Chromie Squiggle by Snowfro

Years in the making, the Art Blocks genesis project’s first iterations appeared on Twitter in September 2018 over two years before its official release on November 27, 2020.

Chromie Squiggle—affectionately referred to as Squiggles—is the art project Calderon developed around his years-long pursuit of the project Art Blocks. Squiggles played a key role in Art Blocks’s development, as Calderon would walk around in 2019 with a Chromie Squiggle card to help explain the concept of generative minting. “I handed them to different people and was trying to tell them the story, and they were looking at me with their eyes crossed,” Calderon told The Monty Report.

Today, the project is one of the most identifiable in all of generative art due to its recency and popularity in the broader NFT and crypto communities. Calderon writes humbly about the collection:

“Simple and easily identifiable, each squiggle embodies the soul of the Art Blocks platform. Consider each my personal signature as an artist, developer, and tinkerer.”