Pascal Boyart, known as PBOY, is a Paris-based street artist who paints large-scale frescoes that reinterpret classical paintings with contemporary and Bitcoin-related themes.,Passionate about drawing since childhood, Boyart became the first mural painter to turn street art into NFTs, starting in 2019.Several of Boyart's murals conceal Bitcoin puzzles or donation systems, blending street art with cryptocurrency culture.,,
In 2017, Boyart painted Daddy, What is Money? in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, a pointillist portrait of a child questioning his father about money, adding an early Bitcoin donation QR code to the mural.When it was minted as an NFT in 2019, it became the first tokenized street art mural.,In January 2019, over five days on Rue d'Aubervilliers in Paris, Boyart painted Liberty Leading the People 2019, reinterpreting Eugène Delacroix's 1830 painting by adding gas masks and yellow vests to its rioters in reference to France's Yellow Vests protests. The mural concealed a Bitcoin puzzle worth 0.28 BTC marking the tenth anniversary of Bitcoin's genesis block, before the Paris police prefecture painted over the fresco a month later.
During the 2020 Covid lockdowns, Boyart spent five months painting The Underground Sistine Chapel, an 8-meter-high, 100-square-meter reinterpretation of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling, in a former gold foundry in Ivry-sur-Seine near Paris.,The project was funded through crypto patronage as NFT presales, and Boyart later minted a companion collection of 400 1/1 NFTs, one for each figure in the fresco's Last Judgment scene.,Because the foundry is slated for demolition, the mural is expected to disappear, leaving the NFTs as its lasting record.The project was documented in a film of the same name produced by Samouraï Coop and received international media coverage from outlets including the Straits Times and AFP.,
In 2022, Boyart began Dollars Assange, an NFT collection tied to journalist Julian Assange's imprisonment, based on an original March 2021 canvas made from torn US dollar bills. A new NFT was minted for every day Assange remained in prison, from April 2019 until his release in June 2024, for a total of 1,901 pieces, with royalties donated to his legal defense.Boyart also produced Lady with Pomeranian that June, an oil painting linked to an NFT collection built around a solvable puzzle.In The Three Graces 2022 (April 2022, minted as a 1/1 NFT that November), Boyart reinterpreted the Three Graces nude and holding surgical masks, evoking the Covid-19 pandemic.In 2023, Boyart released The Censored Venus, a new work timed to that year's EthCC conference in Paris.,
