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Money is not only cash, account balances or bitcoin prices. It is also a story people agree to believe. A Bitcoin Museum & Art Gallery (BMAG) exhibition at Bitcoin Amsterdam, scheduled for November 4–6, 2026, shows how artists can make that story tangible through paintings, shredded banknotes, screenprints and digital work. Germany’s ZETRA and RYR, together with Prague-based Cypherpunk Now (Martin Fischer), approach bitcoin culture from distinctly different directions.
Why money has always been an artistic subject
Amsterdam provides a fitting historical setting. The city’s 1720 speculative bubble inspired The Great Mirror of Folly, a vast visual record of financial mania. Centuries later, cryptographer David Chaum worked at Amsterdam’s CWI and developed DigiCash around 1990, an early attempt at digital cash. The city therefore links speculation, monetary technology and visual commentary.
BMAG’s earlier exhibition The Waterworks of Money by Carlijn Kingma, Thomas Bollen and Martijn Jeroen van der Linden used an irrigation-network drawing to show how money is created and distributed. The three artists in the 2026 program continue that effort to make an abstract system legible, but each chooses a different material and viewpoint.
Three artists, three ways to expose value
| Artist | Primary material | What the work examines | Relationship to bitcoin culture |
|---|---|---|---|
| ZETRA | Painting and fine-art print | Inflation, prices and purchasing power | Critical visual observation |
| RYR | Shredded and burned banknotes, paper and concrete | Trust, belief and the physical life of currency | Material experimentation |
| Cypherpunk Now (Martin Fischer) | Collage, screenprint, animation, NFTs and virtual exhibition | Cypherpunk history, censorship resistance and social change | Direct participation in bitcoin’s early community |
ZETRA turns prices and wallet words into images
ZETRA emerged from Germany’s graffiti scene, began painting in the early 1990s and discovered bitcoin in 2017. His TOMATOSOUP paintings adapt Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup imagery, replacing a familiar consumer icon with changing prices shown in dollars and bitcoin. The comparison makes inflation visible: the object stays recognizable while the amount of money needed to buy it changes.
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His ongoing THE BIP39 SERIES uses the 2,048 words in bitcoin wallet-recovery phrases as a visual vocabulary. Works include 1206/NOTE, 1044/LIST, 1638/SMILE and 0388/CORN. 1638/SMILE is described as a fine-art print mounted on Alu-Dibond beneath a 6 mm acrylic-glass cover, giving a technical storage term a gallery-scale physical form.
RYR makes currency into a literal substance
RYR also came through Germany’s graffiti scene, but his central question is what money becomes when its symbolic authority is removed. He makes paper from shredded banknotes, burns notes to create pigment and fills concrete grenades with shredded cash. He calls these objects “artifacts from the future.”
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His explanation is deliberately broader than a critique of paper notes: “Money is essentially a narrative system built on collective belief and obedience.” In this view, a banknote and a number on a screen are different containers for the same social agreement. RYR says bitcoin may become a broader and increasingly regulated financial asset, while the grassroots artistic identity that surrounded its early culture can still remain visible.
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Cypherpunk Now connects hacker history with printmaking
Martin Fischer joined Prague art collective Ztohoven in 2003. The group became known for inserting a fictional nuclear explosion into a Czech Television broadcast. In 2014, Ztohoven opened Paralelní Polis, a hackerspace whose café accepted only bitcoin; Fischer designed its logo.
After a screen-printing press arrived, Fischer began making prints and has worked as Cypherpunk Now since 2020. He recalls that Paralelní Polis was founded during a 2014 bear market: “We saw it as uncensorable money and understood the changes it could bring to society.” That belief in money outside institutional control is the starting point for his art.
His Cypherpunks of the World project developed from collages into handmade screenprints, animated NFTs and a virtual gallery. Other cited works include Lazar Eyes (2022), Out of Order (2023) and St. Satosius Contra Draconem (2025). The shifting formats mirror a movement that moved between physical workshops, online networks and experimental digital spaces.
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- Page Count: 176 pages
- Binding: Paperback
- Images: 107 illustrations
- Release Date: April 13, 2023
- Dimensions: 21.6 x 13.8 cm
How the exhibition answers “What is bitcoin art?”
These works suggest that bitcoin art is not one style or medium. It can be a painting that compares a consumer product’s price in two monetary units, a sculpture made from destroyed legal tender, or a screenprint preserving the memory of a hacker community. The common thread is that the artwork exposes the rules, trust and power normally hidden behind a payment.
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Where to see the artists in Europe
BMAG programming at Bitcoin Amsterdam is scheduled for November 4–6, 2026, with works by ZETRA, RYR, Cypherpunk Now and other European artists. Additional artworks and editions are expected through the BMAG shop. Event dates, available editions, prices and purchase terms are time-sensitive, so check the official listings before travelling or ordering.
Quick Recap
What a bitcoin art print can show
- Inflation: ZETRA’s soup-can imagery shows how the same everyday object can require different amounts of money over time.
- Money as material: RYR’s shredded notes reveal the physical substrate behind a system whose value depends on collective confidence.
- Memory and ideology: Cypherpunk Now’s prints and digital works preserve the ideas and personalities that shaped early bitcoin culture.
- Technical language: ZETRA’s BIP39 series turns wallet-recovery vocabulary into something viewers can encounter as visual art rather than software terminology.
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