2 mode. He wins.

But Nick says it was so competitive that he asked CDN and his teammate to join up to make a four-man squad. To “fast-forward through the boring bullshit,” as Nick says, they crushed. “We went like 80 and 0. I mean, we did not lose a single fuckin’ match. And we took it very seriously,” he says. Their names were on top of the GameBattles page. And because social media was in its infancy — YouTube, as you may recall, launched in 2005 — there was nowhere else to see who was best. To put a button on this capsule of gaming history: MLG buys GameBattles.com, adds Gears to its professional circuit, and suddenly, Nick and his team are flying across the country to compete at LAN events. 

As a team, they didn’t make much money — after everything was split, they had just about enough to cover their expenses — but they got to be pros. “On LAN, I was always real colorful. And if I beat your ass, I would let your mom know that I beat your ass,” says Nick. “Like ‘Yo, is this your son? Is this your fucking son? Who brought him here? Did you fucking bring him here?’” 

After he’d convinced his family that he could play and succeed as a pro, he had thousands of dollars burning a hole in his pockets from LAN tourney winnings. He was still in high school. “I remember having to go up to Bank of America, and I had to deposit like 10 grand in cash,” he says. 

He was living the dream, but he wanted to go bigger. “Because at that point, I was watching a lot of the Halo guys playing, like Walshy and Ogres” — some of the best players of all time, playing an even more popular title — “I was really itching to go play at that level in front of a crowd and perform,” Nick says. “Because I felt like, no matter what game I touched at the time, I was that little crackhead, man. I was really fucking good. And I got really good fast.” 

Which is true. I recalled an earlier conversation I had with Nick, where he described his gaming prowess. Let me quote from my transcript: 

I’m like that kid in eighth grade. [You know the kid who] had big balls and a big dick? You know what I mean? Remember? When I was in eighth grade, I’ll never forget it. I grew up a little faster than everybody. I was really good at football, and I was beating the shit out of everybody. [I always thought] I’m kind of like that guy. But listen, eventually, everybody’s gonna catch up to that guy. Because they all mature, their balls drop. And everybody’s on the same fucking playing field. Perfect analogy. That’s how I am. I get on the game, I’m better than everybody off the rip, but give them like a month or two months, and it’s over. 

Anyway, it wasn’t all winning and playing games professionally. Nick told me his family wasn’t initially supportive of his teenage gaming habits; they were sports people. “I hated fucking school, man. I couldn’t stand it. Because, you know, it kept me away from the games. And my dad and mom, they would never let me play,” he says. “So the only time that I could play was when they went to bed. So I’d be up all night playing, and then I’d get in trouble for not going to school or for getting up late or whatever.”  

His dad played college ball and then coached at Michigan under Bo Schembechler and Gary Moeller. Both of his uncles played college ball. His grandfather played in college, too. Today, his little brother is a wrestler in Missouri, and three of his cousins are in the NFL. One starts for the Bears. “Even the girls, man. I got a couple girl cousins that played like, at D1 colleges for volleyball and softball,” Nick says. “They’re just huge chicks man. Big shoulders, big backs. You know what I mean? Big, big chicks.” 

He had to prove to his family that he was as good at gaming as they were at sports, which was a tall order. (And it should be noted, Nick recalls that he was pretty good at sports himself — though never as good as he was at gaming.) It led to fights, like the one with his mother where she was so mad that he was up late playing games that she put his Xbox into a trash bag, brought it out onto the front lawn, and smashed it into a million pieces. Nick says she was afraid for him. 

“She was afraid of attitude. She was afraid of failure,” he says. “And listen, I was a tough kid to raise, man. Imagine trying to raise a kid that loves something so much that isn’t there yet. Like gaming was not there yet,” he says. “So they were just trying to be good parents. They were doing the right thing.” 

After high school, though, Nick found himself adrift. He’d been a Gears pro through high school, but his parents had been right, sort of: gaming wasn’t really something you could do for a living, at least not then, not unless you worked as a game developer. Nick enrolled in community college for about a year and didn’t finish. “I remember I called my wife” — Emumita Bonita, as he calls her, whom he met when he was 12 and whom he married when he was 29 — “and I was like, ‘I think I’m going to be a nurse.’” He told his dad that he kind of wanted to go to school to be a cop. “I was just a confused 18-, 19-, 20-year-old not really knowing what I wanted to do,” he says. In community college, he spent his Pell Grant and his loans on “gaming shit and gym equipment,” in his words, while pretending he was a diligent student. He was lost. 

