Fidenza

The work and its context

Fidenza is Art Blocks project 78 on the contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270. The index records 999 invocations against a maximum of 999, the runtime p5@1.0.0, an aspect ratio of 5:6 and the licence label CC BY-NC 4.0. It also records a price field of 0.17 ETH ¹. Hobbs's mint text calls it "by far my most versatile algorithm to date", one that "stays focused on structured curves and blocks" while varying "scale, organization, texture, and color usage" ¹.

Each output is a field of thick, curved rectangles that follow an invisible flow field, packed so that they almost never touch. At one extreme sit a few monumental bands of colour. At the other are thousands of tiny dashes that read as a single woven texture ¹². Few long-form generative works are as widely recognised. In August 2021 Fidenza #313 sold for 1,000 ETH, then about $3.3 million, to punk6529. The same token had changed hands for 0.58 ETH on mint day ³. The series has since been sold at Phillips and Sotheby's and exhibited in museum and gallery shows ⁴⁵⁶.

Conception and development

Hobbs described flow fields as his long-standing method in a 2020 essay: a grid of angles that curves are made to follow. He noted that they "allow me to produce unpredictable, organic curves" ⁷². His Bouldin Creek mural in Austin (2020) was, in his words, "the largest generative work I've ever created" and "a precursor to Fidenza" ⁸⁹. In the Art Blocks interview published on the eve of release, he said he aimed to give "the program as much free reign as possible while still meeting my standards for quality in 99% of the output". He also said that "the output can still be extremely surprising to me, because of the way that the different features combine" ⁸.

His release-day essay sets out the vocabulary that became the traits. It describes seven scales, from "Small - Very Rare" to Jumbo, "the most common". It also covers four turbulence levels, including "none", which "produces straight shapes with no curvature at all"; soft shapes drawn "using thousands of tiny parallel lines"; super blocks "filled with square (or nearly square) blocks of color"; spirals; margins; and "14 different probabilistic color palettes", led by Luxe ². Hobbs has also talked through the project, and the idea of "incomplete control" behind it, in several filmed interviews and talks ¹⁰¹¹¹². His essay "The Rise of Long-Form Generative Art" (2021) gives the wider argument: a single algorithm must hold up across every output, not just a curated few ¹³.

How the work was constructed

The program is two script parts that concatenate to 14,495 bytes, SHA-256 08c1373fa241742c279bdf8da65f1c2ce69eb556046d094f929e2460e06a5832. It was retrieved from the Art Blocks index on 20 September 2026 and read in full. No code is reproduced here ¹.

It seeds its own generator from a MurmurHash of the token hash. It then draws, in order, a scale, a turbulence level, a base angle and a palette, followed by a series of switches ¹. The published trait frequencies follow the program's weights closely, as the table shows.

Next, a flow field is built on a 10-unit grid across a 2,000 by 2,400 drawing. Rotational disturbances are added to it: 15, 28 or 45 of them for low, medium and high turbulence, or none ¹. Shuffled start points are traced along the field. Each curve becomes a fat ribbon whose width depends on the scale. Every point is checked against a ten-by-ten spatial grid of earlier ribbons, and a ribbon is cut off where it would collide ¹. The ribbon is then filled solid, cut into "super blocks", or drawn as a soft shape. Its ends are sliced into short segments of other palette colours, which gives the characteristic banded tips ¹².

The mint

Invocation 0 was minted on 3 June 2021 at 16:04:28 UTC, a week before the public release ¹. The index records activation on 11 June at 12:50:56 UTC and the first public mint at 15:59:46 UTC. The 999th token was minted at 16:25:57 UTC, 26 minutes later ¹. The indexed price is 0.17 ETH ¹. Decrypt's report of the #313 sale gives a mint-day resale of 0.58 ETH, which shows how quickly secondary prices moved above the mint price ³. At retrieval the 999 tokens were held by 512 addresses. The largest single wallet held 61 ¹.

Quirks in the algorithm

A full read of the program, checked against all 999 published token records, turned up the following. Where a point rests on the code alone, it is marked as a code reading.

