Meet the guerilla artist who executed a crypto 'rug pull' in front of the regulator's office!

Artist Nelson Saiers’ “Rug Pull” highlighted the victims of crypto rug pulls and perceived SEC inaction in safeguarding investors.

Street vendors abound in downtown Manhattan’s Financial District. But weeks ago, on Sept. 14, an especially unconventional seller set up shop in front of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), transforming a patch of Maiden Lane into a colorful quilt of doormats, each spray painted with the straightforward instruction to “pull.”

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People enquired, but they were fake and not really for sale. The wares were part of “Rug Pull,” the latest guerilla installation by Nelson Saiers, a New York-based hedge fund manager turned artist who some consider “The Warhol of Wall Street” or crypto’s most creative activist. As an artwork, “Rug Pull” highlights the many victims affected by the type of scam it’s named after.

Saiers only works on-site when it makes sense. His art practice transcends crypto, too. He takes on other topics like unjust incarceration or the profound union of art and math. The artist’s family moved from Ethiopia to the Washington, D.C. area when he was five. He earned his bachelor’s and Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Virginia by age 23.

Saiers caused a buzz with his first guerilla installation in 2018, where he inflated a towering “crypto rat” in Manhattan’s Financial District, staring down the Federal Reserve.

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Its design was directly inspired by iconic New York City blowup rats, which often anchor protests against landlords. In this instance, Saiers added crypto code across the rodent’s body and Bitcoin signs in its eyes.

The rat also alluded to Warren Buffet, who called crypto “rat poison squared” at the time. That was the first crypto winter, where Bitcoin famously fell from $20,000 to $6,000 at the hands of SEC uncertainty and waning faith in the tech.

That was the year Saiers, who’s only ever held Bitcoin, got involved in crypto. “I did want to inject some support back into the crypto community,” he said.

Even at the height of the madness, he never got caught up in a rug pull. Despite disagreeing with Buffet’s crypto critiques, Saiers cited Buffet’s advice “to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful” as his strategy for avoiding most scams.

The artist has another New York gallery show in store during the next year, but just because the “Rug Pull” debut is complete doesn’t mean the project is done. Saiers might perform it again. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d repeated a guerilla installation — he even brought the Bitcoin rat down to Washington, D.C., but while he only has to give the New York Police Department a day’s notice to set up in the city, the Secret Service in D.C. warned him that a bomb squad would need to check out the generator he uses to keep the rodent inflated. Saiers went home instead.