Quine

The work and its context

Quine is project 506 on the Art Blocks contract 0xab00000000002ade39f58f9d8278a31574ffbe77. The index records 497 invocations against a maximum of 497, the runtime custom@na, an aspect ratio of 0.5625 (9:16) and the licence label "NFT License", linked to nftlicense.org ¹. Its project text calls it "Larva Labs' contribution to the final Art Blocks Curated series" ¹.

A quine is a program whose output is its own source code. Each Quine is a coloured pattern on a 78 by 148 grid, and the program that drew it is typeset into the cells of that pattern ². Run the listing and it draws the next image. Larva Labs, the studio of Matt Hall and John Watkinson, frame this as a loop between code and art: "Code Generates Art ⇄ Art Generates Code" ². The project text compares it to DNA, a program that makes the cell and also a copy of itself ¹.

The work closes a long arc for the studio. Its Glyph engine takes its algorithm from Autoglyphs, Larva Labs' earlier on-chain generative work ³. The studio told OpenSea that Quine was its first major project in four years ⁴. Right Click Save reported it as the final project in the Curated series ⁵.

Conception and development

In the OpenSea interview, Hall and Watkinson start from the platform itself: on Art Blocks "the artist submits only their algorithm, which is run by the collectors during the minting process" ⁴. They add that "most people who collect Art Blocks will never actually see the code that generates their pieces". Quine puts that code on the surface ⁴.

That set a hard constraint. As the studio wrote in its release essay, "the entirety of the code that generated the artwork had to fit into the artwork" ². They met it with "code golf", compressing the program until it fitted a grid of about 11,500 cells while still reading as code ⁴². The result is a two-level design. A parent generator, the Art Blocks script, writes a much smaller child generator for each token, and only the child is shown ¹³. Larva Labs' project page describes that child as assembled from snippets for the engine, symmetry, colour and text layout ³.

The studio tested whole editions before release. It told OpenSea that each simulated full set of 497 outputs held a few that surprised them ⁴.

How the work was constructed

The program is two script parts that concatenate to 36,792 bytes, SHA-256 9a531132c0dc817b3f35fd6f280c43ba3a5a8a92cd389088ef03ab6d2ff757d9. It was retrieved from the Art Blocks index on 20 September 2026 and read in full ¹. It is a complete HTML page with an SVG canvas of 1,440 by 2,560 units and no external library ¹.

The parent seeds an sfc32 generator from four slices of the token hash and draws, in order, a Quinity, an Engine, a Code mode, a Chrome palette, a symmetry and a Space ¹. It then fills a template with those choices, strips the unused blocks and hands the child its own seed. The child uses a separate Park-Miller generator. It draws the pattern, finds runs of cells to hold text, and writes its own source into them, one character per cell, ending with a signature line such as "Quine 390.1 by Larva Labs" ¹⁶.

Counts are from the index; the rules are from the code ¹. "Subliminal" places the code in coloured cells, in pale text. "Liminal" places it in the empty cells, in dark text ¹². Quinity sets how many generations the listing passes through before it returns to itself. A 3-Quine's listing draws a second image, whose listing draws a third, whose listing draws the first again ²³. Larva Labs' field guide glosses the Chrome codes as colour initials, such as K for black, S for sky blue and X for fluorescent orange ⁶.

The display is set by the collector. The script reads a "generation" value from the token's post parameters and renders that generation, defaulting to the first ¹. The artist's display notes confirm that owners of multi-generation Quines can choose which one appears as the main image, and change it at any time ¹.

Quirks in the algorithm

A full read of the program, checked against all 497 token records by re-running the trait function for every hash, turned up the following.

