A Strange Year

Hey everyone, it's been almost exactly a year since I last posted an update to the blog. This post is an attempt to fit a strange year into just a few paragraphs. There were more than a few things that I didn't envision having on my bingo card.

Here's the TLDR:

1. I moved.
2. I'm no longer with fxhash.
3. I got pretty sick.
4. I'm working on the blog again.

If you're reading this, then the newest issue of the newsletter is also out! The next one's also already in the works. I guess I'll jump around a bit in terms of timeline, just to keep this relatively short.

Life, Moving, Health Problems

Mid 2025 I moved to a new place. The move happened around the same time I was updating the blog less and less — if you've ever moved places, you can probably imagine that the logistics of it are terrible. Add to that, the new place had a lot of issues that needed to be fixed up before it was ready to be moved into.

Fortunately, all of that is a thing of the past, and so far, I've settled in quite nicely. It's still in the same city, but much more centrally located. A big improvement compared to where I'd previously been, now saving me quite a bit of time on commutes. I didn't know if I was really ready for a larger space, if I would be able to manage all the chores that come with it, but honestly I've done a better job than I thought.

Now I also have a much nicer working space — lemme flex with my little creative/work corner.

The living room is pretty spacious, hence subdivided into living room area and this working space. Still a work in progress, but getting some of my best work done here. I still haven't figured out how to store the plotter in an effective manner, as I don't use it that often (I probably should though). It just sits there most of the time — so if you have any tips for that, hit me up.

Moving did take a lot of energy out of me, more than I'd anticipated. Looking back, I probably ran myself too thin. Throughout the move I was still working full-time and didn't really take any time off. It didn't help that the work just got more and more stressful as time went on.

The last few months of 2025 just feel like a blur. And I guess, by 2026 all of it made me reach a breaking point; on February 23rd I walked myself to the ER thinking I was having a heart attack.

Over the course of that weekend I had already felt some strange intermittent pain in my chest, which I blamed on the flu from the week before. Sunday night this pain only grew more and more intense, and even felt it radiate into my left arm. If you've ever read up on heart attacks, that's pretty much the one sign you need to look out for. Around 4AM when the pain still hadn't subsided, I debated calling 911, but having a hospital only a 10 minute walk from my place, it made more sense to just try and go there as quickly as possible.

A few hours and a cardiac catheter later, I was diagnosed with a Peri-Myocarditis — essentially an inflammation of the heart muscle and the area around it.

At the time of writing, it's been 4 months to the day. The recent MRI I did shows that all my heart functions have returned to normal, but at the same time shows that it's still partially inflamed. Meaning that I need to take it easy for a few more weeks.

It's a bummer. Not being able to move freely, and exercise, has taken a toll on my mental health. In the last three years weightlifting had become a big part of my daily routine — losing that in an instant was difficult to cope with. That hour at the gym was a really effective way to shut off my brain for a little bit, and be away from the rest of my digital life. So far I have not found a good replacement for it.

Yes, I have tried yoga. Unfortunately, I find it quite boring.

But that's that, all I can do now is rest and wait, and try to channel my energies into the other things that matter. I'm grateful to have a loving partner, family, and friends that helped me with it all.

And hey, it's given me the time to pick up the blog again, as well as some other neglected hobbies of mine. Making music again and playing some video games. I'm halfway through Expedition 33, and what an absolute masterpiece. It's rare that a game captures me like that.

Without much of a segway, the day I was hospitalized was the same day that I received the layoff notice from fxhash.

Time at fxhash

Getting the offer from fxhash in September of 2024 was a dream come true. Getting the chance to be directly involved with the platform that had enabled so many things for me in previous years, was just surreal. I felt that I was really advancing in the gen-art x creative coding career (if you can call it that).

At the same time, I really hadn't been doing well financially the few months before. The gig I had previously gotten to help out with the documentation end of 2023, had already helped out tremendously.

The first few months were okay, but it also quickly became apparent that the team was quite burnt out from the previous years. And it really is no wonder with the pace of how the platform had grown, and had to grow really. As the weeks rolled by, the more it became clearer that there were also a lot of other internal issues.

