Chapter Seven — My Encounter with the Chain

I did not come to the blockchain because it was fashionable.

In 2017, there was no art market on Ethereum to speak of: no multi-million-dollar headlines, no viral drops, only the scattering of experiments Chapter Five described, conducted mostly in obscurity, by people who could not yet explain to their friends what they were doing or why. The tools were crude, the audience was small, and the language for any of it barely existed.

I came to it because I was searching for something I could not find in the classical art world or in the early days of digital art: a way to protect the authorship of my work over time.

The Problem I Could Not Ignore

For years, I had been creating in the digital realm — works made of light, code, and time. I loved the freedom of the medium, but I also knew its fragility. A file could be copied endlessly. An image I had made could be stripped of my name, passed around without context, uploaded to servers I had never heard of.

Once set loose in the wild, the work often lost its origin. My authorship was invisible to anyone but those who already knew. The internet, for all its reach, was a place where memory was fickle. The work might survive, but the record of who made it could vanish.

I had studied the classical art market enough to know that its solution — provenance — was built for objects, not networks. I could print certificates, sign them, even burn the files onto discs to store alongside them. But these were props in an illusion of permanence: paper promises in a paperless age.

The Moment of Discovery

It was early 2017 when I read an article about blockchain — not about Bitcoin as a currency, but about the underlying technology. The more I learned, the more it struck me: this was not just a ledger for money. It was a ledger for anything.

I realized the blockchain could record authorship and ownership in a way that could not be forged after the fact, misplaced, or quietly revised. And it could do so instantly, at the moment of creation. This was the missing piece: a way of keeping the connection between maker and work intact, in a medium that had no physical surface to carry it.

My First Steps on Ethereum

Ethereum had been live for only two years when I decided to learn to write my own smart contracts. I want to be honest about what that meant, because the current draft of history makes it sound easy, and it was not. There were no courses, no templates worth trusting, no community of artists to ask. Documentation was written by engineers for engineers, and it assumed you already knew what you did not know. I learned Solidity the way one learns any unforgiving craft: by failing at it, in private, for months.

I could have waited for tools to make it simple. But I understood, even then, that the labor was not an obstacle to the work — it was part of the work. Every hour spent inside the contract was an hour spent building the room where my authorship would live. Painters once ground their own pigments, not because it was efficient but because the hand should know its materials all the way down. Solidity was my pigment. I wanted no one else's fingerprints in it.

On November 23, 2017, at 02:01:12 UTC, I minted my first work on Ethereum: Aspen V.

The record of that act is public, and I would rather show it than describe its importance.

The contract lives at 0xD2680aF5D4129198B3DC4C851c99de14Fce36358;

The minting transaction is 0xdb94a7cae144af3e515bd8937de852bde9e95c0a2638323373aeb5e6d24efefb.

Anyone reading this can look them up. That is the point of this book, and it is why I print the hashes rather than ask you to take my word.

I remember the strange smallness of the moment. There was no gallery, no opening, no one standing beside me. There was a screen, a contract I had written myself, and a button that would broadcast a transaction to a network of strangers' machines scattered across the world. I had imagined the moment for months. When it came, it took the form most consequential acts take when they finally happen: an ordinary gesture, in an ordinary room, that could not be taken back.

I signed the transaction and then did the thing every early artist on Ethereum remembers doing, though none of us knew yet that it would become a ritual: I waited. Watched the transaction sit pending, unconfirmed, suspended between my intention and the world's acknowledgment of it. Then the block sealed, the confirmation came, and something existed that had not existed a minute before — not the image, which I had finished long since, but the event.

The image was already there. The artwork was born that night.

Claiming the Name

Three weeks later came a second act, louder than the first, and just as important to everything this book argues.

On December 15, 2017, at 20:05:33 UTC, my original signature address — the one ending in 2d0 — was first publicly connected to the name Verdandi, in the context of the work. And the connection was not made in a forum post or a profile page, in some corner of the web that could quietly vanish. It was made on the chain itself: a token contract deployed at that moment, carrying the name in its own permanent record — ASPEN - By Artist Verdandi, at 0x886844Fd66957A02F17B1f4d076d0223Ad6110Af. The claiming I described in Chapter Six is the human act that gives the cryptographic record its meaning; mine was inscribed in the same ledger it was meant to give meaning to, where anyone can still read it. The address and the name have belonged to each other in public ever since. The chain proves what the address did. The public record of that December day, and the years of consistent authorship since, prove whose address it is.

I dwell on this because it is the honest shape of the argument. I do not ask to be believed because I say I was early. The dates are in the ledger; the connection between the name and the address is in the public record; the reader is free to check both.