1. A turbulence typo. The helper that adds rotational disturbances is meant to use a smaller radius for high turbulence. Its condition, however, assigns the string "med" instead of comparing against it. Every non-low setting therefore gets the medium radius. The high-turbulence disturbances are larger and gentler than the other two branches of the code intended (code reading) ¹.
2. Spirals ignore turbulence, but their labels do not. When the spiral switch is on, the program sets the number of turbulence disturbances to zero. Yet 28 of the 35 spirals carry a Low, Med or High turbulence label ¹. On spirals the Turbulence trait records a value that was drawn but never used.
3. The spiral's two centres. The spiral's angles are measured around a point four-tenths of the way down the canvas. The added twist grows with distance from the true centre, and the protected clear zone sits at the upper point ¹. The eye of every spiral therefore sits above centre, as #938 and #612 show.
4. A palette that never appears. A complete "Retro" palette of dark browns and yellows, with its own backgrounds, is defined in the code. It is missing from the palette draw, so no Fidenza can use it ¹.
5. Colour weights that add up to more than 100 per cent. In several colour tables the weights sum to 1.02 to 1.04, so the last entries are never reached. In Luxe, the darkest brown can never be picked as a shape colour. The same is true of the darkest brown in Cool and the brown in Luxe-Derived's lead palette. In White Mono, the black background comes up about 6 per cent of the time rather than the 9 per cent written (code reading) ¹.
6. Backgrounds depend on scale. Luxe backgrounds are cream 90 per cent of the time at small scales. For Uniform and Large they are cream 60 per cent of the time. For Jumbo and Jumbo XL they are cream only 30 per cent of the time, with the rest going to deep blue, pale green, pink and other colours ¹. Coloured grounds, like the deep blue of #25 and the pink of #953 (both Jumbo), are therefore mostly a large-scale phenomenon (code reading).
7. Rules found in the published data. No Jumbo XL has a margin. All 30 are "High AF" density, and none has high turbulence. No Micro-Uniform has soft shapes, and no soft-shape output has super blocks. Black and White on Cream are always outlined, except for the five soft-shape cases (#247, #440, #610, #750, #861) ¹.
8. Code names and trait names. "Sharp" angles snap every step of the flow to multiples of 36 degrees; 34 outputs have them. The palette the code calls "Party Girl" is published as "Party Time" ¹.
9. A shared noise field. The program fixes p5's own random and noise seeds at 0 for every token. The soft-shape strokes therefore sample the same noise field in every Fidenza, each from a different random offset (code reading) ¹.

The most coveted variants

Collector attention has settled on a few families. Curated's 2024 survey of the series names Luxe as the palette most associated with Fidenza. It calls spirals "emergent grails" and Black Micro combinations the rarest, and it describes Jumbo XL and Micro-Uniform as strongly sought after despite, or because of, their rarity ¹⁴.

Spirals (35 of 999). Fidenza #938, known as "God Mode", combines a spiral with Micro-Uniform scale, Luxe, relaxed collision and super blocks. It is a whirlpool of thousands of chips. Cryptonomist reported it as "the first ever AB triple digit sale, at 100 ETH", and it was later bought by Cozomo de' Medici ¹⁵. Curated lists Han, Andrew Badr, Nick W, AC and Cozomo de' Medici among its successive owners ¹⁴. Fidenza #612, the "Deafbeef Spiral", is a Medium-scale Luxe spiral that Curated recorded in 2024 as held by the artist Deafbeef ¹⁴.

Black Micros (2 of 999). Only #76 and #479 combine the Black palette with Micro-Uniform scale ¹. #479 was sold at Sotheby's in 2023 from the Three Arrows Capital "Grails" collection. It entered Curated's 24-Fidenza collection and was shown in the window of Glitch Gallery in Marfa from 1 February to 1 March 2024 ⁶. In Curated's survey Hobbs says that black micros "bring an ultimate focus on flow and texture" ¹⁴.

Jumbo XL (30 of 999). These are the largest shapes, never with a margin. #456 is the only Black Jumbo XL, a few heavy black bands on cream ¹. It is also one of the 31 Fidenzas shown in Hivemind Capital's Digital Culture Fund gallery ¹⁶.

Rare palettes. The smallest palette groups are Dark Lifestyle (6), Party Time (9), White on Cream (10), Luxe-Derived (11) and Cool (12) ¹. #61 is a Party Time Jumbo with soft shapes: hot pink ribbons on deep navy. It sold at Phillips' "Ex-Machina: A History of Generative Art" sale in July 2022 for £302,400 against an estimate of £80,000 to £120,000 ⁴.

