Snowfro (b. 1981) founded Art Blocks in November 2020, the platform that brought fully on-chain, on-demand generative art to Ethereum, launching it with his own project Chromie Squiggle, a collection of 10,000 procedurally generated rainbow lines minted one at a time from each collector's transaction hash.,Born Erick Calderon in Mexico City, he lives and works in Houston, Texas.
Before turning to blockchain art, Calderon ran the ceramic tile business La Nova Tile in Houston, after earlier experiments with 3D-printed sculptures, programmable LED bracelets, and projection mapping at live concerts.,His online alias comes from a snow cone stand he ran as a student at the University of Texas.,He became an early collector of Larva Labs's CryptoPunks in 2017, claiming more than 30 Punks including 34 of the collection's 88 Zombie Punks, and moderated the project's Discord from 2017 to 2020.,In 2020 he sold five of his Zombie Punks and used the proceeds to help fund the development of Art Blocks.He has named James Turrell as his favorite contemporary artist, and cites Dan Flavin and Donald Judd's use of light, color and minimalist form among the influences on his generative work.,
Chromie Squiggle became Art Blocks' logo and visual identity, and the price of a single squiggle rose from tens of dollars at mint to tens of thousands, with the rarest editions selling for millions.,In 2021 Calderon began talks with Pace gallery president Marc Glimcher that led to a partnership between Art Blocks and Pace Verso, the gallery's newly launched digital arm.In 2023 he donated ten unminted Squiggles to a charity auction that raised 149 ETH for the ALS Association, in tribute to Bitcoin pioneer Hal Finney, who died of the disease.In December 2025 the Museum of Modern Art acquired a complete set of all eight types of Chromie Squiggle, donated by Calderon together with a group of collectors.
In 2025 Calderon released LIFT (a self portrait) on Art Blocks, an on-chain Game Boy Advance-style game built with the help of AI coding tools that requires players to return daily for up to ninety days. The game is built around Pixel Man, a self-portrait character he had been drawing since around 2013.That year he had his first major US museum exhibition when the Toledo Museum of Art included his work in the survey “Infinite Images: The Art of Algorithms”.Rice University's Moody Center for the Arts holds a Chromie Squiggle commissioned for its engineering building in 2023.
