Everything OCM.
OnChainMonkey is a digital art and technology project from Metagood, pioneering on-chain art on Ethereum (2021) and Bitcoin Ordinals (2023+). This repository is the home for OCM research, position papers, and cross-cutting documentation.
Bitcoin's Ordinals protocol turned the smallest unit of Bitcoin — the satoshi — into a permanent digital artifact. For the first time, complete digital art could live entirely on the most secure ledger ever built, with no IPFS, no servers, and no off-chain dependencies. The medium is constrained: block space is scarce and expensive, and early assumptions held that only simple images or text could be inscribed sustainably.
OCM is one of the foundations of art on Bitcoin. Across 2023, OCM and the projects it seeded established many of the techniques that the Ordinals art ecosystem now treats as standard:
- Recursive inscriptions. OCM Dimensions pioneered the use of recursion to share code on Bitcoin — one inscription calling code from another at render time. Compressed Three.js, p5.js, and fflate were inscribed once and reused across artworks, dramatically reducing per-piece cost and enabling rich visuals on a heavily constrained substrate.
- Parent-child provenance. A parent inscription defines the collection; child inscriptions define individual works. Membership and authenticity are verifiable at the protocol level, without trusting an indexer or marketplace.
- High-resolution, fully on-chain generative art. Each OCM Dimension is a real-time rendered 3D animation under ~1 KB. The collection demonstrated that complex, interactive, high-resolution art could live entirely on Bitcoin.
- On-chain random reveal post-mint. The first random reveal mechanism on Bitcoin that runs after artifacts are immutably inscribed — originally thought impossible.
- Bitcoin-native mint. Non-custodial, no extra fees from the minter, no front-running, no rush.
- Historic satoshis. The first 300 OCM Dimensions are inscribed on consecutive sats from block 78 (early January 2009 — the third day of Bitcoin), embedding the work directly into Bitcoin's earliest history.
Two years on, OCM Dimensions is one of the most-linked inscriptions on Bitcoin. The on-chain libraries it inscribed are still actively used by other artists, and the project has grown from a seed into a forest — thousands of works by numerous creators that all recurse back into the same shared on-chain code. Many are still waiting to be discovered.
What started as "an experiment in whether complex art is even possible on Bitcoin" became a foundation that the medium continues to build on.
- On Visual Reproducibility in Virtualizable Public-Chain Art Systems (April 27, 2026) — A conditional impossibility result for visual scarcity. See
papers/for the abstract and citation.
OCM is a multi-chain family of collections. The original 10k collection (Genesis) launched on Ethereum in 2021 and migrated to Bitcoin Ordinals via teleburn starting November 2023.
| Collection | What it is | Buy / view |
|---|---|---|
| OCM Genesis | The flagship 10k PFP — first 10k Ordinals collection on Bitcoin, pioneering Parent-Child Provenance, Recursion, and Reinscription. Each Genesis is teleburned from Ethereum and arrives as four inscriptions: Perspectives, 20219, Deconstructed, and a Certificate of Ownership. | Osura |
| OCM Dimensions | High-resolution 3D generative art rendered live from on-chain code. Inscribed February 2023 on satoshis from Bitcoin block 78 (January 2009). Pioneered recursive inscriptions (Three.js + p5.js + fflate) and on-chain random reveal. | Osura |
| OCM Katoshi Classic | Hand-drawn collection bringing the original OCM Genesis artwork to life with Web3-lore and pop-culture traits. | Osura |
| OCM Katoshi Prime | The most complex evolution of the Katoshi handcrafted artwork — dozens of layers, breaking traditional NFT artwork norms. | Osura |
| OCM Celestials | The rarest 1-of-1 art in the Katoshi family — fully on-chain, hand-crafted. | Osura |
| Collection | What it is | Buy / view |
|---|---|---|
| OCM Genesis (ETH) | The original 10k fully on-chain SVG collection from September 2021. Can be teleburned to upgrade to the Bitcoin OCM Genesis. | OpenSea |
| OCM Dessert | Free airdrop to Genesis holders. A Genesis "eats" its Dessert to mint a Karma — D1 → Karma1, D2 → Karma2. | OpenSea |
| OCM Karma | Created by burning a Dessert with a Genesis. Genesis + Dessert → Karma. | OpenSea |
- metagood/OCM-Dimensions — Open-source tooling for inscribing recursive Bitcoin Ordinals art using Three.js, p5.js, and fflate. Production-proven by OCM Dimensions; includes the on-chain Studio (a browser-based IDE inscribed on Bitcoin), build CLI, size calculator, and 149 tests.
- metagood/OnChainMonkeyData — Reference data for OCM Genesis (ETH): trait CSVs, meta-traits in multiple formats, raw SVG assets, and a PNG CDN.
| Resource | What's there |
|---|---|
| onchainmonkey.com | Main site — collections, story, holder portal |
| OCM News | Press, announcements, milestones |
| Bitcoin Magazine — The Rise of Ordinals | Founding thesis on why NFTs belong on Bitcoin |
| Stanford Blockchain Review #38 | Reimagining Bitcoin NFTs |
- Twitter / X: @onchainmonkey
- Discord: discord.gg/ocm
- Instagram: @onchainmonkey
- YouTube: @onchainmonkey
- LinkedIn: OnChainMonkey
OCM ships its own Bitcoin Ordinals marketplace, Osura, built by Metagood. The Ethereum collections (Genesis, Dessert, Karma) are listed on OpenSea.