The quintessential Fidenza. Rarity is not the only measure. Hobbs has called #953, a Jumbo Luxe with outlines on a pink ground and common traits, "one of the most quintessential Fidenzas" ¹⁴. #313, the $3.3 million sale, is a Medium Luxe with super blocks and no rare trait at all ¹³.

Notable collectors

• Hivemind Capital, Digital Culture Fund. Its Deca gallery shows 31 Fidenzas, including #456 and the spirals #593 and #984, alongside 40 Ringers by Dmitri Cherniak ¹⁶. A Hivemind feature of January 2025 gives the fund's holding as 25 Fidenzas ¹⁷. At retrieval, 23 of the 31 tokens in the gallery sat in two wallets holding 12 and 11 Fidenzas; no source inspected names those wallets ¹.
• punk6529 bought #313 for 1,000 ETH in August 2021 ³.
• Cozomo de' Medici bought #938 in 2021 ¹⁵.
• Deafbeef held #612 as of Curated's 2024 survey ¹⁴.
• Curated holds 24 Fidenzas, including #479, which it shows as a triptych with #628 and #838 ⁶¹⁴.
• The Anne + Michael Spalter Digital Art Collection holds #517 ¹⁸.
• Fidenza #314, from a private collection, was shown in the Toledo Museum of Art's "Infinite Images: The Art of Algorithms" ¹⁹.

Fidenza in physical form

The Marfa mural

In 2021 Hobbs painted a Fidenza mural at the Art Blocks gallery in Marfa, Texas. His works page says it "utilized the Fidenza algorithm for its design" ²⁰. His time-lapse describes the process: "To start, we projected the design onto the wall at night, and traced the outlines of the shapes using a china marker... Then we painted in the colors using the digital image as a reference". It took "roughly five long days" ²¹.

In the photographs, bands of Luxe-like colour in yellow, navy, red, teal, pink and cream sweep across a white wall under a deep eave. They carry the banded ends of the digital works ²⁰.

The print programme

Hobbs runs an official print programme for holders. "Each Fidenza can only be printed once", and buyers "must prove ownership of the NFT at the time of purchasing the print" ²². Prints come in four sizes: 20 × 24 in ($500), 25 × 30 in ($600), 30 × 36 in ($750) and 40 × 48 in ($1,000). They are made on "Hahnemühle Museum Etching paper, a 350 gsm, 100% cotton" sheet, and each is "inspected and signed by Tyler Hobbs" with a certificate of authenticity ²².

How many remain unprinted. The programme page publishes a status for every mint number. When read on 20 September 2026 it listed 357 of the 999 as printed ("Unavailable") and 642 as unprinted ("Available"), with none pending ²². None of the headline tokens above (#313, #938, #479, #612, #953, #456, #61, #76) has been printed. #25, whose print is shown above, has; so have #517 in the Spalter collection and #314 from the Toledo show ²². Printed shares vary by family: 12 of the 35 spirals, 9 of the 30 Jumbo XLs and 9 of the 38 Micro-Uniforms ²²¹. The full list is the reference for any collector checking a token: tylerxhobbs.com/pages/fidenza-prints.

Copyright and licensing

The index records CC BY-NC 4.0 without a link ¹. On that label, the images may be shared and adapted non-commercially with attribution. Commercial reproduction needs permission, and Hobbs's own print programme is the authorised route to a physical work ¹²². The program carries no separate code licence. p5.js is loaded by the platform at view time ¹. The mural and print photographs above belong to Tyler Hobbs Studio. They are linked, not re-hosted, and need permission before any reuse beyond reference.

Significance and limitations

Fidenza showed that a single long-form algorithm could produce 999 works that are consistent and still surprising. The market's attention has tracked its rarest structures, spirals, micros and Jumbo XLs, while Hobbs himself points to ordinary Luxe outputs as its essence ¹⁴. Its physical life is unusually well documented: one mural, and a print programme with a public ledger that shows about 64 per cent of the edition still unprinted ²⁰²².

Unresolved research questions:

1. Which wallets hold Hivemind's Fidenzas today, and why does the fund's stated count (25) differ from its gallery (31)?
2. Was the turbulence radius typo noticed by the artist, and does it change high-turbulence outputs visibly? A side-by-side re-render with the condition corrected would settle it.
3. When was the Marfa mural painted, how big is it, and is it still standing?
4. Is invocation 0, minted on 3 June 2021, an artist proof?

Bibliography