Initially I was hired to write community newsletters, continue working on the docs, and make educative content for the platform related to generative art. I ended up writing quite a few things, some of which never saw the light of day for one reason or another. For instance, there was this full length tutorial on Chladni patterns, that I worked on in tandem with the CYMATIC exhibition that happened in Photo Paris 2024.

While those newsletters were well received initially, it also felt that it wasn't really putting a dent into this decline in interest. Somehow fxhash never managed to regain the same community sentiment that it had experienced in the early days, even though there were many sincere attempts to recapture it. fxhash did quite a few pivots throughout 2025 — dropping support for Tezos, moving towards art coins, open-form projects, ranked auctions, two revamps of the website, the attempt to open to all digital art, etc.

I didn't have a say in any of it, but I also don't know what could have been done differently to have a better outcome for the company. Maybe the beginning of the end already was the move towards ETH, but I believe that was also a requirement for the seed-raise. Dropping support for Tezos felt like the final nail in the coffin for any sort of positive community sentiment, but then again, it was simply not profitable enough. The coin stuff all just came way too late.

All moves were always just reactive towards the current situation. Maybe the best solution would have been to down-size the team and platform to absolute the absolute minimum, rather than aiming for scale. But that would have required ciphrd to make some hard choices.

The most challenging part of the job was absorbing the overwhelming negativity whenever an announcement rolled out. One of the reasons why I felt less and less desire to be on social media. Some of the feedback was entirely fair — but a platform can't change course every time one person voices an opinion, even if it's a valid one.

There were some seriously crazy sprints in 2025, especially with how ambitious the entire open-form idea was — in retrospect it's really impressive that the team managed to get it deployed and running. Yes, there were a lot of issues, and it was too complicated, but I think it was still a very interesting experiment in generative art x blockchain. Had it been done a year or two earlier it would have probably taken off in a much different manner. But that's just a hypothetical.

As time went on, my position slowly shifted to handle more and more of the day to day comms of the team internally, handling the meetings, writing design docs for the product, and overall coordinating timelines and projects. Partially this was due to me already being involved in most of everything, so that I could compile these updates for the socials. And at the same time, there was a bigger and bigger leadership vacuum, so those tasks needed to be handled by someone.

Overall, the work itself was quite interesting, would it not have been for the difficult circumstances that surrounded fxhash. I hope this paints a broad picture of things. There's a lot more I could say here, but at the same time I'm trying to close this chapter.

The End

With open-form and the FXH launch being somewhat successful it felt that things were moving in a positive direction again. End of September we had one of our regular team-syncs. The call went fine, we ended it on a positive note, we assured Baptiste that we would assist him with everything. All things considered, team morale was high.

Unknowingly it would be the last time I saw Baptiste until March 2026.

The months after, the team was pretty much in limbo — the next week then just complete radio-silence. Not giving a simple notice is inexplicable to me.

There probably is a lot more here that I don't know, hence I will leave it at that. In the end, I find the community update that was given disingenuous; claiming that exorbitant IPFS costs broke the camel's back, is just part of the issue.

The actual plan for 2026 had been the introduction of ranked auctions, followed by opening up to all forms of digital art on the platform. The former we miraculously managed to put into production in less than two months considering that it involved some gnarly contract work in the context of artcoins. At that point we were genuinely stretched thin and motivation was at an all time low, especially with less and less runway looming over us. The lofty goal of opening up the platform to all digital art was becoming quite impossible.

Things then ended on February 23rd, with a notice that salaries for that month would not be paid due to a non-existent runway. I despise over-dramaticizing things, but quite literally as soon as I was rolled into my assigned hospital room, and after calling my family, I got the notification on my phone.

Life has comedic timing sometimes.

With how it all ended, I can't help but feel greatly disrespected. After working closely with Baptiste, Alfredo, and Paul, working overtime many evenings, working through weekends, covering wherever I could, I ultimately did neither receive a checkup message from any of them after my notice about being in the ER, nor was there any sort of follow up. This is just aside from the horrible one day layoff notice — there were many chances end of 2025 / start of January 2026 to inform the team.

