Why I keep track of what 0xG is coding

Blockchain is usually discussed through its applications: cryptocurrencies, decentralized finance, and collectibles. Underneath those layers it is a shared computational surface – a decentralized, collaborative, global system where small programs can run and store state. For artists willing to work within its limits it becomes an unusual kind of material.

Those limits are strict though: computation is scarce, storage is expensive, and the tools are basic. Building directly on-chain forces reduction and works become compact and structural, yet this constraint is what makes the medium interesting. The artwork is not just hosted online but instantiated inside the network itself. Code executes, state accumulates, and the piece persists as part of the chain.

Operating in this space is 0xG, a creator working between conceptual art and technical exploration. Instead of using smart contracts as a distribution mechanism, their projects treat them as the artistic instrument. Some are finished works, others experiments with the medium or explorations of its possibilities – minimal systems that test what art can become inside a global programmable environment.

Like many artists exploring the space, the path began with surface-level blockchain art. But curiosity moved deeper, toward the substrate itself. The main research topic being: what happens when the artwork is written directly into the system it lives in? In a recent braindump that 0xG shared with me, they reflect on this shift and on why the chain still matters as an artistic material. What follows is a closer look at their practice and the ideas shaping it.

The practice of 0xG

Looking at 0xG's practice, it seems difficult to categorize at first. They treat the blockchain as both medium and playground: an open system for exploration and invention. The outputs often look stark – minimal visuals, spare interfaces — while the conceptual mechanisms remain densely self-referential, often aimed at the crypto ecosystem itself. A running thread though are smart contracts, serving as the primary tool. In 0xG's hands, the contract becomes an authored situation: a set of permissions, constraints, and transformations.

Their works can evolve through interaction, sometimes even subverting the systems they live within. Programmed behaviors become metaphors that translate complex topics into medium-compatible language. At the same time, when asked whether what they do is art, 0xG once replied: “I actually don't know, I'm just playing around with the blockchain.” I want to highlight that line because it describes something historically familiar: many practices we now consider canonical began as experiments at the edge of a medium's legitimacy. In other words: medium-specific art often begins with curiosity and play.

In the reflections they recently shared with me, 0xG frames that play as a necessity. Art offers an expressive space alongside technical work, a place to create “on my own terms,” they say. There is also the desire to leave a trace on a system they expect history may one day examine the way we now revisit the early internet. That idea of trace is where blockchain's material qualities come in. The chain records actions persistently – it stores participation, turns gestures into durable inscriptions, and gives otherwise ephemeral gestures a visible history.

Fearless

To me, 0xG’s piece Fearless (September 2022) remains a benchmark for how blockchain can be used in an innovative way. The work was structured around a paradoxical condition: it would “cost” 300 Ethereum (ETH) – around $500,000 at the time – to acquire it for free. A collector needed to hold that amount in their wallet to mint, yet they didn’t pay it.

That condition created a precise kind of tension. The work depended on trust: trust that the smart contract would verify the balance and return the NFT without draining the wallet. The ‘performance’ lived in that leap of faith. The whole event was staged in public and secured by code.

Since 0xG received none of the 300 ETH, Fearless was never about financial gain. Its ‘price’ operated as a conceptual lever: a way to interrogate how value and relevance circulate in crypto culture, where spectacle often functions as a visibility engine. 0xG put it plainly: “Without the price tag, no one would have noticed this work,” and the paradox flips again because it “didn’t cost anything.”

The piece only came into existence because a collector minted it – two minutes after it was live – proving their 300 ETH balance before receiving the NFT in return. In essence, this was a blockchain ‘happening’: a fleeting event unfolding in real time, where the chain acted as medium and then as notary – giving proof that ‘it’ actually happened. In total, the artwork consists of the act of minting, the conditions that were needed, the transfer of the digital artwork, and the public trace that remains afterward.

From an art-historical perspective, Fearless in a way mirrors performance art’s longstanding relocation of authorship. Here, the artist designs the situation, and the participant completes it. The work resides in an event and its documentation. And in this case, is the chain itself as an archival apparatus, but also embedded into the medium.

N.

N. operates as a conceptual critique of NFT standards, treating blockchain interactions themselves as the primary material of the artwork. At its core, N. is an infinite edition with temporary ownership – each new mint erases the previous owner’s token, creating a system where permanence is an illusion.

While the blockchain’s transaction history cannot be altered, 0xG has turned its data structure against itself, using smart contract manipulation to simulate an endless cycle of disappearance.

The contract remembers past ownership but erases the asset itself, reducing the collector’s presence to an almost invisible mark: what’s left is an NFT stripped of visual and economic incentives.

