Alfred Presents · Artist Showcase The Currency (2021) — DAMIEN HIRST

DAMIEN HIRST

conceptual, painting · PALM + Ethereum · x.com/hirst_official

In 2021, Hirst made 10,000 hand-painted spot works and gave collectors a single choice: keep the NFT, or burn it for the physical painting. 5,149 chose the painting. 4,851 chose to stay digital. The question was the artwork.

—
The Currency, total minted
10,000
The Currency, digital survivors
4,851
The Beautiful Paintings, works
399
The Beautiful Paintings, floor
6.9 Ξ
The Beautiful Paintings, volume
20.16 Ξ
On-chain since
2021
Supply and burn/keep split for The Currency (10,000; 4,851 digital / 5,149 physical) are published facts from HENI, as of the July 2022 burn deadline. The Currency is on PALM and not reliably indexed by OpenSea — no floor or volume from this source. The Beautiful Paintings reads from OpenSea (Ethereum, contract 0x6b893a18b60e7ad13e9e9e77e4b4c58ad23b6e17): floor 6.9 Ξ, 20.16 Ξ all-time volume, 37 sales, 331 owners — read 2026-08-22.
Track Damien Hirst in Alfred
The Beautiful Paintings floor and sales, live — The Currency awaits OpenSea PALM indexing.
The work · 2021 – 2023

Physical or digital: collectors decided which mattered more

2021The Currency
Burn for the painting, or hold the NFT

The Currency

“Hirst's 2021 project 'The Currency' asking collectors to choose between the traditional medium of painting and the contemporary NFT, forcing them to put faith in where they see value.”

— HENI Artists biography, heni.com/artists/damien-hirst, accessed 2026-08-18
10,000 works minted4,851 digital survivors5,149 burned for physical
2023The Beautiful Paintings
Generative spin paintings, the algorithm on-chain

The Beautiful Paintings

“Hirst's 2023 generative spin paintings — collectors choose colour, style, shape and title; the p5.js algorithm is stored on-chain.”

— OpenSea collection description, HENI
399 works6.9 Ξ floor20.16 Ξ volume
OpenSea

He spent thirty years asking what makes art valuable — through pickled sharks, spot paintings, and diamond skulls. Then he made the question literal: 10,000 identical works, each collector forced to choose between the physical and the digital, knowing one would be destroyed.

One artist on this page. 46 collections in the median wallet we look at.

Every figure above comes from Alfred’s own dataset — sales, volume and owners read off the chain, floors from the marketplaces. On a wallet he goes one step further, to the number that gets buried under a decade of transfers: what you actually paid.

In the wallets we look at, nearly half of what people hold has no purchase price to look up. It arrived as a mint, a swap or a transfer.

Alfred follows each one back through the chain.

Both figures come from one reading: 16 wallets, 3,548 items, Sep 2026.

See what your collection cost you
Read-only by design — no wallet connection, no keys, no transactions. Ever.