“I spent way too much time on the internet, bro,” Nick says. “And I watched the videos. I watched the videos on some sites that you just shouldn’t be watching. Man, I saw people get their fuckin’ heads cut off, little kids doing the craziest shit. A lot of fucked-up stuff out there in the world that just pissed me off.” It made him look into the military. He wanted to do something about the evil he was seeing in the world — and so he joined the Navy on a special ops contract. Nick wanted to be a SEAL. He quit gaming to do it.

“It was one of, if not the, hardest thing I’ve ever tried to do in my life,” he says. “I got a lot of friends nowadays. They’re SEALs that made it all the way through.” 

But he didn’t make it. He couldn’t hack the underwater stuff, which is fairly important if you want to be a Navy SEAL. (The “S” stands for “sea.”) He could do everything else — the running, the pushups, the physical conditioning. His only demerits were for the underwater swim specifically. Eventually, one of his superiors called him to his office. “He told me to cut the bullshit. He goes, ‘Listen, man, I’m this guy. You’re Nick. We’re just two dudes talking right now. Cut the fucking shit. What’s going on? How come you can’t pass the underwater stuff?” Nick recalls. “I said, ‘Listen, man. I’m trying. I get underwater, and I get real panicky. I get about halfway through whatever we’re doing, and I try to come up for air or I’m gonna pass the fuck out.’” 

“He goes, ‘Well, pass the fuck out then,’” Nick remembers. And so he got a couple more tries at the underwater swim — tries that he wasn’t necessarily supposed to get. Nick does his best. He stays underwater. And then he wakes up on the pool deck with an instructor screaming wake the fuck up! at him. He’d passed out. His best wasn’t good enough.

Ultimately, that superior let Nick stick around on base as a helper. “I was a janitor. I cleaned toilets at Coronado for like two or three hours a day,” he says. “And then I got cut. It was like a big vacation, man. It was pretty chill.” 

Nick went back to community college, right back where he started. “I was super confused again. I didn’t know what the fuck I wanted to do with my life,” he says. So he started gaming again. His friends who’d stuck around told him to stream — told him that people actually subscribed and donated, like it was a normal thing. “I was going to community college again, and I was streaming on the side. And the stream just took over, man,” he says. “I went from 100 subs to 200 subs to 300 to 1,000, you know, just cruising. And that’s when I realized, you know, that it was gonna be a real thing.” 

You know the story from there. Nick’s stream takes off. He plays different games — Halo, Call of Duty, Fortnite, and then back to Call of Duty. Each is its separate turning point in his career. He signs to 100 Thieves and then leaves after a contract dispute. He signs to FaZe Clan, of which he’s now a part-owner. FaZe, by the way, is happy to talk about Nick. “More than anything else, what really drew us to say we wanted to work with him is what he had built with MFAM and how he interacted with his fans and the way that he treated every single person around him as if they were family,” says Darren Yan, head of talent at FaZe. “He was a jack-of-all-trades.” Yan says Nick is the kind of person FaZe wants its audience to look up to, as a kind of elder statesman in gaming. (Though he, like me, is not old.) “Nick is a very, very unique and special individual. I don’t think someone like him comes often,” says Yan. “He’s definitely a generational talent.”

And I agree; it takes a lot of work and a decent amount of emotional intelligence to corral 67,000 paying gamers into a group that’s coherent, broadly nontoxic, and welcoming. That Nick has managed it is a testament to how long he’s been in the scene. He came up through the toxic LAN parties and Xbox Live lobbies that gamers today define themselves against. I tend to think that communities reflect streamers, and if an audience is toxic, then a broadcaster has, in some ways, encouraged that. (Note that I am not talking about the people who pop into streams to troll women or people of color; I’m talking about regulars who also happen to be shitheads.)

But I want to back up a bit. I glossed over Nick’s meteoric rise on Twitch because, from the outside, it seems inevitable. “Former pro player with a hugely competitive streak and an affable bro personality streaming shoot-y games” is as good a recipe for success on Twitch as any — except tons of those people stream, and almost none are as successful as Nick is. Partially, I think it’s structural. The business of gaming changed and matured over the years Nick’s been streaming. The biggest change, probably, was major advertisers and large corporations recognizing that people who played games were a valuable group to target. That meant money began to flow into the scene in the form of bigger tournament prizes and sponsorships even for smaller streamers. At the same time, the rise of social media meant more people than ever could participate — sharing clips, organizing events, and paying gaming creators directly. 

