A First Step Into Blockchain Art
By Gordana Zikic · Part One of a series
Every so often a new territory opens up in the art world, and a familiar unease arrives with it. The vocabulary sounds technical, the entry point is unclear, and it is easy to assume the door was built for someone else — someone younger, more technical, already fluent. I felt exactly this for a long time, and put it off accordingly.
When I finally sat down with it, the setup took about twenty minutes, and most of what had intimidated me turned out to be vocabulary rather than difficulty. I now publish my own work on Tezos, and I write this as someone who came to it recently enough to still remember which parts were confusing.
Several of us now work on the Tezos blockchain, through two platforms in particular: Teia and objkt. No prior knowledge assumed here, only curiosity. What follows gives you enough context to feel oriented, then walks you step by step into your first setup. It costs almost nothing to begin. You can go as far as you like and stop wherever you wish.
Much of what follows I first learned from Ivana Ehrensvärd, who introduced me to objkt, then to Teia, and to the Tezos ecosystem as a whole — patiently giving the context that made everything else make sense. She has since shared that grounding with our wider community across two of our Sunday sessions. The practical route below is essentially hers. Ivana on objkt · Teia · Instagram · X
Part One — The Ideas, in Plain Language
Blockchain: a shared notebook no one can secretly edit
Picture a notebook that thousands of computers around the world each keep an identical copy of. Every time something happens — someone sends a coin, someone publishes a digital artwork — it is written into the notebook, and every copy updates at once. Because no single person holds the only version, no one can quietly erase a line, forge an entry, or rewrite history. There is no bank and no company in charge. The network itself agrees on what is true.
The Tezos blockchain, the one our community uses, is one of these shared notebooks. It is known for using very little energy compared with older blockchains, which is part of why artists working with ecological and social themes have gathered there.
NFT: a certificate of ownership for a digital thing
A digital image can be copied endlessly — that is simply how files behave. An NFT does not try to stop the copying. Instead, it is a line in the shared notebook that records: this particular artwork belongs to this particular person. Think of the signed certificate of authenticity that accompanies a print: the image may travel everywhere, but only one entry names who holds the original.
The letters stand for non-fungible token. "Non-fungible" simply means one of a kind, not interchangeable — unlike a one-euro coin, which is identical to every other euro coin and can be swapped for any of them without loss.
You will also see the word minting. To mint a work is simply to write it into the notebook for the first time — the moment a file becomes a registered artwork with an author and an owner.
Wallet: your ID card and your keychain
To do anything on a blockchain you need a wallet — a small app that holds your digital identity. It lets you sign in to art platforms, hold works, and later buy or sell if you choose. Creating the wallet itself costs nothing.
What costs a little is using it. Every action you take on the blockchain — publishing a work, listing it, sending it — carries a small network fee, called gas. On Tezos these are genuinely small, usually a fraction of a dollar. Your wallet starts empty, so before your first action you need a tiny amount of the network's currency (tez) to cover them. For artists doing this for the first time, Teia runs a project called Teia Fountain that sends a small amount — around a dollar and a half — to a new, empty wallet, enough to publish your first works without buying anything at all.
Seed phrase: the one thing to keep safe
When you set up a wallet, it gives you a list of random words, usually twelve or twenty-four. This is the only way to recover your wallet if you lose your phone or forget your password. Anyone who holds these words can open the wallet, so they are worth treating the way you would treat the only key to your studio.
The habit is simple: write the words on paper, by hand, and keep the paper somewhere safe. Do not type them into a website, send them in a message, or share them with anyone — no legitimate platform will ever ask you for them. That one habit is genuinely all the security most artists ever need.
Part Two — Two Platforms, One Blockchain
This is the point where most newcomers get confused, and it is worth understanding early, because it explains something true about blockchains in general.
Your artwork does not live on a platform. It lives on the blockchain. Platforms are windows onto it — different rooms with different atmospheres. objkt is simply the widest window: because it is the largest marketplace on Tezos, it gathers and shows work from across the whole ecosystem. So a piece you publish on Teia appears on objkt on its own, without you doing anything. It does not flow the other way — Teia shows work made through Teia, not everything on the chain — but the deeper point holds regardless: because your work lives on the blockchain and not inside any one company, no single platform can remove it or lock you out of it.
