The Eternal Pump

The work and its context

The Eternal Pump is project 22 on the Art Blocks contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270. The index records 50 invocations against a maximum of 50, the runtime three@0.124.0, a square aspect ratio, the licence label CC BY-NC 4.0 and a price field of 2 ETH. It files the project under Playground ¹. The whole description reads: "Don't fight it. Just respect it. Made by Dmitri Cherniak with Javascript and GLSL" ¹. Art Blocks now lists it in its Art Blocks 500 group, with a release date of 22 February 2021 ².

Each output is a stack of translucent, extruded rings seen at a slight angle. The rings swell and shrink on a sine wave, so the gaps between them open and close without end. Colour runs from a palette tone at one edge of each surface to white at the other, broken up by a fine noise grain ¹. Curated calls the series "3D-like generative artworks" that reference "crypto's speculative frenzy ('respect the pump')" ³. CoinDesk reported that the title nods "to the culture of 'pumping' up the price of an NFT project" ⁴.

The Eternal Pump came out about a month after Cherniak's Ringers. It is his smallest Art Blocks edition, and it later became the key to his most unusual release, The Wrapture, a year-long test of whether 50 collectors could cooperate ³⁴⁵.

Conception and development

Few contemporary statements about the work survive in sources that could be fetched. The project text is two short imperatives, and no Art Blocks interview was published with the release ¹. In a 2023 interview with Jason Bailey for Right Click Save, Cherniak linked the title to the crypto slogan and described the Playground release as a follow-up to Ringers. He recalled a sell-out driven by bots and fear of missing out, and his discomfort at how collectors treated the artist. He also described turning Pump holders into a fellowship that met in person ⁶⁷. That summary comes from the earlier AB5D essay; the interview body could not be fetched for this draft.

The shift from Ringers is plain. Ringers is a 2D problem of wrapping a string around pegs. The Eternal Pump moves into Three.js and a hand-written GLSL shader, with depth, transparency and continuous motion ¹³. The earlier AB5D essay noted that no prototype sequence or dated design account was found. That is still the case ⁷.

How the work was constructed

The program is a single script of 7,067 bytes, SHA-256 9c97f9188f563450e22eda2cf9deb5aaa4332d6fca5a5c6fdbfc4e1c9840a843. It was retrieved from the Art Blocks index on 20 September 2026 and read in full. No code is reproduced here ¹.

The script splits the token hash into 32 bytes. Ten of them set the features directly. A separate xorshift generator, seeded from the start of the hash, then picks colours, shader powers and depth offsets ring by ring ¹. The geometry is one annulus: a unit circle with a circular hole, extruded six units deep without bevels. Copies of it are scaled down from the outside in and nudged forward or back by a few hundredths of a unit. An orthographic camera looks at the stack from one of eight off-centre positions, so the depth of each tube shows as a wall running away from the viewer ¹.

Every ring gets its own shader. It blends a palette colour towards white along one surface coordinate, disturbs the blend with 3D simplex noise, and draws at a fixed alpha of about 0.43. The noise routine carries a credit to Ian McEwan and Ashima Arts under the MIT licence ¹⁸. No light is placed in the scene. The apparent shading is all in the colour blend ¹.

Motion comes from two sources. Each ring's scale follows a sine of elapsed time, set by the Speed and Amplitude features, with a phase offset that grows ring by ring. Each frame also adds a small fixed rotation ¹.

I recomputed every feature from the hash bytes for all 50 tokens. Each published trait matches the program exactly, as the table shows (own computation) ¹.

Quirks in the algorithm

A full read of the program, checked against all 50 token records, turned up the following. Points that rest on the code alone are marked as code readings.

