Billy Restey is a creative director and 3D artist who creates “abstract conceptual art using motion and figurative visual elements”.Most of his work is inscribed onto the Bitcoin blockchain via the Ordinals protocol, and repeatedly returns to recursion, generative algorithms, and the pull between permanence and impermanence.
Based in Seattle, he picked up a film camera in 1993, attended art school in 2007, and founded the animation studio DYSTNCT in 2012.,He began inscribing on Bitcoin in 2023, starting with ordinal shards in February, followed by Cypherglyphs in March and Metablocks in July. That December he released BitBlocks, a recursive HTML art collection.In January 2024 he wrote a guest guide on overlooked Bitcoin Ordinal PFP projects.In May 2024 Semipermanent was featured in Sotheby's exhibition “Natively Digital: Art on Bitcoin”, and his Obsidian Zero later set an auction record for the artist at 22,860 USD at Sotheby's New York.,That June he released Voxels, generative gradients drawn from inscription IDs, and in July he and painter Gabriel Weis launched Fusion, an experimental collection using recursive fractions of Weis's paintings combined with Restey's code.,His work made its Sotheby's auction debut that October, and WIRED featured him the following month in a piece on the hunt for rare Bitcoin.
In January 2025 he released SUPERCYCLE, a recursive pixel animation, and that May followed it with Recursion, which reimagines Cubism through generative art on Bitcoin, drawing on inscription data from early Ordinals as digital brushstrokes inspired by the Picasso Museum in Paris.,That year he spoke at “NFT Paris” on generative art and at “Bitcoin Vegas” on scarcity and constraints, and from 2023 to 2025 he spoke on art on Bitcoin as part of “Inscribing Atlantis”.At Bitcoin Vegas in 2025 he remarked that “Bitcoin used to be cool, culture is definitely shifting”, adding, “We're losing the edginess. Glad we have Ordinals.”
