Exploring Tezos’ Growing Influence on the Global Digital Art Industry

One look at the industry and it becomes obvious that the underlying dynamics pervading the crypto art market have shifted dramatically since the 2021 NFT frenzy, as highlighted by the growing number of established art institutions beginning to embrace the Web3 ecosystem. For instance, late last year, two digital artworks on Tezos were auctioned by Sotheby’s during their “Digital Art Day” sale. 

Similarly, earlier in June 2025, Tezos-based NFT platform World of Women (WoW), known for championing female representation and inclusivity across the Web3 market , named Vi Powils (formerly with digital art ecosystem Pudgy Penguins), as its new CEO. 

A Web3 driven art and culture movement

Over the last couple of years, Tezos has made an indelible mark on the art world, forging a number of Institutional partnerships along the way. In mid-2024 New York’s Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI) teamed up with the Tezos Foundation so that museum visitors could claim free NFT “fragments” of digital artwork projected on the lobby screen. 

The program — billed as a preview of “the future” — served as an experiment showing how an established museum could engage the public using blockchain-based innovations. Furthermore, during Miami Art Week 2024, Tezos community groups and sponsors hosted six days of programming across five venues in Miami’s art district, further solidifying the company’s reputation as the blockchain of choice for digital art and creative expression. 

In Europe too, leading Tezos marketplace Objkt.com curated a booth at Paris Photo 2024 featuring the work of digital artist Lorna Mills while behind the scenes, the Tezos Foundation announced a “Paintboxed: Tezos World Tour” with the Art Meta group hosting a series of workshops teaching classic computer-generated art techniques to the next generation of creators, culminating in an exhibition at Art Basel 2025.

Empowering the art world 

Central to Tezos’ rise has been Objkt.com, a digital art platform, which as per on-chain analytics, accounted for roughly one-third of Tezos’ entire NFT centric activity. In fact, by Q1 2025 its market share had climbed to about 40% (registering 2,800 active users per week), with other marketplaces like fxHash, Teia and Tezos-native versions of OpenSea not even coming close to matching its total volume.

Unique addresses interacting with Objkt (source: Messari)

On the creator side, new platforms have gone live, with March 2025 witnessing the debut of InfiniteInk, a kind of “launchpad” for art contracts letting creators deploy custom NFT smart contracts on Tezos without needing deep coding skills. Simply put, the goal is to empower artists to issue limited editions, auctions, and interactive projects on-chain while offloading any technical complexities to the platform itself. 

Lastly, generative and experimental art too have flourished alongside these tools. For example, the Tezos-based EditArt collective ran a #Genuary campaign earlier this year, during which 20 artists minted over 10,000 generative artworks on Tezos. Not only that, recently electronic musician Agoria partnered with InfiniteInk to create a generative audio-visual NFT project, one edition of which sold for 8,500 XTZ – the highest Tezos NFT sale to date in the music category. 

Art is going on-chain for a reason

From the outside looking in, there are several factors as to why creators are flocking to Tezos. Firstly, its transaction fees are tiny (often just a few cents or less per mint), making it cost-effective to produce large editions or interactive pieces. Furthermore, unlike many high-profile proof-of-work (PoW) chains, Tezos can scale without driving up emissions — an aspect that seems to deeply resonate with environmentally conscious artists and collectors. 

And, while the broader NFT market has generally cooled since its peak from a few years ago, the Tezos art scene has continued to expand (with artists, collectors and cultural organizations increasingly taking notice).