1. The last ring is never seen. The loop scales ring n of N to one minus n/N, so the final ring has a scale of zero. It still gets a material and uses up random draws. The published Rings value is therefore one less than the loop count. In all 50 tokens it equals the number of visible rings ¹.
2. Hexagons are circles with too few segments. Shape is set by a curve-segment count of 3 instead of 50. Three.js r124 doubles the segment count for arcs, so a "3" arc is drawn with six sides, and the trait is published as Hexagon ¹⁹. The five Hexagons are #3, #15, #16, #17 and #34 ¹.
3. Rotation you can only see on Hexagons. Every ring turns by a fixed 0.001 radians per frame. On the 100-sided Ring outputs this is almost invisible. On the Hexagons the corners visibly revolve. Because the step is per frame, not per second, a 120 Hz display turns them twice as fast as a 60 Hz one, while the pulsing, which uses clock time, stays the same (code reading) ¹.
4. A tenth ring by one byte value. The ring-count byte reaches the top value only at 255 exactly, so Rings 10 had a chance of 1 in 256 on each mint. Only #15 has it ¹.
5. Chunky walls depend on ring count. The thicker wall is only possible when the output has three or four visible rings. Six tokens were eligible and three got it: #17, #25 and #26. #17 is also the only Chunky Hexagon ¹. The same small-ring outputs get a much wider pulse. Their Extra amplitude is 0.2, against 0.12 for the rest, so the one label covers two very different motions (code reading) ¹.
6. "Rigid" rings move almost in unison. Vibe sets the phase step between rings. Smooth pumps offset each ring by half a radian, so a wave runs through the stack. Rigid pumps use a sixth of a radian, so the stack swells nearly as one body ¹.
7. A background that never appeared. The background list holds a green (#76b995) as one of its 22 slots. No token drew it, so it has no published label. The chance of that across 50 mints was about 10 per cent (own computation) ¹.
8. Palette details. Golden holds a single orange, so its eight pumps are monochrome. Flamingo is four parts pink to one each of grey, black and yellow. Riso lists 78 colours but repeats three of them, and includes pure black and white. The trait label keeps the spelling "Flourescent" ¹.
9. Shared bytes and coarse randomness. The generator's seed is read from the first 16 characters of the hash, including the "0x" prefix. It therefore rests on the same seven bytes that set background, rings, position, speed, wall and vibe, and exceeds the precision of a JavaScript number. Each draw is reduced to one of only 1,000 values (code reading) ¹.
10. Screen-space grain. The shader samples noise from pixel coordinates, not from the surface. The grain stays fixed on screen while the rings move through it, and its scale changes with display resolution. The pixel ratio is capped at 2. The piece has no keyboard or mouse input (code reading) ¹.

The most coveted variants

With only 50 outputs, collector attention has gone less to single traits than to palette, colour and the look of each piece. A DappRadar list of the top Art Blocks sales, published on 27 July 2021, put five Pumps in its top ten. It called the series "clearly dominating" at the time ¹⁰. It reported:

• #29 for 100 WETH (then about $236,930), the top sale on the list; it had "switched owners a couple of times for around the same price"
• #1 for 100.69 ETH (about $226,350), a Flamingo pump on an Orchid ground
• #44 for 90 ETH (about $209,150)
• #25 for 90 ETH (about $197,530)
• #19 for 82 ETH (about $179,320) ¹⁰

VERSE gives a highest recorded sale of $213,032, without naming the token ¹¹. The index shows a lowest listing of 24 ETH at retrieval ¹.

The data suggests some families a collector might value (own computation) ¹:

• Hexagons (5). The geometric variant, and the only pumps whose rotation shows. #15 adds the only ten-ring stack, drawn in Riso. #17 is a three-ring Chunky Hexagon on Pink.
• Chunky walls (3). #17, #25 and #26. #25 pairs Chunky walls with the Golden palette and was one of the 90 ETH sales ¹⁰.
• Golden (8). Monochrome orange pumps, including #0, the first mint.
• Rare palettes. "Flourescent" (#22, #35) and Rainbow (#3, #10, #19, #41, #44).
• Coloured grounds. Only 20 of the 50 have a background other than Bright White. Tan (#39, #42), Pastel Blue (#18, #33) and Ivory (#34, #38) have two each.

