Nifty Ink

In the summer of 2020 a software engineer named Austin Griffith put a drawing board on the web. You opened nifty.ink, you drew with a round brush, and when you were done you could set a price and let people buy copies. There was no account to make and nothing to install. The site gave every visitor a throwaway wallet the moment they arrived, and the chain it ran on, xDai, charged a fraction of a cent for each transaction, so a drawing could be minted and sold for a dollar without the artist paying anything up front. The tagline on the site read: putting the fun in non-fungible tokens.

The board did one thing that no gallery had done before. It kept the drawing. Every stroke you made was saved in order, with its width, its color and its transparency, and stored on the public file system IPFS. The picture you sold was a picture, but the record behind it was a performance, and anyone who opened the page could press play and watch the drawing being made. The artist nnxyz, years later, called this the best feature of the board: "if you like Bob Ross, you can look at my over 500 doodles and see how each one was painted." It is the reason the drawings in these rooms can be watched as well as looked at.

Griffith built Nifty Ink as a demonstration. He was, and is, a teacher of Ethereum developers, and the board was his argument that a cheap chain could carry a whole small economy of makers and buyers without the fees that made the main network unusable for a dollar drawing. A piece made on the board could later be moved to Ethereum itself if its owner wanted it there. Most never were. The board was its own place, with a leaderboard, a feed of new inks, a like button and a few hundred regulars.

nnxyz arrived in October 2021, fourteen months after the board opened, and drew four inks the first day. Within five months the artist was writing in public about why: "Easy and fun entry into the NFT space for artists. Tool works without problems. Easy upgrades of the artwork into the mainchain. No entry costs to mint the work. Nice and active community." The community was real and small enough to know by name. Griffith himself funded the artist's first Ethereum wallet in February 2022 and bought eighteen inks. The artists nnxyz liked most on the board were jasperart, ekeko, dashmdash, danielsheldon and chiliprawn; Scrimshaw, whose heads hang in this collection, drew on the same board eight months before nnxyz arrived. When nnxyz gave away the Abstract paintings in April 2022, the list of recipients was the board's regulars.

The collector found the board the way many people found good things in that year, through a grant. Nifty Ink had a listing on Gitcoin, where people funded open projects, and Jamie Thingelstad wrote in March 2022 that he "loved Nifty Ink as soon as I discovered it." His description is as good as any: "This isn't about buying NFTs and going to the moon. This is about a super-simple low-barrier platform that allows anyone to create, sell, buy created images for very low costs. Many are a dollar. All about fun." A year later he put it another way: "It is like I get to see into the artist's notebook and follow along in the creative process. Nifty Ink feels like going to a permanent art fair."

The board is still there. In 2024 nnxyz wrote that "the playback of the doodles" was still its best feature and that the artist's own page held more than five hundred of them. The Nifty Ink page for the artist, read in October 2026, gives the count as 595 inks created, 281 sold, 442 likes, and earnings of a little over four thousand dollars for three years of drawing. That is the scale of the place. It was never a market. It was a drawing board with a till, and for a while a small crowd of people used it every day.

Everything on this site that moves comes from that one decision to keep the strokes. The drawings are rebuilt from the archived paths at full precision, and the playback follows the recorded order; the board did not record the time between strokes, so the pace you see is reconstructed. The story of who kept buying is on the next page.