1. Traits are rejection-sampled, and 47 tokens were redrawn. Before rendering, the script test-runs every generation of the child program. If the code cannot fit the pattern, it discards the whole draw and starts again from a shifted seed ¹. Our re-run of the trait function matches the published traits on the first draw for 450 tokens. The other 47 match only a later draw: 42 on the second, four on the third (#106, #135, #173, #359) and one, #347, on the fourth (own computation) ¹. Of the 47 rejected first drafts, 29 were Shape and 13 Ribbon.
2. Why the published mix drifts from the weights. Those rejections are not random. Twelve of the 13 rejected Ribbons were Liminal, which helps explain why only 11 of 93 Ribbons are Liminal against a written 20 per cent. Shape lost more first drafts than any other engine, which fits its low final count of 92 against Glyph's 115 (own computation) ¹.
3. Two finished engines that can never run. The code contains full "Field" and "Motif" engines, including a random-walk motif builder. The engine draw only offers the other five, so neither can appear (code reading) ¹. The Motif branch also contains an addition that would join two strings instead of adding two numbers; it is unreachable.
4. Two palettes both called BX. On any engine other than Lattice, a BX draw is swapped for an alternative with wider blue and black bands and the same name. Of the 18 BX Quines, only the four Lattices use the palette that the name stands for in the table (code reading) ¹.
5. Palettes that are checked for but do not exist. A rule rerolls "S7" and "S16" palettes on Glyph outputs, but no palettes of those names are defined. A further palette, "RTSP", is commented out ¹.
6. Symmetry is drawn but not published. Every token draws a symmetry, and the lines that would label it are commented out ¹. The field guide treats it as an unofficial trait ⁶. The chances vary by engine: Force can be mirrored left to right or in both axes but never top to bottom alone, never diagonally, and never without symmetry. Elliptic Glyphs are never mirrored left to right alone. Only Lattice and Ribbon can have no symmetry, as in #390 (code reading) ¹.
7. Rules found in the published data. All 115 Glyphs are Non-Euclidean, and all five X palettes are Lattices (#129, #138, #331, #334, #484) ¹.
8. The Pseudo-Quine is almost infinite. A Pseudo-Quine's next generation number is its current number plus one, forced to a 32-bit integer. It does not loop in any practical sense, but the integer wraps after about four billion steps (code reading) ¹. The field guide calls such Quines "effectively infinite" ⁶. The pre-render test checks only the first 13 generations.
9. Test-only padding. In test mode the child carries a block of filler comment, so that the fit test runs against a longer listing than the one finally drawn (code reading) ¹. The signature "by Larva Labs" is stored base64-encoded in the template and decoded when the listing is written.
10. Fonts are the viewer's. The text is set in the generic monospace family, so the letterforms in a live view depend on the viewer's system (code reading) ¹.

The most coveted variants

Quine is young, and the sources inspected do not yet record a stable hierarchy of grails. The traits the studio itself highlights, and the smallest trait groups in the index, suggest where attention goes ⁶¹.

X chrome (5 of 497). The rarest palette pairs black with fluorescent orange, and occurs only on Lattices ¹⁶. #129 is a Liminal 7-Quine: black bars and orange arcs mirrored in both axes. #484 is one of the Quines held at the artist address ¹.

Pseudo-Quines (7) and Perfect-Quines (15). These are the two ends of Quinity. A Pseudo-Quine never returns to its starting image; a Perfect-Quine only ever draws itself ²³. The Pseudo-Quines are #12, #70, #115, #142, #192, #426 and #489. #12 is a teal and black Lattice mirrored left to right (symmetry by own computation) ¹.

Liminal code (88). In a Liminal Quine the listing floats in the gaps of the pattern, in dark text ². The field guide names a further unofficial variant: the "Nude Quine", where a Liminal generation sets all its code in one large block, with #485, generation 7, as its example ⁶. #3 is a Liminal Force in the RM chrome ¹.

The Perfect Sig. The guide also names Quines whose signature line "Quine NNN.M by Larva Labs" lands intact on a line of its own, citing #164, generation 1 ⁶. Because the generation shown is the owner's choice, both of these unofficial traits belong to a generation, not only to a token ¹⁶.

AB5D's example. #390, pictured at the top, is a Liminal, Non-Euclidean Lattice 7-Quine in RM, the fourth most common chrome ¹. It has no symmetry, which is possible only for Lattice and Ribbon (code reading) ¹.