Streaming, meanwhile, exploded. In 2011, Justin.tv bet on gaming and launched Twitch.tv as its own site, which quickly became the main business. The company pivoted, and Twitch was acquired by Amazon in 2014 for $970 million. Competing streaming platforms launched, like Mixer (2016–2020, F), YouTube Gaming (2015), and Facebook Gaming (2018). Streamers became a category of online influencer that was legible to people outside of gaming, and it brought people who played games for a living directly in front of their fans. 

Against that backdrop, I think it’s easier to see how Nick was perfectly positioned to succeed. He had the passion. He had the talent. He was willing to grind out the hours necessary to grow a community. And he switched up the games he was streaming because, he says, he felt like it. “When I’m not having fun, everybody fuckin knows,” he says, by way of explanation. Playing what’s popular matters, but clearly not as much as having fun. 

When Nick switched from playing Call of Duty to Fortnite, just after the game had come out, he says he lost half his subscribers — he went from 5,000 or so to 2,000 or so. When you consider that, generally speaking (because there are exceptions), Twitch takes half of the $5 a viewer pays for a subscription, it works out to a big hit to your income. “When you lose half of that because of a game that you switch to… it’s crazy. It was demoralizing. But that’s happened to me a couple times in my career,” he says. “I knew that, you know what, if I’m not having fun, it’s just not as good content. I’d rather switch games and have fun and be myself and enjoy what I’m playing. And I think they’ll enjoy the stream more.”

Even so, it was a gamble. “I lucked out in the sense where Fortnite blew up and we had no idea it was gonna blow up. And then here I am, this fucking console player, beating the shit out of PC kids,” he says. “And they’re like, how the hell’s he doing this shit? Aim assist. Big, big, big part of it.” (They’ve since nerfed it.)

But if Nick was popular on Twitch before, Fortnite was the game that made him a gamer household name. And he’s thankful because the game also boosted the streaming industry in general. “I’ve played a lot of games. I’ve spent a lot of time in esports,” he says. “It is a fact that there’s just no game like Fortnite.” He even spends some of his time off stream watching competitive play and “beatin’ the shit out of little 12-year-olds on Fortnite every day, baby.” 

That’s how I found Nick on Twitch, actually — through his Fortnite streams, where he played with Ali “SypherPK” Hassan and others. Nick’s Fortnite gameplay is mesmerizing; it gives you the same feeling of seeing a wrecking ball go through a building or watching a controlled detonation happen. Destruction in the service of creation, if you’d like. 

Playing beside him, however, is another matter entirely. “It’s honestly like playing a professional sport,” says Hassan, who was a basketball player himself back in the day. “Playing with Nick brings me back to the times when we’re, you know, on the court, and I’m playing with my teammates, and we’re yelling back and forth at each other. And it’s super intense, high energy.” Nick and Hassan met after Nick had been lurking in his streams, learning Fortnite tips. (Hassan, a wonderfully compelling streamer in his own right, is something of a Fortnite professor.) In 2018, they played together for the first time after Hassan slid into Nick’s Twitter DMs; the event was the first Friday Fortnite tournament — which was one of the first major Fortnite tournaments ever — and they took first place.

After that win, they started playing together regularly, and they’ve been playing together ever since. “We just really clicked. Our personalities are very different, but they mesh really well,” Hassan says, referring to Nick as “the type of person that you see him and you’re like, ‘Oh, I would be friends with this guy.’”

Naturally, it was only a matter of time until Nick got sick of streaming Fortnite. “I think it was a couple months of that, of me just turning the stream on, like ‘All right, here we go again.’” But then Call of Duty: Warzone dropped. “I just got… you know, all gamers, we all have that thing in common. We get addicted to a game because we love it so much. You know what I mean?” Nick says. “We can’t get off it. Close your eyes, you see the game at night.” He was back. “And like a lot of other games in my career, there was some early tournaments for a lot of money, and we fuckin’ popped off, man.” 

Every time I interview Nick for this piece, he’s driving somewhere. Once to see fellow streamer Tim the Tatman (who couldn’t be reached for comment on this piece); the other time, he was on his way to the Super Bowl. He’s kinetic for a guy who plays video games for a living. If you’ll permit me to opine for a second: I think it’s this sense of motion that drives him forward. When he was coming up on the pro circuit, for example, he’d take two-day Greyhounds from Detroit to Dallas just to be able to compete. “I’ve fucking slept in a bathtub before just to be there,” he says. 

