In December 2025, New York's MoMA added 8 CryptoPunks and 8 Chromie Squiggles to its permanent collection. Alongside Centre Pompidou's earlier acquisitions, it marks a definitive shift in how major institutions view on-chain art.
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London — In late December 2025, the Museum of Modern Art in New York quietly announced that it had added 16 on-chain works to its permanent collection: eight CryptoPunks and eight Chromie Squiggles. The works were donated rather than purchased, through a coordinated effort involving Larva Labs founders Matt Hall and John Watkinson, alongside a group of prominent collectors including SquiggleDAO, gmoneyNFT, and the Cozomo de' Medici Collection.
They'll sit in MoMA's Media and Performance department — the same department that holds video art, experimental technology, and other new media works. Alongside a CryptoPunk donated to France's Centre Pompidou, which had made the first institutional NFT acquisitions back in 2023, MoMA's announcement represents something that has been building for years but still landed with symbolic weight: the world's most respected institutions of modern art have decided that on-chain works belong in their permanent collections.
The specific CryptoPunks entering MoMA's collection are #74, #2786, #3407, #4018, #5160, #5616, #7178, and #7899. The Chromie Squiggles came from five donors, several anonymous. CryptoPunks were originally generated by Larva Labs in 2017 — 10,000 algorithmically assembled pixel portraits, released free to anyone with an Ethereum wallet. They predate the ERC-721 standard that defines most modern NFTs, making them something like the archaeological record of the medium.
MoMA housing CryptoPunks isn't an endorsement of the NFT market as a speculative vehicle. It's an art-historical claim: these objects were the origin point of a significant movement in digital art and ownership, and they belong in the permanent record alongside video art from the 1970s or digital prints from the 1990s.
The addition to MoMA's collection follows the institution's earlier acquisition of Refik Anadol's "Unsupervised — Machine Hallucinations" and Ian Cheng's "3FACE" — both involving on-chain components. The Media and Performance department has been quietly building an on-chain art collection for several years, and the CryptoPunks acquisition brings the programme firmly into public view.
France's Centre Pompidou was the first major institution dedicated to modern and contemporary art to acquire NFTs at scale. In early 2023, eighteen projects by thirteen artists — including CryptoPunk #110 donated by Larva Labs, and works by artists including aaajiao, Émilie Brout and Maxime Marion — entered the collection. The Pompidou's acquisitions were notable for their breadth: rather than buying the most commercially prominent NFT works, the institution assembled a curatorial narrative that included early experiments in blockchain-based art alongside the high-profile Larva Labs work.
Together, MoMA and the Pompidou have set a precedent that other institutions are beginning to follow. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Guggenheim have both made on-chain art acquisitions. The British art world — historically influential in contemporary art globally — has been more cautious.
The UK's major institutions have not yet made the kind of acquisitions MoMA and the Pompidou have. The Tate Modern, the V&A, and the National Portrait Gallery have engaged with blockchain art through exhibitions and partnerships, but permanent acquisitions of on-chain works at institutional scale haven't been confirmed publicly.
This may change. The FCA's incoming crypto regulation framework doesn't directly affect institutions acquiring art, but the broader legitimisation of cryptoassets in UK financial and cultural life reduces the institutional reputational risk of collecting on-chain works. When a MoMA acquisition validates a medium, UK institutions that have been watching cautiously tend to become more willing to move.
For UK collectors and galleries, MoMA's acquisition is a different kind of signal than a price chart. It's not a claim about where CryptoPunk prices will go. It's a statement about what kind of object a CryptoPunk is — and where it sits in the history of art.
Major museum acquisitions historically increase both the prestige and the long-term value of the works in a movement — though the path from acquisition to secondary market premium is rarely direct or quick. The 2023 Centre Pompidou acquisitions didn't immediately cause a CryptoPunks price surge. But they contributed to a narrative of institutional legitimacy that persists regardless of NFT market sentiment.
For UK collectors holding CryptoPunks, Chromie Squiggles, or other early on-chain art works: the MoMA acquisition is the kind of thing that tends to matter over a decade rather than a quarter. Cultural institutions acquire works into their permanent collections for the long term, and the works they choose to keep tell you something about what the art historical consensus will eventually say about a medium.
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