Delronde

Asked in October 2024 to sum up the collection in one word, Delronde answered: Pioneers. The aim, Delronde said, had been to collect digital works and artists that broke new ground, and what matters in digital, generative and AI art comes back to human ingenuity: Silicon chips are the cathedrals of our era, and digital art the frescoes.¹ The collection that answer describes now spans early AI, crypto art and code. Its foundation is Art Blocks, and within the AB[500] it reaches every Curated project in the index.²³

Identity

Website · X

Collection

Gallery · Raster · OpenSea · Art Blocks · 6529

Gallery

ENG.ART (collector's own website), opened June 2025

Wallets

eng-art.eth 0x183a…3e3a Primary delronde.eth 0x2206…fd76 Linked 0xf340…11f3 Linked

Art Blocks

277 artworks

AB[500]

210 works across 166 projects, including all 103 Curated projects

abTDH

19,507,670 · +18,121 per day · method

Entry into blockchain and crypto art

The collection began with a small purchase and a lesson. In October 2020, knowing nothing about art or NFTs, Delronde watched Autoglyphs trade, judged them too expensive, and bought a Colorglyph by Larva Labs instead. It stayed in the collection as a reminder to trust my instincts, do my research and that sometimes, "cheap" can cost you dearly.¹

The first goal set after that was specific: a full set of the Art Blocks Curated seasons.¹ Three Chromie Squiggles, from the project with which Art Blocks began, sit in the collection: #145 and #3009 in eng-art.eth, and #320 in the wallet attached to the Art Blocks profile.³⁴

Art Blocks holdings

Tyler Hobbs's Fidenza #897 entered the collection on 30 June 2021, in the wallet linked to the Art Blocks profile, where it remains.⁵³ Hobbs had published an account of the work a few weeks earlier: a flow-field algorithm producing organic curves, with thick curved rectangles laid along them and checked so that they never collide.⁶

The same wallet holds Ringers #424 by Dmitri Cherniak, along with Matt Kane's Gazers and Matt DesLauriers's Meridian.⁷³ On ENG.ART, the collector's own gallery, the Art Blocks set shows Fidenza beside Snowfro's and Cherniak's work, each with the artist's own description of the algorithm.⁸

The Curated goal shows in the footprint. Across the three wallets, the collection holds a work from every one of the 103 Curated projects in the AB[500], 116 editions in all. Beyond Curated sit 43 works from Factory, 23 from Explorations, 14 from Presents, 8 from Playground and 6 from partner collections, plus 67 Art Blocks works outside the index. The deepest single holdings are later ones: twelve works from Snowfro's send/receive and nine of Alexis André's Friendship Bracelets.³² Completion here means a work from each project, not every edition. In October 2025 Delronde wrote that Art Blocks Curated is more than the sum of its parts. Same as the community around it.⁹

Associated holdings

The criteria are explicit. Before buying, Delronde asks whether the purchase is for the work itself, the artist, the narrative/story or the timestamp, and said that most works have only some of these, but my most prized pieces have all of the elements. The first example given was a genesis period Botto.¹ Botto's Communicate Displace came into eng-art.eth on 15 August 2024.¹⁰ ENG.ART describes Botto as a decentralised autonomous artist whose taste is shaped by public votes, and places this work in its genesis set.¹¹

By the time of the Kate Vass interview, the collection's attention had turned to early AI art, which Delronde called personally very meaningful: I consider the 2015-2022 period very special, something that cannot be repeated.¹ On 12 December 2023 a run of alignDRAW images by Elman Mansimov reached the collection.¹² ENG.ART opens its early AI set with one of them, an early text-to-image output from the alignDRAW paper of 2015: I consider this a milestone moment in AI Art.¹¹

The bridge from Art Blocks to that interest runs through a single work. K-Meanearest Neighbors, by Helena Sarin and Dmitri Cherniak, joined the collection on 28 June 2024.¹³ In their gen2GAN collaboration, Cherniak's algorithm generated outputs and Sarin trained neural networks on them. For Delronde the piece signals a transition from the code-based generative art to model-based generative art.¹¹

Crypto art has its place too. Asked about community, Delronde named XCOPY as the standout case: the impromptu performance with the "Black Hole" piece was only possible because of the dedicated community.¹ XCOPY's The Doomed reached the Art Blocks profile wallet on 9 April 2025,¹⁴ and ENG.ART hangs it under its original line, Tech won't save us.¹⁵

On 14 June 2025 Delronde announced that the collection felt complete and introduced ENG.ART as a digital art collection focused on art enabled by software in all forms: code, tools, models, blockchains, networks.¹⁶ The site calls itself my personal love letter to computers, to code, to the layers of abstraction and invisible engineering that underpins modern life.¹⁷ Completion did not end the buying. In July 2025 Delronde bought Jack Butcher's value systems, writing that it exemplifies the power of NFTs and the movement we're in.¹⁸

Patience

I try to keep a low profile, I would rather let my collection speak for itself to those who share similar tastes, Delronde told Kate Vass, adding a willingness to be very patient.¹ In February 2026 Delronde argued that art NFTs should be priced in US dollars, so that artists are not paid less for the same work when cryptocurrency prices fall: I'd much rather people buy art they love at fair prices and hold for years than gamble for a quick flip.¹⁹

The Art Blocks record bears that out. A Fidenza held for more than five years, a complete run of the Curated projects in the index, and a footprint that keeps extending into Factory, Presents and later work describe a collector who treats the platform as a history to be assembled, then set beside the AI and crypto art that came after it.