9,000 faces drawn by one hand — the New York artist Tony Tafuro — and inscribed onto Bitcoin, some on satoshis mined by Satoshi Nakamoto and Hal Finney themselves. The loudest voices in Bitcoin called it pollution. The chain kept the record.
In January 2023, ordinal theory gave every satoshi an identity — a serial number assigned by mining order, trackable forever. Inscriptions completed it: an artwork written permanently into a transaction’s witness and bound to a specific sat. No server hosts the art. No URL points at it. The artifact is the chain, replicated on every full node on earth.
Ordinal Maxi Biz is the largest single body of work in that medium by a gallery-exhibited artist: 9,000 one-of-one drawings, no two alike, released across five drops through the inscription era — and licensed CC0, no rights reserved. The work belongs to the chain and to everyone.
Sats from historic blocks — mined by Satoshi, by Hal Finney — become identifiable, holdable relics of the genesis era. OMB is built directly on this.
Inscription data lives inside the witness of a taproot spend — consensus-protected space. Fully on-chain. No pointer, no IPFS, no promise.
Controlled by keys, transferred like the coin it rides on. No platform, no enforced royalties, no admin. Ownership with no asterisk.
Tafuro (b. 1989) is a New York native and multi-medium artist — a 2012 Parsons BFA who first made his name photographing Barrier Kult, the masked black-metal skate crew, in work one critic described as having “the controlled violence of a skater attacking a ramp.” His path runs from documentary photography through oil, ink and acrylic, via four years of hand-painted garments worn by cultural icons, to canvas — and then to the blockchain.
His territory has always been counterculture — skate, punk, metal, hacktivism — documented with an ethnologist’s precision and repainted with raw, gestural urgency. OMB is that language at maximum scale: 9,000 individual ink drawings, mantras, ₿ marks and trembling linework, produced in an obsessive burst and committed to the most permanent surface an artist has ever had.
Nine thousand drawings by one hand, on a canvas that cannot be repainted.
The founder is pseudonymous: ZK Shark, ex–Wall Street, who met Tafuro through Twitter Spaces having already collected his work. Through a sleepless February 2023 they assembled the collection, launching that March — the first months of the inscription era — with rare-sat hunter Nullish sourcing the historic coins the drawings live on.
The ethos is extreme ownership: no royalties, no metadata switches, no company between the holder and the artifact. Buy it, lend it, inscribe over it, destroy it — nobody can stop you, and nobody will save you. The artwork is CC0. And the community runs OMBounties, a grants programme funding open-source work on privacy, decentralisation and permissionlessness — a collection that pays forward into the network it lives on.
It’s a movement, not a project. No roadmap, no royalties, no permission.
Its defining act of iconoclasm: collectors burned CryptoPunks — Ethereum’s crown jewels — for OMB allowlist spots. Punk #8611 crossed first, then #9146. The old world’s masterpieces, sacrificed for citizenship in the new one.
An OMB’s eye colour is not a trait lottery — it records where the artifact lives on the chain. Scarcity anchored to Bitcoin’s own genesis history, verifiable by anyone, forgeable by no one. Five drops, 9,000 works, one hand.
Beyond the eyes, every OMB belongs to a meta — a recurring character type Tafuro drew across the collection. It is where the range shows: cyberpunk grime, occult horror, junkyard humour, Bitcoin iconography, all in the same trembling ink line.
What you are scrolling is not a copy — each image is delivered from the inscription itself via an ordinals node, referenced by the collection’s own on-chain gallery. Click any piece to open its inscription record. Independent index: ord.net/collection/omb.
WITNESS is a private collection. It does not exhibit, price, or promote its holdings.