PSEUDONYM
Generative portraits of Kusama and Polkadot accounts. A social experiment in on-chain identity.
2026 · Generative code · Kusama & Polkadot
What it is
PSEUDONYM turns the public activity of any Kusama or Polkadot account into a generative portrait. A wallet address is a pseudonym, not a mask: everything a portrait shows is already public on-chain. The work makes that record visible, so people can see what the chain has built about them and decide how they feel about it.
It began as a prototype I shared on X in June 2026 and has since been rebuilt as a working platform: enter any address, and its portrait is drawn.
From data to paint
Each portrait has two layers. The identity layer (colour, palette and layout) comes from the account's public key, so it stays the same on every network. The activity layer comes from each network's own history: transactions shape the surface detail and turbulence, staking sets the viscosity, votes open vortices, and the balance of sent and received sets the direction of the light.
Account data now lives across the Relay Chain, Asset Hub and the People chain, so PSEUDONYM reads all three. The same data always produces the same image, which makes every portrait verifiable.
Eight themes
Every portrait is painted in one of eight themes, from Mineral's turquoise and bronze to darker, deeper palettes. The theme changes the materials; the data underneath stays the same.
Reflection and the Identity Archive
After seeing their portrait, people answer four short reflection questions. Reflections join a public Identity Archive after review. Those from verified owners carry a verified mark, everyone chooses whether their portrait is shown or hidden, and anyone can ask for a reflection to be removed.
The platform reads only public data, stores nothing unless someone submits a reflection, and keeps no IP addresses or tracking data.
Process
Next: claim or veil
Owners will verify an account by connecting a wallet and signing a message: free, and nothing is written on-chain. A verified owner can then choose.
Claim: the portrait, as it stands that day, is minted on Kusama Asset Hub directly to the owner's wallet, with its date, network and data snapshot. Minting uses a pre-signed permission, so no one can mint someone else's portrait, and the owner pays only the network fee.
Veil: the portrait leaves the public archive, though anyone can still generate it from the public address. That tension, what people choose when they see an image of their own data, is the heart of the experiment.
Code will be released under MIT, and the artworks and documentation under CC BY.
Lineage
PSEUDONYM grows out of Inside Our Brains (2022), where real EEG recordings became images. Both start from data that already exists and turn it into something people can feel.