Your guide to Bitcoin, Ethereum and Web 3.0

The world’s No. 2 cryptocurrency exchange had just filed for bankruptcy, its boy genius CEO had resigned, and millions upon millions of dollars disappeared from the company’s wallets in real time without any explanation. But hundreds of miles from the noise of financial panic in the cities, in an old cattle feed mill in the West Texas desert, dozens of crypto-culture producers bobbed their heads and waved their hands in a synchronized display of vibrating curls.

The curls were Chromie Squiggles, the second explosively successful generative NFT art project from Art Blocks. To the delight and apparent awe of the barn’s residents, these usually static Squiggles danced for the first time, in sync with the ear-splitting tunes of English DJ Jamie xx.

“Spinning!” a partygoer next to me continued to shout, raising his hands to the vibrating monitors and jumping in place. “Spinning, spinning, spinning, spinning!”

“Pray to the curl!” cried his friend giddily.

It was November 11, 2022, and 500 admirers had descended on the small town of Marfa, Texas, for Art Blocks’ second annual Open House—a gathering of collectors, artists, investors, and schmoozers involved in the company’s growing ecosystem.

Art Blocks Open House in Marfa, Texas, November 2022. (Photo: Sarah M. Vasquez)

One can assume the vibes of an event centered around non-fungible tokens—which in the last two years has won obsessions and raging haters equally – would be deeply affected by the pulse of the crypto market. And yet FTX armageddon felt as far removed from the gathering as any big city that happened to be in the days when news was delivered by covered wagon.

It wasn’t because NFT people feel immune to market swings. According to the event’s host, Art Blocks founder and Squiggles artist Erick Calderon (aka Snowfro), it was because the collection, and his NFT company, have mostly nothing to do with NFT, and even less with crypto.

“I used to say that I want Art Blocks as a platform to transcend crypto — you drop the word crypto, you drop the word generative, you drop the word NFT, and you just have art,” Calderon told me. “But we also want to transcend crypto.”

As Calderon sees it, far too many companies in the crypto ecosystem hinge their value proposition on the novelty of the underlying technology. Jog-but earn crypto! Sweaters-but in the metaverse! Cat Pictures—but make them NFTs! A mediocre TV show concept—produced by a DAO!

This fixation, he believes, only temporarily masks the shortcomings of a company’s product.

“Why do we bet our companies on new technology? Companies don’t just survive on crypto,” Calderon said. “They survive on culture, and they survive on their teams. We try to be an adult company. It means creating an internal organizational culture, which is very difficult to do in crypto, where everyone is external and dependent on the price of a CryptoPunk. But we fought so hard to insulate ourselves from that.”

Erick Calderon (L) at the Art Blocks Open House in Marfa, Texas, November 2022. (Photo: Sarah M. Vasquez)

Art Blocks is a 40-person company and growing, despite the devastating effects of the crypto bear market. It now boasts a full curatorial team that carefully selects and onboards digital artists to debut their collections on the company’s hugely popular platform.

Calderon attributes Art Blocks’ enduring success to their refusal to indulge in practices that became standard for most NFT projects at the height of the speculation bubble in early 2022.

“The worst mental health state I’ve ever been in was when Art Blocks went crazy in October,” he said. At the time, Art Blocks was selling NFTs for millions of dollars apiece. “People were like ‘you need a token, reward your collectors, you don’t care about your collectors unless you do a token, look what SuperRare is doing, look what Bored Ape Yacht Club is doing’.”

Art Blocks never offered a token, or exclusive benefits, or any other vague gesture of the often fetishized but rarely realized principle of Web3: “utility.”

It offered art and publicly accessible community spaces (both digital and physical) with a focus on art. It emphatically resisted the temptation to give anything else.

If Art Blocks does not see itself as a crypto or NFT company, but as an art institution, nothing showed this better than the three-day gathering in the fabled art mecca of Marfa.