Teia: the community
Teia is built by artists, for artists. It grew out of an earlier platform and was rebuilt by its own community when that one closed — which tells you most of what you need to know about its character. It is governed collectively through a DAO (a decentralised autonomous organisation: essentially, decisions are made by member vote rather than by an owner), and it leans towards experimental, social and community-driven work. Prices tend to be modest and generous. It is, in feeling, closer to an artist-run space than a gallery.
Teia is the gentler place to begin, and the easier place to meet people.
objkt: the marketplace
objkt is the largest marketplace on Tezos — broader, more commercial, more like a fair or a platform than a community. It carries curated galleries, auctions, collection pages and richer tools for presenting and pricing work. Collectors browse it, and it is where most buying and selling on Tezos happens.
Because both sit on the same blockchain, work published on Teia is visible on objkt too. You are not choosing between them. This is where I publish my own work — you can see my profile there if it is useful to look at a real one rather than an abstraction. Like many artists here, I use Teia for community and conversation and objkt for presentation and sales.
Part Three — Setting Up, Step by Step
Around twenty minutes, as I said. Take it slowly. Nothing here is irreversible except losing your seed phrase.
1. Install the Temple Wallet
Go to templewallet.com and install it — as a browser extension on your computer (Chrome, Firefox, Brave, or Edge), on your phone, or both.
- Choose "Create a new wallet."
- Set a password. This unlocks the app on your device — it is not the seed phrase.
- The wallet will show you your seed phrase. Write it on paper by hand. Better not to screenshot it, keep it in a notes app, or email it to yourself.
- It will ask you to confirm the words, to be sure you saved them. That is the setup complete.
As with online banking, reach the site through the official address above rather than through a search result or a link someone sends you. Look-alike addresses exist, and typing the address yourself is the simplest protection.
2. Create your Teia profile
Go to teia.art and click "Sync" (or "Connect wallet") in the top corner.
- Choose Temple Wallet and approve the connection when it appears.
- Open your profile and add a name, a short bio, and a picture.
- Save. Approving a sign-in like this is free — you are only proving the wallet is yours.
3. Connect to objkt
Go to objkt.com and connect the same wallet. Any works you published on Teia will already be there, because objkt reads from the same blockchain your Teia works are minted on. You may want to fill in the profile fields again, as objkt shows some of its own.
4. Look around
The best way to get a feel for a place is to wander through it. Nothing you click costs anything unless you explicitly confirm a purchase in your wallet.
- Teia — the community platform
- About Teia
- Teia DAO — how the community governs itself
- objkt — the largest Tezos marketplace
- Teia on Instagram · Teia on X
If You Want to Go Further
objkt keeps a clear help centre at docs.objkt.com, written for people at exactly this stage, and Teia publishes its own guides and has active community channels where beginners' questions are welcomed rather than tolerated — this is, on the whole, an unusually patient corner of the internet. For the blockchain itself, tezos.com is the plain starting point.
Beyond that, the most reliable way to learn is the same as with any medium: follow a few artists whose work you like, watch what they do, and ask them. Most will answer. I am happy to be one of them — I would rather answer a question twice than have someone quietly give up at the wallet stage, which is where most people stop.
What Comes Next
This is the first of a series. Having a wallet and a profile is the threshold; what lies past it — how to publish your first work, how editions and pricing behave, what royalties actually mean for an artist, how collectors find you, and how this ecosystem sits alongside a conventional practice — will follow in later parts.
None of it needs to be understood at once. The concepts settle with use, the way any new medium does. Install the wallet, make the profile, wander a little. That is enough for now, and it was enough for me.
Where This Knowledge Comes From
The teaching behind this article comes from Ivana Ehrensvärd, named above. She is the founder of Hartverse, a Belgrade-based NFT art community and education hub. Coming from a background in archaeology and museum work, she built Hartverse around the idea of care-based onboarding — helping traditional artists enter the Web3 space without losing their footing. Hartverse has worked with institutions including the National Museum of Serbia, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, ULUS and the University of Belgrade, and works primarily within the Tezos ecosystem through objkt.
Ivana and I also run a residency together in Belgrade, through Hartverse and Belgrade Artist in Residence, for artists who want to spend concentrated time inside this ecosystem rather than approach it alone from home. To learn more, or to ask about working together, get in touch: virtualstudiogroups.com
— Gordana Zikic, VSG Magazine