Damien Hirst - The Currency

The Currency is 10,000 small spot paintings by Damien Hirst, each on a sheet of handmade paper about the size of A4. Spots of enamel paint fill every sheet, and Artnet reported that no two dots share a color. Each work is titled, numbered and signed on the back, and all but two are dated 2016. A machine learning model wrote the titles from a database of his favorite song lyrics. Like a banknote, every sheet carries security marks: a hologram with his portrait, a microdot, watermarks and a stamp.

HENI released the works in July 2021 as NFTs on Palm, a sidechain linked to Ethereum, at $2,000 each. More than 32,000 people applied in a week, and a raffle picked the buyers. Hirst kept 1,000 for himself. Each NFT stood for one paper work, and its owner had a year to decide which to keep. The other would be destroyed. When the window closed in July 2022, the paper had been chosen for 5,149 works and the NFT for 4,851, Hirst's own 1,000 among them. Those NFTs were minted on Palm, which HENI says has a two-way bridge to Ethereum. In October 2026, 2,170 were on Ethereum. The images live off-chain.

That autumn, Newport Street Gallery in London showed all 10,000 sheets, and the paper behind every kept NFT was burned in the gallery, starting with Hirst's own 1,000 in October. He joked that it was "a bit like the reverse of signing." Collectors prize short titles, and a single word, such as Revocation, is among the rarest. In 2024 the Guardian reported that at least 1,000 sheets dated 2016 were painted in 2018 and 2019. Hirst's lawyers did not dispute it and said he dates the works of a conceptual project to the year he conceived it.