Notable collectors

• Three Arrows Capital / Starry Night Capital. The fund's "Grails" collection held Pumps. Sotheby's offered #9 as lot 5 of "Grails: Property from an Iconic Digital Art Collection Part II" in New York on 15 June 2023, estimated at $60,000 to $80,000 ¹². A pre-sale guide valued it at "190 ETH" ¹³. The result was not found. Artnet reproduced a recap listing "Eternal Pump 5 & 16" among the private sales from the collection ¹⁴.
• Curated keeps an Eternal Pump gallery. It records #16 as "Acquired from the 3AC collection via Sotheby's", and calls it "the first artwork to be sold from the infamous Three Arrows Capital collection" ¹⁵. At retrieval, #16 and #29 sat in the same wallet. No source inspected names it ¹.
• Vincent Van Dough. The Line wrote that he "held 8 of the 50" ¹⁶. At retrieval the largest single wallet held exactly eight: #1, #10, #17, #19, #23, #25, #44 and #46. Four of these (#1, #19, #25, #44) are among DappRadar's top sales ¹¹⁰. No source inspected ties that address to him.

At retrieval the 50 tokens were held by 39 addresses. The artist's own address held none, and neither did the AB5D wallets ¹.

The Wrapture and the Pump holders

The Eternal Pump's second life is as a membership. Curated notes that Cherniak "turned The Eternal Pump into his community project, involving Pump holders in subsequent releases". Its gallery page adds that the collection gives holders access to his "future experimental work" ³¹⁵.

The clearest case is The Wrapture, released on Art Blocks on 15 December 2021 ⁵. Fifty works were given only to Pump holders, under one rule. If no holder moved, listed or sold a Wrapture for a year, the edition would stay at 50. If anyone broke the rule, the remaining 616 editions, up to 666, would open to public minting ⁴⁵. Cherniak explained the plan on Proof's podcast before it launched ¹⁷. The lock ended on 17 December 2022, and CoinDesk reported that all 37 holders had kept to it, including Starry Night Capital's four despite the Three Arrows liquidation ⁴. Cherniak told CoinDesk: "In many ways, the Wrapture became a mirror to the NFT ecosystem" and "Ultimately, blockchains are social coordination technologies" ⁴.

The Line's account dates the Pump to "October 2021" and describes the one-year condition as if it belonged to the Pump itself ¹⁶. The index and the Art Blocks pages show that the Pump was minted in February 2021 and the condition applied to The Wrapture ¹⁵.

No prints, murals or exhibitions of the Pump were found.

The mint

Invocation 0 was minted on 21 February 2021 at 06:14:28 UTC, before the index's activation time of 22 February at 03:51:48 UTC ¹. The public start is recorded as 17:48:50 UTC on 22 February, and #1 carries that same second. The 50th token was minted at 17:50:35 UTC. The other 49 therefore sold in 105 seconds, 14 of them in the same second at 17:49:06 (own computation) ¹. The price field reads 2 ETH ¹. That speed fits Cherniak's later memory of bots and fear of missing out ⁶⁷. VERSE gives the release date as 21 February, apparently from the first mint; Art Blocks gives 22 February ¹¹².

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 for non-commercial use with attribution, under the Creative Commons deed ¹⁸. The simplex-noise routine embedded in the shader is Ashima Arts' MIT-licensed code, and Three.js is loaded by the platform ¹⁸. No separate licence for Cherniak's own code was found.

Significance and limitations

The Eternal Pump is a short, fast program that makes 50 slow, hypnotic objects. Its title and two-line statement point at the market, and within months it was being traded at around 100 ETH ¹⁰. Its larger importance is social. Holding a Pump became the ticket to The Wrapture, whose year-long pact made the holders into a test of whether collectors could coordinate ⁴⁵. The code is small enough to check in full, and every published trait follows it exactly. The most useful details for collectors are the six-sided "Hexagons", the rotation only they display, and the ring counts that gate Chunky walls ¹⁹.

Unresolved research questions:

1. What did The Eternal Pump #9 fetch at Sotheby's on 15 June 2023, and what were the private-sale terms for #5 and #16? The "5 & 16" line comes from an automated extraction of an embedded post and needs checking.
2. Does the wallet holding eight Pumps belong to Vincent Van Dough, as The Line's figure implies? And which holder owns #16 and #29?
3. What exactly did Cherniak say about the Pump in the Right Click Save interview and its podcast? The body text could not be fetched, so the paraphrase here rests on the earlier AB5D essay. His release-day posts on X are leads.
4. Was invocation 0, minted a day before activation, an artist proof, and who received it?
5. What was the "respect the pump" source Cherniak had in mind, and have Pump holders received other releases besides The Wrapture?

Bibliography