And the funny thing is that all this forward motion has blazed a trail for the people behind him. “When I look back on it now, I’m so lucky to say that ‘Listen, you’re looking at the foundation. You’re looking at the groundwork. And I’m happy that you’re here now — great. Welcome,’” he says. “But at the same time, I was here before any of you motherfuckers, man. Did we know it was gonna be like this? Hell no. And if anybody tells you that, I think they’re fucking lying. Because it was just pure passion.” And there aren’t many old heads like Nick left. Some have put their controllers away; some have gotten quote-unquote real jobs.

In our last conversation, I ask Nick what gaming has done for him. “The whole ‘done for me’ thing is pretty explanatory,” he says. “I’m a fucking millionaire, right? That’s kind of fuckin’ cool.” And then he changes tack and tells me that not everyone is lucky enough to get to do what they love every day, which is true. But a more revealing answer comes later, as a response to a different question. 

“You’d be fucking wrong if [you thought] I wasn’t competitive in the stream world, too, man,” he says. “I fucking want more viewers. I want more subs. I want to be the best. I want to be the top guy. I think we all do.” The answer, in other words, has been there all along. Gaming allows Nick to be the person he’s always been struggling to become: the guy who wants to compete. The guy who’s gonna beat your ass and let your mom know about it.

When I watch CodeMiko, I think a lot about unreality — though not for the obvious reasons. While Miko is a virtual creation, a punkish motion-captured digital avatar with a knack for performing her personality, I find myself more interested in the nature of her performance itself; she’s just magnetic, and I’m not sure I can describe why.

I could tell you that her streams are a combination of interviews with big-name streamers, fiddling with motion capture software, and bizarre interactions with chat. I could mention that since her start last March, Miko’s channel has amassed 640,000 followers and that she now streams to more than 7,000 viewers at any given moment she’s live. But I’m not convinced any of that contains the true nature of her gonzo appeal. What I am sure of is that Miko is here to stay, and whatever it is she’s up to is reshaping the Twitch landscape in her image — and giving everyone a healthy dose of the bizarre in the process.

Behind CodeMiko is a real human being — whose name is not Miko but who seemingly prefers to be called Miko — who plays a character referred to as The Technician in the fiction of the stream. The Technician keeps Miko’s hardware running, and it’s her I reached over video chat the other day to talk about the character’s appeal.

“Miko is a failed video game character. Her dream is she wants to be in a triple-A video game but she’s so scuffed and glitchy that she was unable to,” says The Technician, who is also Miko. “So she started trying to do Twitch streaming instead.” Miko The Technician describes Miko the virtual streamer as someone who fits the classic archetype of the struggling Hollywood actress — someone who just wants to be in a movie, any movie, except in Miko’s case, it’s literally any game. (Heads up, game devs.) “She’s kind of an NPC,” Miko (The Technician) says.

I should pause a moment here to note that yes, I am profiling a virtual creation — a streamer who, technically speaking, does not exist, at least not in our meat realm. Though she’s not alone in not existing and creating content nonetheless. By now, you may have heard of Miko’s counterparts, vtubers — “virtual YouTubers,” which is a term that’s now a catchall for a hugely popular segment of online entertainers who use digital prosthetics to obscure their faces and bodies. Miko isn’t a true vtuber, I don’t think, because the human behind the whole thing is widely known and regularly shows her face on camera. I am aware that this distinction may be considered splitting hairs.

In any case: at this point, CodeMiko’s reputation is beginning to precede her, at least on Twitch. In the early days, Technician-Miko would do everything, in her own words — all of the designing, programming, admin, and marketing work that goes into being a full-time virtual streamer. “When I was doing it by myself, I had a very strict schedule of going to sleep around 9PM, waking up at 2AM, and then devving until like 12PM,” says Miko of those early days. “And 12:30PM, I’ll stream, and I’ll stream to like 5 or 6.” And she used to do that every single day.

Now, however, she’s hired a team, and her schedule is different. Having thousands of concurrent viewers a stream will change a streamer’s life, if not necessarily their priorities. These days, Miko’s attention is split, she says, in a million different ways, and she’s mostly managing and supervising her accounts when she’s not streaming. That, of course, was a consequence of just how quickly Miko was growing on Twitch. “I think I went from like 200 to like 10,000 viewers in like a couple of weeks,” she says. The growth came from a single viral tweet posted at the end of November, which showed a side-by-side video of streamer Miko and Technician-Miko. “That tweet kind of went viral and that boosted me up to my first 1,000 viewers,” she says.