In effect, N. transforms blockchain's ledger of ownership into a record of erasure, where the only proof of possession is the black void left behind.

Generative art and the discarded algorithm

0xG’s more recent thinking extends this logic into a critique of mainstream generative art’s habits. They describe a pattern where the algorithm – the actual generative engine – gets treated as a means to an end. The outputs become a selection of images, a set of “best ones,” while the algorithm itself recedes. Their analogy is: “social media produces a curated fiction by selecting highlights, and generative art often performs a similar reduction when it collapses into static output.”

The critique is medium-specific. A blockchain is a global world computer with global state. In mainstream generative art, that state often goes unused. The chain becomes a hosting layer or a market rail. 0xG’s practice returns to the gap between what the medium enables and what most works actually do with it. That gap becomes a motor.

Actus Essendi

One of the clearest expansions of this thinking is Actus Essendi, a project developed during a bear-market shift when attention moved toward physical objects and prints.

Actus Essendi is anchored in an algorithm that is stored on-chain: an SVG that renders a different output at every resolution. Resolution becomes conceptual material and formalized as the token id. The on-chain seed functions as “essence”—a blueprint of potential. The snapshot at a specific resolution becomes “actus essendi,” the actualization of that potential. 0xG draws this concept from Thomas Aquinas, where 'actus essendi' names the act of being – ‘existence’ – realized.

The project sharpens its critique by becoming physical-first. The physical works are aluminium prints of specific snapshots, handpicked and signed on the back with a unique wallet signature, and each print comes with an NFT. The NFT begins as the on-chain generative SVG that shifts with resolution. The signature becomes a key, allowing the collector to optionally call a mechanism that transforms the essence into the actus essendi: the fixed visual of the print.

The work carries a deliberate friction: it stages the conventional generative-art move (selecting and canonizing particular outputs) while preserving the living algorithm underneath. The collector can elect to lock the work into a single state, and the system will make that decision legible as an authored act.

Unseen

Unseen moves away from smart-contract mechanics toward networked experience in a more classical sense. The artwork presents actual photos of asphalt under the sun. When the viewer disconnects from the internet, forms and shapes are revealed – digital projections into the ground, arriving through absence of connection.

Two ideas meet here. One is a correction of language: “networked art” originally concerns networks as technology, infrastructure, and interconnection. In crypto, the term sometimes drifts toward “community,” a social meaning that can eclipse the technical one. The other idea is psychological and contemporary: permanent online presence as default, with disconnection functioning as a condition for perception.

Unseen was part of Moonbeam by shl0ms and karborn, a show staged during an eclipse. The artists photographed the moon with a telescope, bounced a message off its surface, and built a collection around visuals of that eclipse. 0xG’s contribution fits the frame: a work that treats connection as a medium, and disconnection as the event.

Once a Human

And then there’s 0xG’s reflections on AI. They are someone who avoids easy futurism. What they do instead is describe uncertainty that feels widely shared: a life-changing technology that affects people psychologically through uncertainty, fear, instability, and a sense of accelerating displacement. The paradox becomes sharper for the tech-literate: advantage coexists with threat.

Their AI-related work turns that tension into a slow, open-ended collection. Once a Human (begun in 2024) is a series of reflections on AI from a technologist and artist imagining a near-future reality. Works are fully on-chain and released over time, moving between visual pieces and conceptual structures. Some purely visual works are in low-resolution to fit on-chain and require AI upscaling. 0xG frames that requirement as part of the artwork: different upscalers generate slightly different images, making interpretation a technical process with subjective variance.

The visuals use an older Stable Diffusion model (2022), with Zero – the first on-chain artwork 0xG created – as a foundation. The image-based pieces involve prompting, inpainting, parameter tuning, and post-processing, and the conceptual pieces address systems.

A few anchors in the series clarify how 0xG thinks about authorship under AI conditions:

• #1 Once a Human connects the collection to Zero. It can only be claimed by exchanging the Zero token, which becomes permanently locked in the Once a Human contract. Ownership becomes commitment; the acquisition highlights a transition, and the earlier work becomes substrate.

• #2 The Simplicity Paradox responds to the claim that AI requires no skill through a deliberately simple artwork – something the artist could create by hand – foregrounding intention, control, and authorship decisions rather than technical spectacle.

• #3 Synthetic Nostalgia looks at AI’s mimicry of emotion: images that move viewers while remaining meaningless to the machine producing them.

• #4 Once a Machine is a conceptual contract artwork where two contracts engage in recursive tokenURI calls leading to perpetual reversal, folding existential questions into protocol behavior.