Marfa was founded in the 1880s, and for nearly a century it looked no different than any other neighboring town populating the sparse Chihuahuan Desert; it rose to international prominence in the early 1970s, when renowned artist Donald Judd bought up a number of the city’s buildings and transformed them into contextless “anti-museums” for his giant concrete and metal installations, as well as the works of other artists. In the decades that followed, Marfa’s artistic reputation and exotic isolation attracted thousands of disaffected townspeople. Today, the city resembles a strange cross between Frontierland and Williamsburg, populated by barns, shuttered storefronts, art galleries and matcha-slinging coffee shops.

Art Blocks opened its Marfa gallery in 2021. Some at the time colored the company’s arrival in Marfa as unwelcomeand Art Blocks’ crypto-processed offering as a marked departure from the city’s renowned artistic tradition.

I found no such excitement in Art Block’s presence in Marfa.

“I think they’re a brilliant addition to Marfa and I think they’ve integrated well into the scene,” Rachel Beitz, owner of Rule, a gallery down the street from Art Blocks, told me. “I can’t think of anyone who has spoken ill of them.”

Beitz also dismissed the idea that only an art collection’s medium—including the baggage-filled blockchain space—could be decisive for a project’s artistic legitimacy.

“All of art history is the next big thing that’s not considered art to the key holders of what ‘art’ is,” she said. “Marfa is a place where a lot of people come to experiment. For me, it’s almost natural that this is one of the places people come and try this.”

Art Blocks’ projects differ most clearly from traditional art in two ways. First, they are NFTs, minted on the Ethereum blockchain and can be purchased by anyone with an internet connection. For another, they are generative. Artists construct computer code that sets parameters for how an Art Blocks work can look; in embossing, the piece is randomly generated within these parameters, and displayed in its realized form for the first time.

“The NFT part isn’t too hard to explain. But when you dive deeper into long-form generative art, that’s when it starts to get a little more complicated,” Plutonium Fa pseudonymous Art Blocks collector, told me about the obstacles he faces when discussing projects with outsiders.

Plutonium, along with two other Art Blocks collectors, were selected by the Art Blocks team to curate the collection shown at the November Open House, which they called Perspectives.

“I know it’s hard for traditional collectors and traditional artists to grasp the idea that you write a piece of code and it can essentially create an infinite number of outputs,” said Properanother of Perspectives‘ community curators. “But in the best examples of generative art, the art is the code itself. It’s easy to be a painter. It’s hard to be a good painter. It’s easy to be a generative artist. It’s hard to be good.”

After a tequila-soaked weekend in Marfa, the Art Blocks faithful flew back to their hometowns, back to reality, back to a world that was finally, breathlessly paying attention to their industry—but for all the wrong reasons: bankruptcy, infect, criminal charges, state surveysand waveson wavesof layoffs.

The crypto winter was getting colder. The new year has brought no relief.

But somehow, through the darkness, the Art Blocks continue to soar. Friendship bracelet, an Art Blocks project conceptualized by Calderon and realized by French artist Alexis André, was released exclusively to existing Art Blocks NFT holders in late October. When the free-to-coin claim closed on Tuesday, the collection’s value skyrocketed, becoming the top collection on NFT marketplace OpenSea within hours. At the time of writing, Friendship Bracelets has generated over 14,300 ETH in trading volume (approximately $20.3 million).

It is a standout in an otherwise dismal market. NFT trading volume has plummeted 87% from the peaks in January last year. Blue-chip profile picture (PFP) NFT projects that were once safe bets doesn’t look so sure.

Why don’t Art Blocks suffer too? Calderon believes the answer is quite simple.

“If [Art Blocks holders] bought a piece of art and they put it on their wall and that piece of art went to zero, they still have a great piece of art,” he said.

How many other NFT projects can say the same? Remove speculative value, the crypto marketing angle, the downloaded NFT acronym; what’s really left? If viewed as an NFT company, Art Blocks appears to be an anomaly. If it is seen as an art collective that happens to use blockchain technology, things start to make a lot more sense.

Non-crypto companies using Web3 technology as a tool to realize larger goals – be it related to entertainment, trade, Meetingor art – chugging through the crypto bear market just fine.

Art Blocks can demonstrate that projects born out of Web3 need not be defined solely by it. Increasingly, this approach is starting to look like the way forward for cryptoculture.

Editor’s note: This article was updated to clarify the eligibility to claim a friendship bracelet NFT.