The One

By early 2018, I had begun the work that made these ideas unavoidable for me: The Curse of the Artist Hand, which I have since come to call, simply, The One.

Its timeline is worth laying out, because the sequence is the substance.

The photograph was taken on January 10, 2018.
The artwork was completed on January 18, 2018,
and minted that same day at 02:30:15 UTC

A one-of-one on a contract of my own, named The Curse of the Artist Hand - By Artist Verdandi, under the token name HAND.

The contract lives at 0xD06555b974c9103FDb0229625B1fb28fA5a10D6b;

The minting transaction is: 0x04b85ea353ea40454262365de0e098c504c5a11d6a95d82fd9b73c6e9ea45cbd.

On January 25, 2018, its live stream began on YouTube. And on February 20, 2018, I registered the copyright — a deliberate act of belt-and-suspenders authorship, binding the new record to the oldest legal instrument an artist has.

That copyright registration deserves a word, because it answers a question skeptics fairly ask: if the chain is so good, why bother with the old system? In 2017 and 2018, I used copyright the way a careful builder uses a second anchor — to establish authorship in the legal world while the chain established it in time, and to protect the stored image itself, which the chain does not do. The two systems answer different questions. The chain says when and from what address; the copyright says whose, in the eyes of the law. I have never seen them as rivals.

The work itself was a deliberate statement: a single image of my hand, reaching into the Ether, tokenized as a one-of-one. But The One was never just a file. From the moment I conceived it, I knew it would not live as something to be downloaded or stored. It would be streamed live, so that it could be witnessed continuously but never reduced to a static copy of itself.

The chain would hold the record of my act. The network would carry the work's presence. Together they made something that could be held by one collector and witnessed by anyone.

It was in the weeks just before this work that the central realization of my practice arrived: that the fight I cared about was authorship, not ownership alone. Ownership is a question the market asks. Authorship is the question art history asks, and the classical world had never been able to answer it for digital work. The One was the full expression of that realization — which is why, whatever its formal title, it earned the name I now use for it.

Realizing the Philosophy

Minting those early works made something clear to me. I was not simply making tokens. I was using the blockchain as a witness to my authorship, and the witness did not forget.

For me, the chain was never primarily a gallery or a marketplace. It was closer to a collaborator: the archivist who would never lose a record, the registrar who would never misattribute, the historian who would never forget a date. From that point on, every work I created on-chain carried this intention. It was not enough for a work to be beautiful. It had to be bound to its origin in a way that would endure beyond me.

Between November 2017 and the following months came the works I think of as my first body of on-chain art, each minted from contracts I wrote and signed from the address I had publicly claimed.

And a distinction was already forming that I would only later have language for: the difference between collecting and stewarding. Chapter Eleven belongs to that idea.

Before the Noise

Years later, as the NFT market exploded, I watched the world arrive at tools and language for what a handful of us had been doing quietly. By then, the conversation had shifted toward speculation, trends, and profit.

I have always resisted the idea that the blockchain's primary role in art is to make something valuable in monetary terms. Its primary role, for me, is to keep the record of authorship unbroken — to ensure that no matter how far the work travels, the origin still reads true.

Signature provenance was not something I borrowed from the market. It was something I found in the chain itself. And once I saw it, I could not unsee it.

The Museum and the Chain

Years after those first mints, two of my early works — TEST and Rosetta, from 2017 and 2018 — entered the permanent collection of the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts. The acquisition was completed on April 22, 2022, and the works were displayed from July 14 through September 11, 2022. In the museum's own words, they were "the first digital artworks in the collection."

The museum's accession practice made this book's argument better than I could. Alongside the transfer of the works on the chain, I signed a paper deed of gift, and SAMFA keeps both paper and digital files for the works — the oldest instrument of custody and the newest record of origin, filed side by side, each vouching for the other. The curator noted the irony of holding actual paperwork for such works. I note the continuity: every collections object gets a file, and now the file and the ledger say the same thing.

I will not pretend the moment meant nothing to me because the works were already recorded without it. That would be theory talking, and this is a memoir chapter. It meant a great deal. But what it meant is worth being precise about.

The museum did not confer provenance on those works. It could not; the origin record was already complete, sealed years earlier, the night each was signed into the chain. What the museum conferred was something the chain cannot generate on its own: cultural recognition. Placement in a story larger than mine. The classical world and the time-chain, each doing what it does best — the ledger holding the fact of the works, the institution holding their meaning.

For most of art history, those two functions were forced into the same fragile hands. The same institutions that interpreted art also had to guarantee it. What I felt, watching those accession records being written, was the two functions finally coming apart cleanly: the museum freed to do the work of meaning, because the work of proof no longer needed anyone at all.

The chain remembers. The museum understands. A work of art deserves both.