I have tried my best to remain respectful in what I have written.

The Good Moments

But it's not all bleak though, there were quite a few rewarding moments in between. My favourite one was helping eboy upload and mint their open-form project to the platform — which was also the most successful open-form project imo.

While we were waiting for the devs to help figure out some hiccups with the upload flow, we had a few moments to chat and talk about art, life, and all sorts of other things. In the screenshot we were post launch, watching some of the mints show up in the open-form graph.

I also really enjoyed giving the workshop in Ghent at the very start of my employment, getting to meet Bjørn in person, exchange some words, and experience the amazing Entangled installation live was surreal.

I also greatly enjoyed working with Markus, Leo, and Louis over the course of the year and a half. They are the unsung heroes behind fxhash, none of it would have actually been up and online if it wasn't for them. They deserve much more credit for that than they have received.

All three of them are incredibly skilled and talented devs. Other companies would be lucky to have this kind of dev team: Markus built that crazy open-form graph from scratch in just a few days, Leo handled hooking up some crazy complicated contract work to the frontend, and besides handling the database, Louis would always immediately be there whenever anyone faced an issue. Sadly I never got the chance to meet them in person.

Writing this down, it's a really strange feeling looking back on it all. A significant part of my life, not just working for fxhash, but also the amount of time I have put into the projects that I've released with fxhash, as well as thinking and writing about it ever since 2021. It could have been a good memory. I genuinely cared deeply about the platform, and I still do care about generative art, even if this entire experience taints my joy for it just a little bit.

At the same time, I'm relieved that it's over. It took a while to process all of it, especially with how abruptly it ended, in conjunction with my health.

Here is a notebook my partner gifted me when I got the job — she wrote me a small note on the first page.

Where to from here?

When I first launched this blog, it was meant to be my little corner of the internet. I started it at a time when I felt like I didn't have a voice — like I wasn't doing anything meaningful. Having a platform to put words out into the world, to inform and teach people, to actually reach them, matters a lot to me. Making a positive impact, however small.

Looking back, I think I've built something genuinely valuable. Some parts are all over the place, sure — but still. My plan is to flesh this out into a more polished archive of my work, my writing, and not just a newsletter. Still a newsletter, but also more than that.

I am currently working on rebuilding the blog as a proper platform. That is the n-th time that I do this, but this time I actually have the know-how to do so.

And while we're already talking about the newsletter. I had already started pivoting more towards creative technology at large as the newsletter progressed, in its wake, the blog was to a large extent about generative crypto art. That space looks completely different now. I recently checked the Discords of various platforms that existed at some point, and it largely feels like a digital wasteland now. Maybe I am missing something though, with all the buzz I'm seeing around Art Basel, it feels that digital art is just becoming more and more mainstream, and just isn't such a niche thing anymore.

In comparison, everything related to AI in tech has just become magnitudes more relevant; obviously considering that is an existential threat to programmers and the craft. Without a doubt it's the most important conversation of this decade, and has heavy implications on creative technology, art making, and the value of human opinion. Not taking part in this conversation is simply stupid. This is to say, that I'm aware this should become a more prevalent part of the newsletter, rather than just a footnote.

In the advent of AI, I strongly believe that human-made "content", and original opinion will only increase in value. One of the reasons why I feel comfortable coming back to writing, and compiling the newsletter. While AI can do many of these tasks much faster and much better than me, at least for the foreseeable future it will not be able to replace my thoughts, opinions, and the human experience I'm living.

What's my plan moving forward? I'll try to be more active again on here and my socials in the coming weeks and months. I'm not promising or imposing any sort of strict schedule on myself, but I have already worked on some new art, drafted some new articles, experimented with some new formats, etc.

So yeah, that's pretty much it, that's all I wanted, and needed to say. I'll catch you in the newsletter, or in the next update!

Cheers ~ Gorilla 🌸