April 2019

Autoglyphs went live on Ethereum on 5 April 2019, made by Matt Hall and John Watkinson of Larva Labs, the same two behind CryptoPunks. All 512 were minted within a day. Each cost 0.2 ETH, about $35 at the time, and the entire proceeds, around 76 ETH, went to the environmental charity 350.org. Larva Labs kept the first 128 for themselves and released the rest to the public.

A claim has built up around them, repeated by collectors, critics and the market: that Autoglyphs are the first on-chain generative art. That is one reason they are remembered, not the only one. Set the history aside and the work still holds up. It is worth being precise about what the claim does and does not mean, because the careful version is the one that holds.

Being precise about a big claim

“First” is a slippery word in this corner of art, so here is the honest ladder, scoped to Ethereum.

Autoglyphs are not the first art on Ethereum. That title is generally credited to Curio Cards, a set of 30 art cards released in May 2017, almost two years earlier. And “first NFT art” overall is older and contested still, reaching back to Counterparty-era work like Rare Pepes in 2016 and Kevin McCoy’s Quantum in 2014. Scoping to Ethereum is the whole point. So Autoglyphs are not the first blockchain art, and they have never claimed to be.

They are not even the first to derive art from the chain. MoonCats, from August 2017, worked that way: a code in the contract fixed each cat’s traits, but the picture itself was drawn off-chain by a script on their website, and the on-chain version only came years later. CryptoPunks, from June 2017, were the same in this respect, the images lived off-chain at first and were moved on-chain only later. The recipe was on the blockchain; the finished image was not.

What Autoglyphs did first is the narrow thing, and the one that matters: they are the first project where the artwork itself is both generated and stored entirely on-chain. The drawing code lives inside the contract, and when you call it, the contract produces the finished work and hands it back. Nothing about the image depends on a server or outside software. That is the line Larva Labs actually draw, and the claim that survives scrutiny: not the first art on a blockchain, not the first to generate from one, but the first where the art is made and kept wholly on it.

“The cave paintings of on-chain art.”

Larva Labs’ own line for them, and a fair one: the earliest marks of a form everything later was built on.

What is actually on the chain

It is worth being exact, because the detail is part of what makes Autoglyphs interesting, not a footnote to hide. What the contract generates and stores on-chain is the artwork as a grid of ASCII characters, the arrangement of marks that is the Autoglyph. The clean, printed-looking image you see on a marketplace is that same character grid rendered through a custom font Larva Labs made, which lives off the chain. So the work, the thing that is generated and permanent and owned, is on-chain. The styling of how it is displayed is not. The instructions are what was stored, in the spirit of conceptual art, and the picture is rendered from them.

Older than the blockchain

The closest ancestor is Sol LeWitt, whose wall drawings are sold not as paintings but as written instructions, carried out by whoever owns them. His line from 1967 is the whole idea in a sentence: the idea becomes a machine that makes the art. Matt Hall has said the link was direct, that seeing a LeWitt wall drawing executed from instructions is what suggested storing instructions on-chain rather than an image. An Autoglyph works the same way: the contract holds the instructions, and the owner can render the glyph at any size, on a screen, on paper, on a wall.

Behind LeWitt sits the first generation of computer artists, working in the 1960s under machine limits much like early Ethereum’s. Larva Labs named A. Michael Noll and Ken Knowlton, pioneers at Bell Labs, as a direct reference. The first computer-art exhibitions opened in 1965 in Stuttgart and New York, and were argued over as art then in the same way on-chain art is now. Critics place Autoglyphs in that line, alongside Vera Molnar, Frieder Nake, Georg Nees and Manfred Mohr. What Autoglyphs add to the lineage is permanence: LeWitt’s instructions could be lost and those early programs ran on machines long gone, but an Autoglyph is written into Ethereum and rebuilt from there every time.

Into the museums

In January 2023 the Centre Pompidou in Paris acquired Autoglyph #25, among its first NFTs. The Whitney in New York holds Autoglyph #115, accessioned in 2024 (accession 2024.16). These are accessioned works in two of the world’s leading museums, catalogued like anything else in the collection, which marks how far the work travelled from a 2019 on-chain experiment to a fixed point in on-chain art’s short history.

#25 Centre Pompidou

#115 Whitney

From $35 to millions

Autoglyphs minted at about $35 to charity in 2019. By the 2021 boom, single glyphs were selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars. A high point came in February 2024, when a set of 10 sold privately for 5,000 ETH, about $14.5m. The set was one of only three “developer sets,” all drawn from the first 100 minted.

The numbers are not the point of the work, but they are part of its history, and they track how the perception changed.

Lighting the fuse

Autoglyphs proved that the algorithm itself can be the artwork, and that minting can be the moment a collector runs the artist’s code. The clearest line of influence runs to Art Blocks, the platform that launched the generative-art boom in late 2020; its founder, Erick Calderon, minted Autoglyphs and has credited Larva Labs with lighting the fuse. Most of what followed, the on-demand generative mint, the idea that the code is the artwork, even as a single output now and then, like the bear, takes on a life of its own, traces back through Autoglyphs to a Sol LeWitt instruction on a gallery wall. For 512 small grids of characters, minted in an afternoon and given to charity, that is a long shadow.