from chat to chain

This project delves into a unique concept: how pinned messages in a group chat can serve as digital artifacts, embodying a group’s shared culture and lore. Over several months, these artifacts—pinned messages—were collected from ongoing discussions between eight friends in a Telegram chat.

We're taking these artifacts from chat to chain.

At the heart of this project are two key questions: How can we use blockchain technology to create and preserve the cultural artifacts of a group that has existed entirely online? And how might we experiment with blockchain as a new medium for storytelling?

This experiment transforms ephemeral group chat moments into enduring cultural artifacts that, when curated as a collection, tell a broader on-chain story.

Treating these pinned messages as a form of digital archaeology, this project commoditizes organic artifacts that encapsulate the unique culture, history, and lore of our group chat. Stripped of context and anonymized, these fragments represent a mosaic of our digital footprint, capturing the zeitgeist and culture of our group at a specific moment in time.

This project goes beyond memory preservation, crystallizing our group's culture into immutable, on-chain artifacts that will endure indefinitely.

Ultimately, this project explores how our everyday digital interactions evolve into a form of lore—unwritten rules, shared language, and common reference points that define our online communities.