The project

nnxyz drew on Nifty Ink for three years. The first drawings are dated October 20, 2021, two small figures the artist called randoomdles, and the last December 5, 2024. In between the artist created 595 drawings there, set a price on nearly all of them, and sold editions of 281 of them to fifty wallets. This collection holds 548 of those drawings, every one the collector owns.

Nifty Ink was a free drawing board on the xDai chain, built by Austin Griffith in 2020 as a demonstration of what a cheap chain could do. Anyone could draw in the browser with a round brush, set a price, and mint editions for a few cents. The board recorded every stroke in order, with its width, color and transparency, which is why these drawings can be watched being made. It did not record time.

2021: Faces

The first face arrived six days after the randoomdles, on October 26. By December the artist was making fifty inks a month, nearly all of them faces: a head in a square, eyes, teeth, a ground of black or white. The series was called nifty faces and numbered from #1. A second address drew Nifty Faces #12 on November 30 and sent it to the first the same day. The 134 Faces in this collection run to July 20, 2022, when the origin work, #0000, was drawn last and held back.

2022: On the Block, and everything else

New Nifty on the Block began on December 8, 2021 and ran to 303 drawings in this collection by October 15, 2022, the artist's busiest year: 435 inks, with peaks of 66 in May and 54 in July. Rawblocks began in May 2022 with two drawings, then waited five months while On the Block finished. The year is told month by month on its own page.

It was also the year the artist stepped off the board. In March and April, fifty-two Abstract paintings were minted on Polygon under a contract the artist named "nnxyz abstract", and forty-six of them were given away in April to the people who had bought, liked or made work on the board: austingriffith.eth, scrimshaw.eth, jasperart.eth, danielsheldon.eth, superphiz.eth and others. The artist called it a proof of support, "some value outside of Nifty Ink for all owners as a small thank you." In August the artist deployed an "index collection" on Ethereum and Optimism, describing it as "an open never-ending collection published independently on multiple blockchains," named after Andy Warhol's Index Book, and minted "i was famous" on Ethereum in editions of three: Duchamp's Fountain, four times over, in Pop colors. In November came "lord of the inks", one image of about five hundred of the artist's own Nifty Ink drawings laid out as a wall, and on Optimism three small series with new names: oink, opticals and, under the index collection, Heaven or Hell.

2023: Closing

Rawblocks resumed in October 2022 and ended on March 15, 2023 at #65. That month the artist did something the board allowed but few used. Every edition slot that had not sold was minted straight to a dead address, 1,572 of them in March alone and nearly three thousand across the project. Nothing was destroyed; the unsold copies were simply put where no one could ever buy them, so that each numbered series was finished. The artist had announced it the previous August: "all 400 created nifties will be gradually burned. Everything after that is part of a new story." In July the remaining Abstract copies went the same way.

The series each have an origin work, #0000, which was held back and sold last as the key to a complete set. Nifty Faces #0000 and Rawblocks #0000 went to this collection in 2022 and 2023; Abstract #0000 followed in May 2023, and with it the fifty-two Abstract paintings. A fifty-third Abstract token, "#1", was minted and burned within three hours on March 30, 2022 and never left the artist.

Afterwards

The board did not go quiet. The artist went on liking other people's inks through 2024, more than a hundred of them, and in December 2024 drew three more. Two of them came to this collection in April 2025; the third went to another buyer.

Off the board, the work kept its holders in mind. In April 2022 every owner of a Nifty Face received its pixelated twin, "nifty faces px", on Polygon. Later came a cat club "with no roadmap, no utility", "Friends Of Country Air", "cringe-eez doodles", and three re-issued contracts whose copies were airdropped to the people who already held the originals. On Tezos, from August 2022, came "canvas everywhere", the "untitled" heads, "kanji", "i send you summer", GMGL and ScreenSwindler, with the artist's bio there reading "born readymade to please the eye, intentionally flawed to show the arbitrariness of insignificance". This collection holds forty-six of those later works, hung in the two rooms of After Nifty Ink; every collection the artist made, held or not, is listed in the catalogue.

Who was there

Fifty wallets bought from nnxyz on Nifty Ink. One collector, Jamie Thingelstad, bought from three wallets: 121 of the 283 sales, and about half of the 4,026 xDai the drawings earned. Two other wallets each bought three inks on May 10, 2022. The complete sets did not pass through the market; the artist sent them directly, 508 drawings in three batches in August 2022, October 2022 and March 2023.

Austin Griffith, who built the board, funded the artist's first Ethereum wallet with 0.06 ETH on February 1, 2022, bought eighteen inks, and received gifts in 2023 and 2024. The others who bought most were iamjim.eth, jaxcodes.eth, justn.eth and a handful of addresses without names.

The artist was a visitor as well as a maker. Over three years nnxyz liked 345 inks by 93 other artists on the board, most of all by jasperart.eth, ekeko.eth, dashmdash.eth, danielsheldon.eth and chiliprawn.eth, and three of them by Scrimshaw. Several of the same names received Abstract paintings. The circle was small and the artist knew who was in it.

Nearly everything the drawings earned left the chain: about 3,969 xDai was bridged out in sixty-seven transactions, most of it in 2022.

In the artist's words

The artist's bios, where they exist, say the same thing three ways. On Linktree: "born readymade to please the eye / flawed imperfect on purpose". On objkt: "born readymade to please the eye, intentionally flawed to show the arbitrariness of insignificance". On Threads: "A drama of the arbitrariness & insignificance of latent realities in the visible public space". On X the bio is empty and the location reads "latent space".

On the artist's life, in the description of Heaven or Hell on Tezos, August 16, 2022: "An artist's life can be heaven or hell. Depending on the circumstances and the current contemporary culture, you can make it or die trying." And in "shrine of - create, try, hope, die", March 19, 2024: "insert coin, create, try, hope, die, Game over, repeat." Thirty of the artist's posts, on the board, the burn, the index collection and what art is for, are gathered verbatim on In the artist's words.

How to read this page

A wallet is an address, not a person. Where an address has an Ethereum name it is given; where it does not, it is counted. Only the collector is named. Amounts are in xDai, the board's currency, worth about a dollar each. The burns are the gallery's reading of mints to a dead address; the contract records no burn event. The ledgers are public, and the addresses and contracts are listed in the research record.