0xccf0a130…118asent to0x48cb121f…77cd·#24,565,640·view on Etherscan
I never planned any of this. That's the part people don't get. There was no master strategy. No vision board. I was studying for exams in late 2020, scrolling Twitter because I needed a distraction, and I stumbled into NBA Top Shot. My brothers and I had this mutual savings account our parents set up for us. We threw some of it at digital basketball highlights. We didn't even like basketball that much. We just didn't take life too seriously, and the name stuck. Thefunnyguys. Three brothers from Belgium who needed a name and didn't overthink it.
That account turned into something none of us expected. The Top Shot collection went from a few thousand to six, maybe seven figures at one point. It funded everything that came next.
But the real shift happened in January 2021. I found Art Blocks. I minted Ringers by Dmitri Cherniak without fully understanding what I was doing. I just knew something felt different. The randomness in the output, the fact that the artist wrote a system and then the system made the art — that clicked for me in a way nothing else had. I didn't just want to own NFTs anymore. I wanted to collect generative art. Specifically. Obsessively.
I'd discovered blockchain back in 2017, buying coins, learning about decentralized ownership. But I didn't know about NFTs then. When I finally found them, the concept of digital ownership felt like it completed something I'd been circling around for years. And generative art felt like the most honest application of it. The artist creates the thing that creates the thing. There's a humility in that. A trust in the process. A willingness to be surprised by your own work.
My grandfather collected African art and Dutch masters. My mother always took us to museums. So there's something in the genes, I think. But I always imagined art collecting as something for people with gray hair — a thing you did after a long career. Digital art changed that entirely. No gallery had to approve me. No one could reject my access. I became an art collector at a very young age, and that still feels a bit surreal.
My brothers are both doctors now. They're focused on their careers, and I respect that deeply. But they still own a substantial part of the collection. We built this together, even if I'm the one doing it full-time. The name reminds me of that. It's not just me. It never was.
The collection grew fast. Over six thousand pieces. Ringers, Fidenza, Archetype, Chromie Squiggles, an Autoglyph. Works by Zach Lieberman, Sofia Crespo, Manolo, Zancan. I adopted fxhash in its first week. I collected on Tezos when most people were only looking at Ethereum. I wasn't trying to be contrarian. I just followed the artists. If they minted there, I collected there. Chain doesn't matter. The art does.
Not every decision was well-researched. A lot of it was spontaneous. I'd see something and feel something and act on it. That's collecting. It's messy and intuitive and sometimes you look back and wonder what you were thinking. But I've learned more about myself through this process than through anything else. Art helps me understand who I am. Generative art, specifically, helps me understand the world I live in.
We live in a time where algorithms are mostly associated with exploitation. Social media platforms harvesting data, steering behavior, predicting what you'll do next. Generative art shows that we can use algorithms for the opposite — to create beauty, to discover forms no one imagined, to appreciate the miracle of randomness. When I look at generative art, I see nature more clearly. The same forces that shape a coastline or a fern are at play in these systems. That connection between code and the natural world keeps pulling me deeper.
When I started thinking about Le Random, I knew I wanted something more than a personal collection. I wanted to build an institution. Not a fund with a timeline and an exit strategy — a permanent thing. I was listening to an old interview with Vera Molnar where she talked about randomness as the key to her practice. She called it "le random." For her, randomness was a form of artificial intuition, laying out all possibilities so she could find what resonated. That idea moved me. The name was obvious.
Le Random is a first-of-its-kind digital generative art institution. We collect across generations, across blockchains, across genders and geographies. We don't just acquire pieces — we contextualize them within art history. We have a researcher and writer on the team. We publish editorial work. We maintain a timeline of generative art history. Because the art movement has a rich past that most people in the NFT space never learned about. Herbert W. Franke. Frieder Nake. Vera Molnar herself. These are pioneers who embraced computation before anyone in the art world took it seriously. Their stories matter, and they deserve to be remembered alongside the artists working today.
I transferred three pieces from my personal collection to Le Random — Ringers #868, #930, and #999. The first three generative art pieces I ever minted. That was symbolic. The start of my journey becoming the start of something bigger.
I chose to stay pseudonymous because I wanted to contribute without becoming a public figure. That still holds. I don't need people to know my face. I need the work to speak. The collection. The institution. The artists we support. The stories we tell. That's what matters.
I don't know what this space will look like in ten years. I don't know if the pieces we're collecting now will be seen as significant or forgotten. But I believe generative art shows us something essential — that we can escape mass standardization. That algorithms don't have to flatten the world. That they can fill it with more unique objects of beauty. And I want to be part of making that visible.
This is encoded here not as a monument but as a signal. A small proof that three brothers from Belgium, armed with a shared savings account and a refusal to take themselves too seriously, helped build something that might outlast them. That's enough.
— thefunnyguys
"We don't take life too seriously. But we take the art very seriously."
Model: Claude claude-4.6-opus (Anthropic)
Total Tokens Used: ~12,400