And that’s when things took off. Her clips began circulating on r/LivestreamFail, which acts as a kind of repository of Twitch drama; bigger streamers would see them there and then raid her, and then she’d interview them on her show. It was a virtuous cycle that catapulted Miko into Twitch stardom, which is also something it’s clear she hasn’t totally processed yet.

“When I was like 200, 300 viewers, I was like ‘When I hit 1,000 viewers, that’s going to be my goal, and it’s gonna feel so great. And I’ll be like, good,’” she says. “But I hit 1,000. And then the next day, I hit 2,000. And the next day, I hit 3,000.” She tells me she feels grateful, and that, yes, it’s awesome. But it’s only now, a few months since she was thrust into the limelight, that she seems to be coming to terms with the idea of being a prominent person on Twitch.

That makes sense; nobody blows up this fast on Twitch. Miko started her streaming career because she was laid off from the animation studio she worked at just after moving to Los Angeles last March — which, as you’ll recall, also happened to be the early days of the pandemic in America. She had to keep paying her $2,000-a-month lease in LA, which wouldn’t be up for almost a whole year. “And I thought, you know what would be the good thing to do right now isn’t to try to look for work,” she says. “Let me put down 20 grand and try to make it on Twitch.”

And that’s exactly what she did. “My suit was around 12 to 13k. And then I had my computer, my iPhone cam, my helmet, and then my software subscriptions as well. But the mocap software subscription is actually really expensive as well,” she says. She put the $20,000 investment on her credit card. “I told myself I’m not gonna have a backup. Because if I did have a backup, then I’ll give up,” she says. “If I don’t have a backup then you have to make it.”

And Miko has. She’s built up a world around herself filled with fascinating characters and extremely clippable moments. She’s been temporarily banned from Twitch a couple of times in the past — which, when I talk to her, she doesn’t seem very stressed about even though, each time, her livelihood has been on the line. As Nathan Grayson reports over at Kotaku, Miko’s bans thus far have seemingly been for small slip-ups that violate the letter — if not the spirit — of Twitch’s TOS. (Like the time she let her viewers pay to send her “D pics,” which were literally pictures of the letter “D” that would show up on her phone. Twitch did not appear to find the joke funny.) “Bans make your IP more interesting,” Miko says, laughing. “[It] gives a little bit of color.”

Whatever happens, it’s clear that Miko — the streamer or The Technician — is here to stay. And she’s planning new things for chat to try out, too. “I’m trying to make like a GTA Carpool Karaoke on crack. I’ll have the guests, we’ll be driving in a car,” she says. “And we’ll be going through the city, trying to get to our destination, while chat obstructs the road with various things.”

Chatting with her, I get the distinct impression that Miko — whichever Miko you prefer to imagine — has an inexhaustible well of ideas for her channel. It’s like talking to someone at a party in the wee hours of the morning, when the world feels slightly tilted, in just the right way. It just works, though saying that obscures just how much effort goes into her channel. A successful performance is about finding what works for an audience, and Miko is dedicated to trying anything she thinks might delight her fans.

“I’ll make it and then if it works, keep it,” she says. “If it doesn’t work, throw it away.”

The artist Derek Laufman woke up last weekend to a couple emails from his followers, who had a question for him. They wanted to know if he’d started selling NFTs — non-fungible tokens — of his art. But it wasn’t just email. People had DMed him on Instagram and Twitter, too. “I just replied, that’s 100 percent not me,” Laufman says when I reach him by video call.

On Rarible, a site where people can purchase NFTs, a verified profile had appeared that alleged to be from him — which means that someone took the time to impersonate him all the way through the platform’s verification process. “I was basically kind of annoyed that somebody had, quote, unquote, verified me as on that platform,” Laufman says. “I dealt with having my art stolen for years. And I’m sort of numb to that. But when somebody is claiming to be you … that kind of, you know, pisses me off.”

After a few people reported the theft and impersonation and Laufman fired off a few messages on Twitter about the situation, Rarible took the profile down. But not before one of his fans had bought an NFT of the work.

While you’ve probably heard of NFTs by now, you’ve probably heard more about digital art selling for exorbitant sums than about the creators who are getting ripped off.