Notable collectors

At retrieval the 497 Quines were held by 316 addresses, 243 of them holding one ¹. The largest holding, 13, sits at the address the index records as the artist's. The next two hold 12 and 11; no source inspected names them ¹. The VERSE series page reported a highest sale of $112,977 without naming the token or buyer ⁷. No museum acquisition of a Quine was found.

Quine in physical form

Art Blocks showed Quine at Art Basel Miami Beach, 3 to 7 December 2025, in Zero 10, the fair's new digital-art sector ⁸. The booth presented all 497 works in a custom vitrine, alongside ten signed, framed artist proofs selected by Larva Labs and offered through Art Blocks ⁸. The developer Jonnie Hallman built an animation for the show that prints and scans each Quine and runs its extracted code to make the next one, shown on a 4K display ⁹. A newsletter account describes framed prints, a grid table and an 8.5-minute looped animation at the booth ¹⁰. Art Blocks' release video on YouTube is titled "Quine by Larva Labs" ¹¹.

The mint

Why the index shows 497. The sales notes in the project record give the split: "477 artworks will be available in the October 9 ranked auction with settlement. The remaining 20 artworks are reserved by the artist" ¹. The index bears this out (own computation) ¹:

• 1 token, #0, was minted on 6 October 2025 at 16:16:23 UTC, three days before the sale opened, to the artist address.
• 477 tokens, #1 to #477, were minted on 10 October between 16:11:11 and 16:19:23 UTC, after the 24-hour auction closed and settled.
• 19 tokens, #478 to #496, were minted together at 19:16:11 UTC that day, all to the artist address.

That gives 1 + 477 + 19 = 497, of which 20 were the artist's reserve ¹. The project's maximum is set to 497, so no more can be minted ¹. Of the 20 reserved Quines, 13 remain at the artist address (#0, #480 to #485, #489 to #493 and #496). The other seven have moved on, as the sales notes' "released at a later date" allows ¹. No source inspected explains why 497 was chosen rather than a rounder figure. Art Blocks' announcement of the Art Blocks 500 collection counted 495 flagship projects and expected 500 by November 2025, so the number is not an edition-size rule of that collection ¹².

The auction opened on 9 October at noon Eastern time ². A post relayed by KuCoin gave a starting price of 0.25 ETH ¹³. The clearing price was 7.56 ETH, reported as about $31,000, per Phemex and Hallman ¹⁴⁹. Phemex also reported early resales at 8.9 and 9.45 ETH ¹⁴. The index's price field reads 0, since settlement pricing is not stored there. Its lowest listing at retrieval was 2.12 ETH ¹.

Copyright and licensing

The index records "NFT License" with a link to nftlicense.org ¹. The program carries no separate code licence, even though the program is the image. Collectors own an output whose visible content is Larva Labs' source code (code reading) ¹.

Significance and limitations

Quine closes the Curated series with a work about the thing every Art Blocks project shares and almost none shows: the program ⁴⁵. Its structure is recursive, since each token is an image that is also its own next generation, and collectors choose which generation stands for the token ¹². The code also shows a cost of that ambition that the published traits hide. About one token in ten had its first draw of traits thrown away because the code would not fit (own computation) ¹.

Unresolved research questions:

1. Why 497? The sales notes explain the split into 477 and 20, but no source found explains the total. Larva Labs could be asked directly.
2. Where did the seven reserved Quines that left the artist address go, and are they the ten framed artist proofs shown in Miami, or unrelated?
3. The field guide's Quinity figures, as extracted by an automated fetch, did not match the index; the page should be read by hand. The OpenSea and release-essay quotations above also came from automated extraction and should be checked.
4. Which Quine was the $112,977 sale reported by VERSE, and when?
5. The Right Click Save interview and The Defiant's auction report did not load in full; X posts by Larva Labs and Art Blocks about the auction remain leads.

Bibliography