The Museum of Modern Art in New York has added eight CryptoPunks and eight Chromie Squiggles to its permanent collection. The acquisition, which comes via donations from multiple collectors, is the latest acquisition by a major museum of on-chain art and one of the medium’s most significant institutional endorsements to date.

CryptoPunks are a collection of 10,000 unique, algorithmically generated 24×24 pixel characters on the Ethereum blockchain. They were launched by Larva Labs in 2017 and are considered both NFTs and works of art. Chromie Squiggles are also generative NFTs, with 10,000 editions in circulation, each one displaying a unique colorful wavy line. They were created by Erick Calderon (aka Snowfro) and were the first project on ArtBlocks, a digital art marketplace, also on the Ethereum blockchain.

“The acquisition of Cryptopunks and Chromie Squiggles by the world’s most important institution for modern and contemporary art is a clear sign that the crypto art movement has arrived in the canon of art history at an institutional level,” Georg Bak, a digital art adviser and founder of the Digital Art Mile, told ARTnews. “While digital art existed in a niche for decades, this acqu...