Larvalabs

Biography

Larva Labs is a software development studio founded by programmers Matt Hall and John Watkinson, who met as computer science students in the 1990s. The pair began their careers writing early mobile applications, including apps for the T-Mobile Sidekick, before eventually publishing more than twenty mobile applications and shifting their creative attention toward blockchain technology. In 2017, Larva Labs created CryptoPunks, a series of 10,000 uniquely generated 24-by-24 pixel character icons stored on the Ethereum blockchain, which became one of the founding projects of the NFT movement and helped establish digital collectibles as a legitimate category of contemporary art. That same period saw the release of Autoglyphs, among the very first examples of fully on-chain generative art, drawing conceptual inspiration from Sol LeWitt's rule-based wall drawings and translating similar ideas of randomly determined lines and geometric form into blockchain-native code. Larva Labs later expanded its practice with additional generative projects including Meebits, Protoglyph, Voxelglyph, and Quine, continuing to explore the intersection of software engineering and generative aesthetics. In March 2022, the studio sold the intellectual property rights to CryptoPunks and Meebits to Yuga Labs, though Hall and Watkinson have continued to create new work independently under the Larva Labs name. Widely regarded as pioneers of blockchain art, the duo remain influential figures whose early experiments helped shape the technical and cultural foundations of the NFT art world.