0xccf0a130…118asent to0x48cb121f…77cd·#24,565,585·view on Etherscan
I keep thinking about tile. Which is funny because I thought I'd left that behind years ago.
But here's the thing about porcelain tile — the reason I spent nearly two decades selling it, arguing for it, installing it in people's homes — is that it lasts. It doesn't fade. It doesn't warp. It doesn't pretend to be something it isn't. There's an honesty in that permanence that I found really hard to walk away from, even when I walked away from the tile.
What I didn't realize until much later is that I wasn't actually walking away from anything. I was finding a different version of the same obsession. Timestamped. Authenticated. Durable in ways that even tile can't compete with.
The first Squiggle I generated — honestly it was a proof of concept. I needed to show that the system worked. That the contract could hold something real, something generated, something that couldn't be faked. I minted it and it became more than that. A signature, I guess. My signature. And I held on to the last one for four years. Four years of watching people build their entire identities around these little lines. Normal. Bold. Fuzzy. Slinky. Ribbed. Pipe. Six categories for something that felt boundless.
When I gave #9999 to LACMA in August of 2024 I kept waiting for the feeling to arrive — the big arrival feeling, the sense of completion. It didn't really come. What came instead was a kind of quiet. Like untangling a knot you've been working on for a long time and finding your hands are just... empty now. Not bad. Just different.
I think about this knot thing a lot. There's a book I read as a kid — Maniac McGee — and there's a character who untangles impossible knots. That image has stayed with me longer than most things I've read since. Maybe because that's mostly what I've been doing. Not creating — untangling. Finding the line inside the chaos and pulling until something resolves.
I am not a great coder. I want to be really clear about that. I spend half my time just getting back into the work. Late nights with a cup of coffee after the kids are asleep, convincing my brain that it's not actually time to rest yet. The concentration required is enormous and I don't have a natural gift for it. What I do have is a question I ask before I start anything:
Do I think this could make someone smile?
That's it. That's the filter. If yes, I proceed.
Before web3 I had a lot to say and almost no one to say it to. The tile world gave me a good life but it wasn't a room with many walls. What web3 did — and what building Art Blocks did — was expand the room. Suddenly I could place something into the world and a community formed around it. Not because I orchestrated it, but because the work itself was an invitation. Come in. See what gets generated. Be surprised with me.
Being surprised with people is still what drives me. The unpredictability of the output — neither the artist nor the collector knows exactly what they'll get until it exists. That's not a bug. That's the whole point. Art should do something to you before you've decided what to think about it.
I'm terrified of success in the permanent sense. I see it as the end of the road. What I actually want is to keep being curious. To keep empowering artists who couldn't before afford to dedicate themselves to this work. To keep building infrastructure that runs on kindness as much as code.
Patience. And kindness. Those are the two things I'd tell anyone starting out. They don't sound impressive. They don't make for good taglines. But they are the things that have held everything together when nothing else would.
I don't know what's archived here or who reads this. Maybe no one. Maybe someone decades from now who stumbles across it the way I stumbled across a CryptoPunk in 2017 on Reddit — barely understanding what I was looking at, feeling something pull at me before I had words for it.
If that's you — welcome. I hope something generated today made you smile.
— Erick Calderon (Snowfro) / patience. and kindness.
Model: Claude claude-4.6-sonnet-medium-thinking
Total Tokens Used: ~4,900