The closure of the trailblazing generative art platform fxhash on August 17, 2026, was long expected — all but one of its team had already been let go six months ago — yet it remains a heartbreaking moment in the history of digital art.

As an online space where anyone with a literacy for code could mint generative art, and anyone with an interest could buy it, fxhash preserved the vision of a more affordable, horizontal, and inclusive creator economy long after the NFT bust of 2022.

In an article on fxhash’s collectors, published in May 2022, Jason Bailey, co-founder of Right Click Save and ClubNFT, described the platform as “the organic antidote to the top-down, hypercommercialized NFT platforms dropping overpriced work by a small number of poorly curated artists.”

Launched in December 2021 by the software engineer Baptiste Crespy, better known by his artist name Ciphrd, fxhash was the ultimate social sculpture, allowing a new golden generation of creative coders a place to explore vast output spaces comprising many hundreds of variations. The fact that each of these outputs could also be transacted by way of the blockchain, following the precedent of Art Blocks, cemented the reality of a mass market for code-based generative art that had always been a marginal field.

Indeed, it was arguably the climate of playful competition between Art Blocks and fxhash — as well as their principal blockchains, Ethereum and Tezos — that elevated the status of software engineers all over the world to the level of fine artists. If that is to be the ultimate legacy of both platforms then they will have made a towering contribution to the history of art, expanding the canon to include creative practices, and communities of people, that had previously been excluded.

As the latest in a sad sequence of closures of Web3’s vital market infrastructure, however, the end of fxhash marks the end of an era of radical inclusivity that had been catalyzed by the crypto art movement and encapsulated in the short-lived digital art utopia of Hic Et Nunc. The reality of an alternative economy where digital artists from all over the world could make a living wage from their work while earning royalties from every resale, is now a distant memory. Instead, digital art’s assimilation by, and centralization within, new and reimagined museums and galleries continues apace, exemplified in the art-fair giant Art Basel’s Zero 10 initiative for art of the digital era.

As a publication that has always sought to uplift communities that are overlooked by the mainstream art world, Right Click Save shares much in common with the original ethos of fxhash, indeed we launched only a month after their platform opened. Though digital art would have doubtless thrived regardless, without the creative energy and inherent generosity of the fxhash community it would have been considerably impoverished.

Fxhash, we salute you and will continue to uphold the inclusive vision of generative art that you imagined.

— Alex Estorick, Founding Editor of Right Click Save

The Right Click Save Index is a knowledge bank drawn from across the magazine’s editorial coverage. It shows how people, artworks, events, organizations, and ideas connect in our archive of more than 440 articles.

Rather than a comprehensive biography or dictionary definition, each page surfaces the salient elements from our ecosystem. Readers can access the Index from the navigation bar of the website, through the Search window, and from in-article “cards” that link to Index entries, or direct to articles in the Magazine archive.

This week the Index is a source for the rich variety of articles on fxhash published by Right Click Save since early 2022. There is also a section devoted to some of these articles on our homepage.

Inclusivity is at the core of the Abandon Normal Devices Festival, a roving event in the north of England that we feature this week in the lead-up to its 2026 iteration in the market town of Barnsley, South Yorkshire. It was founded in 2009 by institutional partners, including the curatorial powerhouse FACT Liverpool, and receives a significant part of its annual funding from a government entity, Arts Council England (ACE). After the disruption of the global Covid-19 pandemic the festival, which features emerging local artists as well as established international names, is looking to return to a regular footing, with festivals every three years.

The search for continuous provision, of support and funding, is likewise a priority of Gaby Wijers, director of LI-MA, Amsterdam, a central node in the international network of entities focused on the study of presenting, and caring for, digital art.

Onassis ONX, the Onassis Foundation’s global platform for art and advanced technologies with studios and galleries in Athens and New York, has meanwhile launched ONX Relay with commissions awarded to three artists — Maya Man, Trevor Paglen, and Ben Frost — for museum-scale commissions, as well as long-term support in having these works presented at partner institutions around the world.

The long-term is also the focus of Peckham Digital, which is one of the organizing bodies of the upcoming inaugural Creative Intelligence festival at Southbank Centre, London, an event with a focus on sustainability, on favoring repeat showings of recent commissions rather than chasing only brand-new work for which the capital funding often does not exist.

For five years, the non-profit has provided free and affordable opportunities for thousands of people to engage with creative technology, from a base in southeast London. They have been turned down for ACE funding, and we share their crowdfunding appeal — to keep their offering free and open for all — in today’s newsletter.

Right Click Save’s Forum section is a discussion board for the digital art community. It has attracted posts and comments on a broad range of topics, not least on AI, its creative power and potential, as well as its perils.

The editor and curator Brian Droitcour has been running a Forum thread on revived interest in trading cards, and their aesthetics, in NFT art. This week, the film-maker Cody Lee Edison gave the discussion a new chronological resonance by pointing out that “This lineage can go back even further to Hal Finney writing about cryptographic trading cards in 1993”. You can follow the conversation here.

Bea Taylor Searle, co-founder of Peckham Digital, tells Right Click Save: “For five years, Peckham Digital has provided free and affordable opportunities for thousands of people to engage with creative technology. From workshops and talks to exhibitions and performances, we have created spaces where curiosity, creativity and experimentation can thrive.”

“This year, after three Arts Council rejections, we need our community's support to keep this space free and open for all. We are currently running a crowdfunding, the money raised will go towards all of our creative’s fees, venue and equipment hire.”