Larva Labs to Release Final Art Blocks Curated Project

Larva Labs, the pioneering creative technology studio founded by Matt Hall and John Watkinson, is to launch Quine — their first major project since 2021 — as the final release on Art Blocks Curated, the platform’s foundational series. Quine will be sold as an edition of around 500, Larva Labs tell Right Click Save, through a 24-hour English auction with settlement. The auction starts on October 9, 2025 with successful bidders all paying the same amount: the minimum successful bid.  

Previous releases from Larva Labs, including CryptoPunks (2017), a ground-breaking early NFT collection, Autoglyphs (2019), an iconic fully on-chain generative art project, and The Meebits (2021), a collection of voxel-based 3D characters, have helped to establish both the aesthetics and the infrastructure — including zero-fee trading systems — of digital art on the blockchain. 

‍Quine is named after a computer science term for a program that produces its own source code as its output. Larva Labs’ new release extends that concept to generative art by making the algorithm a visible part of the composition: code as both medium and subject. Each minted token therefore contains its own custom program that both generates the artwork and writes its own code into the composition.

“Like biological DNA,” Art Blocks says in a launch statement, “each Quine carries its own blueprint, producing unique visual forms that possess the means of self-replication.” 

At the time of minting, collectors will receive a generator that, when run, produces its own code as a graphic artwork. Some generations will produce one artwork, others will produce three, five, seven, or 11 artworks. When a collector has a multiple-artwork output they will have an option after the minting process — PostParam — to choose which image from the generated work to show on Art Blocks and on marketplaces, with the ability to alter that choice at any time. 

“I think what has been nice about the PostParam is that it gives you, the collector, some agency,” says Hall. “You choose as the collector what you think is the best output from your generator.”  

Hall and Watkinson tell Right Click Save in an interview that what especially appealed about the invitation to create the final release on Curated was that it reinforced the bond between CryptoPunks, Autoglyphs, and Art Blocks at a moment when the platform is approaching its fifth anniversary and 500th release. Art Blocks first went live on Ethereum Mainnet on 27 November, 2020, and its day-one releases are the first three listed in the Curated series: Chromie Squiggle by Snowfro (Erick Calderon, Founder of Art Blocks); Genesis by DCA (Daniel Calderon Arenas); and Construction Token by Jeff Davis.

Erick Calderon first encountered Larva Labs’ work when he acquired his own CryptoPunks at the time of the project’s release in June 2017. But it was the launch of Autoglyphs two years later — where minting caused the algorithm (stored on the Ethereum blockchain) to generate an edition of works that were both unique and part of a family — that inspired Art Blocks. 

According to Hall, Calderon realized the importance of Autoglyphs as a “model for editioning generative art: that the algorithm exists and is the product of the artist and the work that is minted is out of their control.”

Calderon sold some of his original CryptoPunks to raise capital for the launch of Art Blocks. That platform — with artworks generated using code stored on Ethereum but run through Javascript on the user’s browser, allowing richer graphics than with an algorithm sitting on the blockchain — “has obviously taken [things] to whole new levels,” Hall says. It has also united, he adds, “some of the greats of generative art, the people that we’ve followed and been fans of over the years pre-blockchain.”

When Larva Labs were invited to make the final release for Curated, they thought about their relationship with Art Blocks, Hall says. They also wanted to honor and make prominent “the idea that the code is the art, which sometimes can be a little invisible.” “When Erick offered us this,” Watkinson says, it felt like a lot of pressure but also a great opportunity. “It’s really an honor to do it, and we wanted to make sure that we did something that was fitting of that honor.” It also felt right, he says, “because Erick talks about Autoglyphs being the inspiration that sort of pushed the Art Blocks boat away from the shore.” For Calderon, the feeling is mutual. 

“We operate in an ecosystem with continually shifting attention and metas where it can become easy to forget our roots and the highlights of the past in the face of the insanity of the crypto environment.” (Erick Calderon)

For Calderon “no matter what I have created or accomplished I find it important to honor those that lit a fuse within the army of people building on top of the Ethereum blockchain and exploring the intersection of art and technology. So even after launching Art Blocks and Squiggles, my PFP [profile picture] on Twitter remains a CryptoPunk, and my bio acknowledges Matt and John, and to have them release a work like this on Art Blocks is truly one of the greatest honors that I personally can fathom on this journey.”