The Infinite Node Foundation launches its permanent Palo Alto (US) hub with “10,000,” the first major exhibition devoted to CryptoPunks (2017), Larva Labs’ (Matt Hall and John Watkinson) canonical PFP (profile picture) NFT collection. Following last year’s acquisition of the collection’s IP from Yuga Labs, NODE positions the algorithmically-generated portraits as a process-based artwork where “the marketplace is a living exchange that hums with activity.”

Digital art NFT marketplace Raster launches with unified artist profiles spanning multiple blockchains, solving the fragmentation that forces collectors to hop between platforms. Co-founded by Michael Elsdoerfer and thefunnyguys, it aggregates 88,000+ artist profiles and 16 million Ethereum and Tezos tokens. “Digital art collecting shouldn’t feel like archaeology,” the founders tweet, of their consolidation of scattered oeuvres, data, and marketplace histories into a single, searchable platform.

Dubai-based exchange Bybit is exploited for $1.46B—the largest hack in the history of the 15-year-old crypto industry. Bybit CEO Ben Zhou reveals his team was fooled into signing over control of a cold wallet with 0.5% of the global Ethereum supply, which the hackers promptly stole. Shortly after the attack, blockchain sleuth ZachXBT linked North Korea’s Lazarus Group to the exploit, showing wallets involved were also connected to a $69M hack earlier this year (image).

Presenting the first purely contract-based group exhibition, “World Computer Sculpture Garden” treats Ethereum as a site for immutable artworks. Curated by 0xfff, 0xhaiku, Figure31, Sarah Friend, Material Protocol Arts, Rhea Myers, and Paul Seidler contribute works that use blockchain as material (not distribution). Friend’s Yesbot (2024), for example, wraps Myers’ Is Art (2014) contract to perpetually affirm that art is art—a persistent ‘yes’ running indefinitely on-chain.

On the anniversary of the Ethereum Merge, a protocol shift that dramatically reduced the chain’s energy footprint, American media artist Kyle McDonald reveals the physical sculptures of his eco-critical NFT artwork, Amends (2022), to remind us of the 18.1 million tons of CO2 the use of Ethereum produced historically. If sold, the three handmade glass blocks filled with artefacts from associated mitigation projects would help repair the damage done by three major NFT marketplaces.

Generative art NFT platform fxhash announces a $5 million seed raise with venture capital firms and angel investors including Tezos Foundation, PunkVenturesDAO, Casey Reas, and thefunnyguys (Le Random). The funds will be used to hire more team members, support development of a 2.0 release (integrating Ethereum) and tools for art institutions, and bolster the platform’s mission of “empowering anyone, anywhere, to artistically express themselves with code,” they tweet (image: Zancan Garden, Monoliths, 2021).

Rhea Myers’ solo exhibition “The Ego, and It’s 0wned” opens at Nagel Draxler’s Crypto Kiosk in Berlin, offering blockchain-based “symbolic forms” that ponder property, representation, identity, and secrecy. In the titular piece (2023), for example, the British artist and hacker tokenizes her brain wave recordings while Type Opposite Images (2023, image) reverses colourful Vaporwave tropes. Also on view: new NFT editions of iconic Ethereum works that Myers created in 2014.

Mario Santamaría’s solo show “Gárgola” opens at Centre d’Art la Panera, Lleida (ES), wedging two metaverses into one exhibition space. An architectural structure marks the exact plot of land the Spanish artist purchased in Next Earth, a virtual 1:1 reproduction of the planet, while suspended screens render a 13,5 billion light-years drop (the fall, 2022) into the Voxels Ethereum virtual world. A winding liquid cooling system further reminds viewers of computing’s (very real) materiality.