Three European Artists on the Changing Meaning of Money

The city of Amsterdam, a birthplace of modern financial systems, also fostered some of the first artistic critiques of finance. Following the bursting of speculative bubbles across Europe in 1720, local printers and satirists created The Great Mirror of Folly, a series of engravings and theatrical works that laid bare the excesses of financial gambling.

Almost 300 years on, Amsterdam became the stage for a different monetary experiment. In the 1980s, cryptographer David Chaum, a pioneer in anonymous communication who helped create the ideological bedrock for the cypherpunk movement, joined CWI, the Dutch national research institute for math and computer science. Around 1990, Chaum established DigiCash, a firm aimed at creating private digital currency. DigiCash filed for bankruptcy in 1998, predating bitcoin by about a decade, yet it demonstrated that the vision for digital cash was already forming.

At Bitcoin Amsterdam last year, BMAG displayed The Waterworks of Money, a work by Dutch artist Carlijn Kingma, created with journalist Thomas Bollen and researcher Martijn Jeroen van der Linden. It portrayed the financial system as an enormous irrigation network, where some regions overflow with liquidity and others stay parched. The piece translates an intricate monetary framework into something understandable, revealing how money is generated, spread, and consolidated.

This legacy of scrutinizing money and surfacing its unseen sides continues with three European artists showcasing work at Bitcoin Amsterdam this November. ZETRA, RYR, and Cypherpunk Now take inspiration from graffiti, political printmaking, hacker culture, and early bitcoin communities to investigate how the significance of money is evolving.

Martin Fischer became a member of the Prague art collective Ztohoven in 2003, a group infamous for superimposing a fictional nuclear blast onto a live Czech Television broadcast. By 2014, the collective had launched Paralelní Polis, a hackerspace featuring a café that solely dealt in bitcoin, with Fischer behind its logo design. In a 2020 interview with Bitcoin Magazine's Aaron van Wirdum, Fischer recounted that acquiring a screen-printing press the year after spurred him to create his initial prints. Operating as Cypherpunk Now since 2020, he has been building a visual chronicle of bitcoin's shifting culture.

Both RYR and ZETRA come from Germany's graffiti scene, yet they tackle the theme of money in distinct ways. RYR turns currency into his medium, crafting paper from destroyed banknotes, pigment from their burnt remains, and concrete grenades packed with shredded cash, which he calls "artifacts from the future." ZETRA, who started painting in the early 1990s and encountered bitcoin in 2017, looks at what currency can purchase. His TOMATOSOUP paintings reimagine Andy Warhol's famous Campbell's Soup Cans, tracking how prices have moved in both dollars and bitcoin. Meanwhile, THE BIP39 SERIES delves into the 2,048 words forming bitcoin wallet recovery phrases, and includes 1206/NOTE, made in collaboration with Polymerbit.

Bitcoin has influenced what these artists create, how they earn a living, and the communities they are part of. The cryptocurrency's expanding adoption by banks, investment funds, and large companies has also raised tough questions regarding the movement's founding principles and the future direction of its culture.

BMAG: Warhol made Campbell's soup a symbol of consumer culture, lifting a common supermarket item into the realm of high art. Your TOMATOSOUP series goes back to that image, adding an element that Warhol mostly omitted: the fluctuating value of money. What sparked the concept of redoing Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans, and does the inflation critique register with viewers right away?

ZETRA: I often see iPhones and houses displayed on bitcoin Twitter, illustrating how they get cheaper measured in BTC. I imagined it would be interesting to pick something from art history, something more aesthetically pleasing, such as Warhol's classic soup can label. For my TOMATOSOUP work, I attached real stickers to the can to indicate how much soup has risen in price in USD over the years, set against the lower prices we may anticipate in BTC in the coming decades. Bitcoin enthusiasts who see TOMATOSOUP typically grasp it right away, recognizing they are better off as fiat money's purchasing power dwindles through inflation. Others typically require some clarification, which I am glad to provide.

BMAG: For THE BIP39 SERIES, you take the 2,048 words that make up bitcoin wallet recovery seed phrases and turn common words into art, giving them added weight for bitcoin owners. Can you break down the various sources of inspiration for this series and what it shows about bitcoin, language, and who controls money, for readers who are new to these ideas?

ZETRA: Any bitcoin user moving their sats into cold storage comes across 12 or 24 of these meaningful words, usually quite early on. There are exactly 2,048 words in a deliberately selected list that represents the power of self-custody. I began working through the words one after another, thinking about how each one could be represented physically: the main image for the word, its associated number, the style, and the medium. The possibilities for translating these words into bitcoin art seem endless. Kicking off THE BIP39 SERIES with 1044/LIST was an obvious pick. It presents all 2,048 words in a list format. Growing up in the 80s, the second piece had to be 1638/SMILE: a bright yellow smiley, with 1638 where the eyes go. It is a fine art print on Alu-Dibond under a 6 mm acrylic glass cover. Very clean. Another part of the series is 0388/CORN, which is another clear nod to Warhol. THE BIP39 SERIES is going to be a long-term endeavor for years ahead.

BMAG: You destroy banknotes to make paper and burn them to create pigment. Artists have always tampered with currency to challenge where its value lies, but your method makes ruin part of the making. Is it contradictory to wreck money in order to produce an artwork that could eventually become far more valuable?

RYR: Currency operates as a narrative system, held up by collective trust and compliance. It has functioned for centuries because society jointly believes in the tale it conveys and the worth it stands for. I have always been captivated by that notion, especially how a simple banknote can hold so much significance, authority, and assumed value. I sought a distinct method to communicate that narrative, both conceptually and materially. In 2017, I was considering an exhibition titled To Cut a Long Story Short. The playfulness of it appealed to me, particularly regarding money and the narratives we connect to it. Reducing banknotes to shreds became a very direct interpretation of that phrase, and it unlocked an entirely fresh creative medium for me. I am not merely erasing money. I am taking an existing narrative, shredding it, and reassembling those fragments to tell something new.