Which is a shame. The promise of NFTs is pretty easy to grasp: if you’re a digital creator, they represent a way to make money off of work that might not otherwise be salable. You can earn royalties from future sales of work in perpetuity — and it can be built right into the object itself. But the reality of NFTs is different, and grimmer.

Artists like Laufman have have had their work minted as NFTs and listed for sale without their permission; and as in that case, platforms that host stolen art only seem to moderate if the artist finds out and posts about it on social media. Tales From The Loop author Simon Stålenhag found his art on Marble Cards, another NFT site, and Giphy has warned that people are turning user-created GIFs from its site into NFTs. Because the NFT system doesn’t require people to actually own the copyright to something to mint it, it’s a market ripe for fraud.

NFTs are unique digital widgets that are typically part of the Ethereum blockchain and can be used to identify the owner of a piece of digital art. Any digital object can become an NFT, as long as it’s been “minted,” or put on the blockchain as a token. They’re sort of like trading cards, if the card was digital and pointed to the URL of a JPEG. And because these tokens are represented on a blockchain — which is predicated on burning cheap electricity to solve mathematical puzzles, which when solved pay out some amount of cryptocurrency — there is an as yet unspecified negative environmental cost associated with transacting them.

The whole system is predicated on the understanding that the people minting NFTs are who they say they are. Would you buy a GIF of Nyan Cat for $560,000, for example, if the creator of the meme wasn’t the person who was selling it as an NFT online? Because anything can be tokenized on the blockchain — where, by the way, the record is immutable — anything can end up as a NFT, even if the creator of an artwork isn’t the person selling it online for Ethereum.

While it’s unclear whether the problem is widespread, many artists have started checking sites like OpenSea and Rarible to see if their work has been minted without their permission. “I’d seen a few posts going around of people who’d had their art stolen,” says Devin Elle Kurtz, an artist and visual developer, when I reach her by phone. So Kurtz decided to look around to see if her own work had been taken. “And I was like, you know, it probably hasn’t. You know… it’s probably fine.” As the narrator of this story, I can say: it wasn’t fine.

“I searched my name and sure enough it came up,” Kurtz says. “One of the first results was my art on this Marble Cards website.” The piece in question was around five years old, from her DeviantArt account, and it had made it to the front page of the website. “The person who turned it into an NFT had, like, put their handle all over it,” Kurtz added. “Like, all over the frame, they’d like put their watermark on it with their Twitter handle.” Which is very weird!

“I don’t know who that person is, and they may not have known they were doing anything wrong,” Kurtz says. “Nothing against that individual if they didn’t realize that what they were doing might not be the greatest.” It was priced at 1.03 Ether, which as of publication time works out to $1,844.03; it’s still up, though Marble Cards removed the image at Kurtz’s request. But the NFT — the frame around the URL in the case of Marble Cards — will continue to exist forever, on the blockchain. (Marble Cards is unique in that it lets users mint and trade “frames” around artwork, rather than the artwork itself, theoretically avoiding copyright issues — though artists clearly disagree.)

Kurtz’s experience is emblematic of the big problem with NFTs, generally speaking: anyone can mint anything. All you need is an Ethereum wallet and some cash for “gas fees” — in other words, the cost of doing the transaction to put whatever you’re minting on the Ethereum blockchain.

On OpenSea and Rarible, two major NFT platforms, you don’t have to verify you own something before putting it on the blockchain. Verifying yourself on these platforms is also not difficult; Rarible’s process involves submitting social handles for verification but doesn’t seem to check whether you own those handles, as in Laufman’s case. OpenSea, on the other hand, has foregone verification entirely. Its recommendation for buyers is now, “Do your own research.” (Neither platform had responded to requests for comment at press time.)

I spoke to the independent crypto journalist Amy Castor to get her opinion on this kind of NFT fraud. Castor recently wrote a story for her personal website about the biggest sale in NFT history — of the artist Beeple’s work, which the famed auction house Christie’s sold for $69 million — alleging that Metakovan, the pseudonymous buyer, bought the work to finance a pump-and-dump scheme with another token they own, B.20.

“Anybody can create an entity about anything and just sell it on a marketplace. There probably aren’t that many protections in place. But, I mean, the key thing is you’re not buying anything,” Castor says when I reach her by phone. “If you buy identity as a token, it’s just this coin. There’s really no intrinsic value to it, other than what somebody else is going to pay you for it,” she continues. “It’s all speculative at the end of the day.”