• #5 (work in progress) proposes a role inversion: the LLM writes the prompt, humans collectively become a next-token prediction machine via a smart contract, and the completion emerges through weighted votes until a stop prediction ends it. A companion visual follows.

To me, this doesn’t necessarily read as ‘AI art’ as a category and more like medium literacy: a practice using AI as technical condition and conceptual matter.

Untitled and Truth Oracle

0xG also keeps returning to a question that many artists in the space seem to avoid – I guess because it complicates sales: what does it mean to make ‘blockchain art’ when the work is simply an image file linked to a token?

With Untitled, 0xG does give an answer to this question, through an elegant reduction: a collection of blank non-fungible tokens – transparent PNGs with no visual – titled Untitled 01, 02, 03, and so on. The blank token is treated as complete work by the artist. However, collectors who value visual work can choose a link to a visual signed by 0xG with their Ethereum wallet - “a modern pen” - and have it permanently linked to their token. The concept makes fungibility and reproducibility part of the structure, as well as the old right-click-save argument that still haunts digital art discourse. The work asks for a kind of consensus: does an NFT function as token, as link, as object, as certificate, or as stage?

And then there’s Truth Oracle, which comes from 0xG’s ‘love-hate relationship’ with crypto culture. They describe prediction markets framed as “truth-seeking” platforms where stake becomes epistemology. In practice, the underlying mechanics resemble gambling, and outcomes are determined by external oracles, with insider advantages and unregulated incentives.

Truth Oracle makes the structure explicit. The - yet again - ‘performance’ begins with free, soulbound tokens. Participants mint a soulbound ERC-1155 token representing a prediction (“Yes” or “No”). After three and a half days, the outcome is revealed. Those who predicted correctly continue; the others are eliminated. Another round starts and the process keeps repeating. If a single winner emerges, they can claim the final token as a transferable ERC-1155 1/1. Another possibility remains: nobody wins, and the final NFT never exists.

The visuals are generative, representing prediction percentages for each round. In the instance 0xG describes, nobody predicted the ultimate truth; neither “Yes” nor “No” will ever exist as a 1/1. If you want to have a look: the work remains fully on-chain at 0x6e4a0a2760d4f63a9f15a7fb80912c60629515c7.

Afterward, 0xG verified the separate contract responsible for deciding each round’s outcome. Viewers could see an open function called “insider” that would have allowed anyone who discovered it to game the results and force an outcome, but nobody discovered it. The piece holds the entire ethics of the system inside its mechanics: truth as claim and truth as wager.

On the state of blockchain art

0xG’s recent reflections on the field describe a post-peak landscape where many who remain are there for the art, with serious work continuing under less noise. At the same time, there is a visible drift toward traditional art-world formats as the cyberpunk promise of decentralized systems faces technical, legal and sustainability pressure.

However, 0xG also describes being drawn to this moment precisely because it retains friction. A “horizontal decentralized system trying to live inside vertical ones” creates tension that artists can register and translate. For them, the chain remains an “underpowered global computer platform” where basic primitives force ingenuity. 0xG describes an “80s nostalgia” in making something from very little – the constraints become an aesthetic and ethical stance.

Where the work lands now

0xG translates the fleeting nature of performance into the specific temporality of the chain. Fearless still makes this clear: a work that exists because someone performed a risk in public under certain rules, with a permanent trace component. That structure threads through Perpetual’s ritual of burn and renewal, N.’s ownership-as-erasure, Unlike’s century-long subtraction, Truth Oracle’s wagered epistemology, and Actus Essendi’s metaphysics of potential becoming snapshot.

The historical echo is consistent: performance and dynamic art has long asked who completes the work, where the work resides, and what counts as documentation. In 0xG’s practice, smart contracts make these questions executable. The collector’s decision becomes a material act, and the chain becomes the archive of that act.

At the same time, the newer works sharpen a second axis: where meaning lives under technical abundance. AI expands possibility while destabilizing authorship and labor, platforms compress art into content, and blockchain promises permanence while producing new ways for works to disappear. 0xG keeps using these systems as they are, then twisting them until they confess their values.

I keep checking what 0xG is up to because their practice is the most loyal to the medium’s actual properties – state, constraint, trace, participation – while refusing the easy comfort of static outputs and resisting the pressure to instrumentalize the medium’s financial layer for profit or speculation. In a period when many projects might smooth their rough edges for market legibility, 0xG keeps building artworks that behave. They unfold, lock, burn, erase, invert, wait, and ask for a participant in this. They leave a record ánd they hold enough conceptual tension to remain useful long after the immediate cycle of attention moves on.