Xer0x is an anonymous artist working with glitch techniques, painting, 1-bit pixel art, and retro hue-cycle imagery, with a practice inseparable from a sustained critique of crypto culture's financialisation, echo chambers, and dependence on the social media platform X as both an archive and an arena. His name plays on copy culture and open-source licensing, and also reads as a deliberate reframing of XCOPY.
Xer0x has a background in graffiti and has described his practice as an attempt to translate the logic of vandalism into digital space, treating X as a public wall to intervene in. His genesis mint, Signal Vs. Noise, released on Hic et Nunc, uses a flickering, Morse-like title to invite the viewer to decode a message before revealing itself as sensory overload with no hidden structure. He has described the work as a minimalist troll that pairs a title suggesting depth with an aesthetic that induces near-seizure, calling it “fine art ideas with low-brow packaging”.
In 2022 Xer0x released Royalty under a CC0 license, encouraging the community to create derivatives from it. That March, artist Shilly Preston combined Royalty with Tyler Hobbs's Fidenza using AI to make Royal Fidenza, an edition of ten sold on objkt.com. After objkt.com suspended Preston over the unauthorized use of Hobbs's non-CC0 work, he was required to buy back and burn the editions he had sold, and Xer0x remains the holder of one of the few surviving originals.
Later that year, as the war in Ukraine unsettled global markets, Xer0x released Trust, the second work in a three-part series building on Royalty. Rather than selling the piece, he announced in a single tweet that he would give it for free to the twenty highest bidders and five underbidders, turning the sale into a game built entirely around trust. By the deadline, the cumulative value of the offers placed for the free piece reached about $250,000, and Xer0x distributed the works exactly as promised.
Xer0x also began using ChatGPT to help code p5.js sketches, a practice that later influenced fellow Tezos-based artist Santiago Márquez.He has been named as an influence by younger digital artists, including Underscore.