BMAG: Your concrete pieces look like artifacts from a time when the battles over fiat currency are over. But bitcoin is more and more held via the same banks and institutions it was built to bypass. Does this mean the movement has won, or has the system just swallowed the alternative?

RYR: That is exactly what makes this narrative so compelling. When I was making the concrete weapons, I pictured a future where the old financial system had already waged its fight to survive. The weapons turned into fossils, archaeological relics from a monetary war that people in later times might find hard to comprehend. My concrete pieces symbolize a future where that war is behind us. Whether bitcoin eventually triumphs or gets absorbed into the very system it opposed is still an open question.

BMAG: Your pieces are mostly constructed from the physical leftovers of cash, even as money itself becomes more digital and abstract. Are people losing something crucial in their grasp of money as it fades from physical use?

RYR: We are probably losing a physical bond with money, but not necessarily a grasp of what it is. Money was always a story based on collective faith, whether it came as paper or as numbers on a display. What draws me is how an abstract concept like value can be embodied in a physical item. I don't hold that art must be purely genuine or completely novel. Nearly everything has been attempted already. For me, art is a deeply human, almost ordinary method of voicing an opinion and giving thoughts a tangible form. Bitcoin will likely mature into a larger and more heavily regulated financial instrument, but I wish for its grassroots ethos and artistic character to stay clear. That is what my fellow artists and I will keep contributing to, upholding the essence of a movement that was cultural well before it turned institutional.

BMAG: Paralelní Polis was more than a hub for debating other monetary systems or a gathering space for hackers; its café was an early adopter of bitcoin as actual currency. What was the atmosphere like in the early days of Paralelní Polis, and how has it been for you to sell your art for bitcoin?

Martin Fischer: Paralelní Polis started up in 2014, right during a bear market. The amusing part is, none of us starting it had any idea what a bear market was. We didn't view bitcoin as a way to become wealthy. We considered it uncensorable currency and recognized the transformations it could bring to society. There was zero speculation, which is exactly what made those initial days so fantastic. I sold my first screen-print for bitcoin in 2017, almost ten years ago, and plenty more after that. But virtually every transaction was about staying afloat. I reinvested most of the bitcoin I made into funding my next undertakings and keeping my art alive. I never built up a big bitcoin stash, but in hindsight, it offered me something much more important than financial gains: the chance to stay an independent artist.

BMAG: There's a deep European tradition of political printmaking, stretching from Amsterdam's 18th-century financial satires to 20th-century protest posters. You came out of Ztohoven, the collective that hacked a live TV feed to air a fake nuclear detonation—a brazen intervention. Ztohoven tweaked authority through disruption, whereas bitcoin offers an alternative through game theory and economic rewards. Do you view bitcoin as carrying on that same interventionist spirit, and your prints as an outgrowth of it?

Martin Fischer: I do see a link, though I would not call them identical. With Ztohoven, we employed art to question power, push back against institutions, and reveal how simply reality can be twisted. Bitcoin does not have to issue a statement or provoke anybody. It simply presents an option that operates without anyone's approval. To me, that is a much more compelling form of disruption. However, these days bitcoin is so corporate and so closely tied up with conventional banking that viewing it as an anti-establishment force is difficult. I consider this a natural outcome of its achievement, rather than a sellout of its initial ideals. That does not imply I am happy with the direction things are heading. The strange part is that bitcoin's core ideas have not really shifted, but how people see and utilize it certainly has. As for my screen-prints, I continue to work from the original concept of detaching money from the state, meanwhile investigating the myths, memes, and legends of the bitcoin era. That is the part I love the most.

BMAG: Your Amsterdam show gathers over ten years of work that traces bitcoin's shift from a fringe movement into a more corporate financial system. When you look over these prints now, has the movement evolved more than you anticipated, or has your own outlook shifted? And which pieces stand out as your favorites?

Martin Fischer: I enjoy thinking back to the early times, when we were all in the same camp and our main adversary was Faketoshi. Now? We have internal conflicts over JPEGs, Ordinals, BIPs, OP_RETURN, debates about what is spam and what belongs on bitcoin. What disappoints me most is that people who previously stood together against censorship and for liberty now put huge amounts of effort into arguing with each other over what others ought or ought not to be allowed to do with bitcoin. Maybe this is a natural outcome of bitcoin's success. The bitcoin community has transformed considerably, and so has my viewpoint. I am substantially more doubtful now that technology by itself can inherently improve society. Regarding my preferred pieces, Bitcoin Meteorite is certainly one. In that work, I adapted the meme of banking dinosaurs witnessing their own end, inserting the abstract from the Bitcoin white paper. It earned me a moment of recognition when Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert highlighted it. Another is Cypherpunks of the World. This piece matters to me both for honoring the cypherpunks and their heritage, and for its intricacy. It began as a set of original collages, progressed into handmade screen-prints, and later turned into animated NFTs and a virtual gallery. It stands as one of my most complex projects, linking various methods and media while staying faithful to the initial concept. Among my newer pieces, I am quite fond of Out of Order from 2023. It is a highly detailed screen-print, notable as the first one where I successfully made zero printing errors. That alone makes it significant to me. I also admire St. Satosius Contra Draconem (2025), which draws from the traditional image of Saint George slaying the dragon, reinterpreted through bitcoin myth.

ZETRA, RYR, and Cypherpunk Now, along with other European artists, will feature their works at Bitcoin Amsterdam from November 4 to 6, 2026, under the Bitcoin Museum & Art Gallery (BMAG) program.