MoMA adds CryptoPunks and Chromie Squiggles to its permanent collection

For MoMA, this kind of addition is a way to document how the language of art keeps changing and where the line now sits between a digital object and a museum artifact. For the NFT market, it’s a rare moment when an institution of MoMA’s scale treats these works as part of an evolving cultural landscape rather than as price charts.

The new pieces will be held by the museum’s Media and Performance department, alongside video art, experimental tech, and other new‑media formats. Larva Labs and several well‑known figures in the crypto art scene were mentioned among the donors. Private collectors helped coordinate the effort as well. Many of them have been pushing onchain art toward museums for years.

CryptoPunks is a series of pixel portraits that launched in 2017 and later became almost synonymous with the early NFT movement on Ethereum. Chromie Squiggles, in contrast, are often treated as one of the clearest symbols of the Art Blocks era. Those simple, looping lines turned into a signal that an algorithm can be an author too.

What’s notable is how CryptoPunks is being institutionalized on more than one track. Beyond museum collections, the project is also getting a physical, archival form. Back in 2023, Yuga Labs spoke about an interactive book that aims to present all 10,000 avatars “pixel for pixel.” The idea is to treat it as both an archive and a catalog raisonné.

In an interview with GNcrypto, Yuga Labs CEO Daniel Alegre described the company’s broader direction like this: «At Yuga, we are a cohort of creatives at the forefront of web3, with a mission of building culture on the blockchain».

Against MoMA’s move, that line lands in a very concrete way. “Building culture” here isn’t just about launching collections or hosting events. It’s also about getting digital work into places that are built to preserve it for decades.

It’s still too early to say how quickly museums will start collecting onchain art at scale. But the coordinated donation matters on its own. It’s a community gesture, meant to anchor its early symbols in the places where the canon is formed.

Read more about high‑value digital artifacts in our feature: The Most Expensive NFTs