Marguerite De Courcelle

Marguerite deCourcelle, professionally known as "coin_artist," is a vanguard artist, creative technologist, and game designer who has been at the forefront of the blockchain creator economy since 2014. A visionary in crypto art, her ingenuity is recognized by global institutions like BBC, MIT, NASA, and Bloomberg. Her inaugural cryptographic puzzle "The Dark Wallet" in 2014 marked the beginning of her journey into this innovative art form. “The Dark Wallet” featured a unique and notorious Minecraft Server as part of its cryptographic experience.

The pinnacle of her career thus far is the cryptopuzzle "Torched H34R7S" also known as "1Flamen6," a collaborative work with Rhea Myers in 2015. This artwork, inspired by Shakespeare's "The Phoenix and the Turtle," features a Bitcoin wallet's private key ingeniously encoded within its design. The puzzle challenged the public for three years, its value appreciating alongside Bitcoin's rising worth, until it was finally solved by an anonymous programmer. The complexity and allure of this piece cemented deCourcelle's reputation as a pioneer in crypto puzzles.

Expanding her digital artistry, deCourcelle made a significant impact with "F473 (FATE)," a digital-born game with generative elements sold during Christie's first NFT group show in 2021. This work underscored her innovative approach by featuring cross-chain interoperability, a decentralized cooperative gamified story-telling experience, and a physical painting with a hand-painted private key to a cryptocurrency prize, offering an interactive narrative that redefines art engagement.

Currently, as the CEO of Blockade Games, deCourcelle continues to push the boundaries, leading a team of technologists and futurists at Blockade Labs to democratize creative expression. They are developing cutting-edge technologies that enable creatives to generate digital environments efficiently, marking the future of digital environment development. Through her career, Marguerite deCourcelle has not only pioneered new forms of artistic expression but has also championed the democratization of creativity, enabling a wider audience to unlock and celebrate their unique creative talents.

“I’m excited about creatives taking control of their future”

Puzzles and playfulness: Marguerite deCourcelle on the bridge between content and ownership.

By Anna Seaman

In Shakespeare’s 1601 poem, The Phoenix and the Turtle – known to some as the first great metaphysical poem – the two protagonists die. Interpretations vary but it is assumed that the poem charts an unrealised love affair between two birds – a phoenix and a turtledove - who represent truth and beauty. Its tragic end is countered with a hopeful prayer that this ideal union will re-emerge – like a phoenix from the ashes.

When Marguerite deCourcelle aka coin_artist appropriated the poem in 2015, she created a painting depicting a chessboard upon which two fallen pieces lie and a phoenix and a turtledove are twisted together among some vines. But this was no normal painting, it was a complex puzzle and part of a series of smaller puzzles collectively called The Legend of Satoshi Nakamoto, which she devised in collaboration with Rhea Myers, a hacker, coder and another pioneering crypto artist. The painting - TORCHED H34R7S - was the final piece in the puzzle chain and its brushstrokes hid a code to a private key to the 1FLAMEN6 wallet. Before releasing the puzzle to the crypto community on the Bitcointalk forum, deCourcelle loaded the wallet with 4.87BTC worth $1400 – about half of all her assets at the time. It was not without irony that BTC was at the lowest point of a bear market in 2015 and in the following years, it emerged from those doldrums to reach new and dizzying heights - much like a phoenix rising from the ashes. When the puzzle was solved and the wallet drained three years later, the BTC value was close to $50,000. However, the painting was more than a reflection on the possibility of new growth when truth and beauty, or crypto and art, it was an artistic ode to deCourcelle’s love for gaming and the cryptic nature of cryptography.

To solve the puzzle, one had to look carefully for symbols and codes. In the rows of flames at the edge of the canvas, a series of zeros and ones were encoded. The colour and shape of each flame made up a four-character piece of the binary series. A further part of the code was represented by six ribbons in the bottom right-hand corner. The puzzle-solver was required to link the zeros and ones together and then translate them into the private key. It was esoteric, it was fun, but it was also visionary.

“I had no idea how viral it was going to be in the beginning,” she said. “At first I hid things all across the internet and in a Minecraft server that we were hosting. It was my first dive into the community from a technical angle – and the playfulness that we unlocked blew me away.”

She also said that she was tapping into what she considered to be a very important factor about the emergence of cryptocurrency. “I saw BTC as a huge tool for artists, no matter what the medium - it was an opportunity to get rid of the middleman between people and the artists,” she said.

Therefore, more than simply a game, it was a commentary on the economics of art. deCourcelle admits she was influenced by Andy Warhol’s views on art as a commodity. “Warhol once said ‘if you are going to buy a painting. I think you should take that money, tie it up, and hang it on the wall’ and that really stuck with me,” deCourcelle said. “Warhol also said that art is what you can get away with – in many ways it was these concepts that interested both myself and Rhea.”

In 2018, when the puzzle was finally solved, deCourcelle had co-founded Blockade Games. “The puzzles were also a tool for community building and attracting talent,” she says. So, with a community around her, she decided to do something more ambitious. 

In March 2018, her team launched Pineapple Arcade, a series of crypto themed arcade games for which they remade old classic games and hid cryptocurrency prizes within them. Some of those prizes admitted players access to Neon District, a cyberpunk role playing game that was immersive and had a huge emphasis on both storytelling and art.

“Since our crypto community resonates with cyberpunk and the sci fi genre, we wanted to make the game rich and beautiful. It was gritty, edgy and colourful with active animation and active game play.”

It also spoke to the new kind of ecosystem for creatives that emerged alongside cryptocurrency and Web 3.0.

“We created a platform in which users can take their assets and have a way to interact with them and make them their own – the game was the bridge between the content creation of Web 2.0 and the ownership of web 3.0,” she said.

In 2021, deCourcelle teamed up with 10 other contributors to create "F473" (FATE) - a digital-born game with generative elements that enabled players to collect and use NFTs. It was auctioned at Christie's as part of Proof of Sovereignty: A Curated NFT Sale by Lady PheOnix.

Her practice both as an artist and as a collaborative developer is to redefine the way the public engage and interact with art. She is passionate about democratizing creative expression enabling a wider audience to unlock and celebrate their unique creative talents. “The journey has been fun and organic but there is a serious undertone,” she said. “I’m very excited about the idea of artists and creatives having this opportunity to take more ownership and control over their futures.”