EXCLUSIVE: Art Blocks Founder Sells CryptoPunks To Raise Funds, Leading To Success Of Squiggle NFT Project

Art Blocks is a first-of-its-kind platform focused on genuinely programmable on demand generative content that is stored immutably on the Ethereum ETH/USD Blockchain, according to its website.

The inception of Art Blocks was a result of an opportunity to claim CryptoPunks that Art Blocks founder Erick Calderon, aka Snowfro, came across while browsing Reddit.

"I attribute 95% of everything that's happening now to Matt and John from Larva Labs," Calderon said Thursday on Benzinga's new NFT show "The Roadmap."

Matt and John are the founders of Larva Labs, which created the arguably most well-known NFT project, CryptoPunks. 

Snowfro said he claimed a total of 34 CryptoPunks, which he began selling to fund the development of Art Blocks.

"We wouldn't be here today without them and that's kind of where things started," Calderon told Benzinga. 

More About Art Blocks: "You pick a style that you like, pay for the work, and a randomly generated version of the content is created by an algorithm and sent to your Ethereum account. The resulting piece might be a static image, 3D model, or an interactive experience. Each output is different and there are endless possibilities for the types of content that can be created on the platform," according to Art Blocks. 

Prior to Art Blocks, artists could generate thousands of outputs and then select the ones that they wanted to use based on the results. In other words, there was a "built-in curation" factor, Calderon said. 

"I think what makes Art Blocks special is that that curation is out the window. That curation has to be done all on the front end and the artist has to really tweak and massage their ... algorithm to where every single piece that comes out of the minter represents them as an artist," Calderon said.

"They're digitally signing something before they're even seeing what comes out."

Squiggle By Snofro: One of the most well known Art Blocks projects is called Chromie Squiggle.

"The squiggle was originally a proof-of-concept. It was never meant to be an art project," Calderon said. "It was meant to prove how much variation you could get from the hash string that's stored in a token."

For those who aren't very familiar with the squiggle collection, the art pieces look very similar, but when one begins exploring the project further, it's easy to see how different they are from one another, Snowfro said. 

"I found this beauty in like the discernible nature of the squiggle and how it actually can represent something that people can relate to."

Snowfro went on to talk about Ethereum gas wars, Art Blocks artists, the minting process and more.

See the full interview here: