Namecoin Blockheads

Information

Created: 10 March 2014
Creator: Addison Kowalski, Courtney Guertin and Amadeus Demarzi
Blockchain: Namecoin

The Pixel Faces That Found Their Way onto Namecoin

Before people were buying cartoon apes for the price of a house, some internet users were already putting pixel portraits of themselves on the blockchain. They weren't trying to create the next collectible craze. They were looking for a way to establish an identity online.

Some of those portraits survive today as Blockheads, a group of digital avatars associated with Namecoin. Their story begins with a simple avatar maker, moves through an experiment in decentralised identity and eventually reaches the NFT market, years before most people had heard of NFTs.

There's a catch, though. Blockheads was never launched as a collection in the way we understand the term today. Different people created and registered their avatars independently. Collectors only brought them together years later, when they recognised a shared piece of early blockchain history.

A little piece of yourself, made from pixels

The story begins in 2010, when Addison Kowalski, Amadeus Demarzi and Courtney Guertin were experimenting with 8-bit portraits. The idea was simple: take the chunky, pixelated look of early video games and turn it into a recognisable personal avatar.

By January 2011, the idea was attracting attention in the technology community. An article published by TechCrunch described the avatars' growing popularity on Twitter and the creators' interest in developing a social gaming application around them. EightBit's own history also dates the original avatar creator to 2010.

The appeal is easy to understand. At a time when online profiles often consisted of little more than a username and a small photograph, a customised pixel character gave someone a distinctive face without requiring them to commission an artist or learn graphic design. Users could assemble characters from different visual elements, producing portraits that felt personal while sharing a recognisable style.

The technology was hardly elaborate. That was part of the point.

EightBit's creators eventually returned to the idea with a separate NFT collection in 2022. But the original avatar builder had already been around for several years before the first Blockheads records appeared on a blockchain.

At the time, these avatars were simply a way to present oneself online. Nobody needed to call them digital collectibles, much less proto-PFPs. The terminology would come later.

Namecoin wanted to give the internet names of its own

To understand what happened next, we need to look at a different corner of early cryptocurrency history.

Bitcoin had demonstrated that people could transfer digital money without relying on a central authority. What if the same general idea could be used to register names and attach information to them?

That was the thinking behind Namecoin, launched in April 2011 as the first fork of Bitcoin. Its original ambition was decentralised naming, including the .bit domain system. Rather than depending entirely on a conventional registrar, users could register a name in a blockchain-based database and control it through cryptographic keys.

Namecoin's records could also contain associated data. A unique name could be linked to information, with the blockchain recording who controlled it and changes made to it.

This opened the door to experiments beyond domain names. Namecoin could also support digital identities.

That possibility became more accessible in 2014, when Muneeb Ali and Ryan Shea launched Onename. The service aimed to make cryptocurrency identities easier to use. Instead of expecting someone to remember a long Bitcoin address, Onename offered a human-readable profile through which people could identify themselves and share information such as payment details and verified social accounts.

Contemporary reporting in August 2014 described the problem Onename was trying to solve. Cryptocurrency addresses were awkward strings of characters, whereas people were accustomed to finding one another by name.

Onename used Namecoin to register identities in namespaces such as u/. These records could contain profile information, including links to avatars and social accounts. The service handled much of the underlying complexity, allowing people to participate without having to construct blockchain records themselves.

This is where Blockheads enters the story. People were registering identities, and some happened to use pixel-art avatars generated with EightBit.

The first Blockheads appear

The earliest Blockheads records are associated with March 2014. Historical NFT researchers identify 10 March as the date of the first known registration in the group, under the Namecoin name i/el3k0n-1. The date comes from secondary research rather than a complete independent audit of every transaction, so it is best treated as the reported starting point.

The names themselves tell us something about their original purpose. Entries such as i/el3k0n-1, i/danbuchner-1 and i/austinheap-1 look rather different from the token names of a modern NFT collection. They belong to an identity system, not an art release.

Users created profiles, attached their information and used pixel avatars generated with EightBit. The records were registered individually over the following months and into 2015. There is no convincing evidence that the users coordinated their activities, intended to produce a limited-edition series or even thought of themselves as members of a shared project.

That is what makes Blockheads unusual. A modern NFT collection usually begins with a creator, a defined supply, a launch date and some method of distributing tokens to buyers. Blockheads began with separate people using an identity service. Its members were united by the software used to make their pictures, not by a common mint.

The images also predate their blockchain registrations. A historical web archive contains an example of a Blockhead avatar on its owner's Twitter profile in January 2014, before the corresponding Namecoin registration identified by researchers. The picture existed first; the blockchain record came later.

That distinction matters. The creation of an image, its appearance online and its registration on a blockchain are three different events. They can happen on different dates, and the history of Blockheads becomes easier to understand once we stop treating them as one.

Were they NFTs before NFTs?

This is where the terminology becomes tricky.

Namecoin records had several characteristics now associated with non-fungible tokens. Each name was individually identifiable, could be controlled and transferred, and could hold information. Unlike ordinary units of a cryptocurrency, one name was not interchangeable with another.

But Blockheads were not ERC-721 tokens, and they were not minted through a dedicated NFT contract. They were Namecoin name records associated with digital identities. The modern category of profile-picture NFT had not yet taken shape.

Calling them early blockchain-linked avatars is therefore more precise than saying someone launched a conventional NFT collection in March 2014.

In retrospect, however, the resemblance is striking. Years before CryptoPunks appeared on Ethereum in 2017, people were already associating distinctive digital portraits with blockchain-controlled identities. The underlying purpose was different, but the combination of an identifiable name and a visual representation was already there.

That does not prove Blockheads directly inspired CryptoPunks or any later PFP project. No reliable evidence establishes such a connection. It does show that the idea of linking avatars to blockchain identities did not begin with the better-known Ethereum collections.

History rarely proceeds as neatly as a collection's marketing page might suggest.

The records were not quite the pictures

There is another detail hiding behind those cheerful pixel faces.

Registering an avatar on Namecoin did not necessarily mean storing the entire image inside the blockchain. Historical profile records could contain a URL pointing to a picture hosted elsewhere. The blockchain preserved the recorded information, but the image itself might live on an ordinary web server.

This arrangement made sense at the time. Storing and updating identity data was one thing; storing complete image files on a blockchain was another. A link was a practical way to connect a profile with a picture.

It also created a problem for future historians. Websites disappear, services change their infrastructure, and images are moved or deleted. Some early Blockheads links pointed to image-hosting services, including Twitter's image servers. A surviving blockchain record therefore does not guarantee that the original image remains available at its recorded address. Other images may have survived through separate copies or archives.

The blockchain can preserve evidence that a particular record existed. It cannot guarantee the continued existence of every external file to which that record once pointed.

For Blockheads, the original Namecoin record and its transaction history are more useful for establishing provenance than a picture that merely looks the same.

Why the trail ends in 2015

Onename eventually moved away from Namecoin. Its development team had concerns about the network's security and operational limitations, and its identity system moved to Bitcoin in 2015 as part of the evolution towards Blockstack. Research presented at the 2016 USENIX Annual Technical Conference later documented the team's experience and reasons for switching networks.

The latest Blockheads registration identified in the research material dates to 30 July 2015. The timing suggests a connection with Onename's migration, although it does not prove that the move directly caused users to stop registering these avatars.

For the original records, the practical consequence was that they belonged to an earlier phase of blockchain identity experimentation. Onename continued to evolve, but Blockheads did not continue as a coordinated project.

There was no announced end date, no final mint and no official farewell. The trail simply goes quiet.

Lost, rediscovered and collected

For several years, the Blockheads records remained an obscure part of early blockchain history. Then, in 2021, interest in older digital assets grew. Collectors began searching beyond Ethereum for forgotten tokens, blockchain names and experiments that predated the NFT boom.

Jake Gallen's NFT archaeology research describes Blockheads as a group of 34 tokenised profile pictures from the Onename era, while other accounts and the later curated collection use a figure of 42. His account places the group's over-the-counter trading activity in September 2021 and reports that some pieces attracted prices above 50 ETH during the period of intense interest. These are historical reports, not a verified series of completed sales for every original asset.

The rediscovery changed how the records were understood. What had begun as ordinary profile data could now be examined as evidence of how early blockchain users represented themselves. The shared visual style made the records recognisable as a group, even though no such group had existed when they were created.

A separate Ethereum collection containing 40 Blockheads images appeared on 4 October 2021. Its description presents the images as a reissue of the historical material, rather than establishing that each token controlled the original Namecoin identity. Copying a historical image to Ethereum is not the same as transferring the original Namecoin asset.

The difference between 34, 40 and 42 remains unresolved. The figures come from different accounts and collections, and the available evidence does not provide a definitive reconciliation of every record. The curated historical group identifies 42 images, while earlier reports and the image-based reissue used different counts.

Bringing Namecoin assets to OpenSea

The next stage involved Emblem Vault, a system designed to make assets from other blockchains accessible through transferable tokens on Ethereum.

A Namecoin name could not simply be listed as an ordinary Ethereum NFT because it lived on a different blockchain, with its own rules for ownership and transfer. Emblem Vault offered a way to represent control of an underlying asset through an Ethereum token.

In broad terms, a vault holds the underlying asset in a wallet, while an Ethereum token represents control of that vault. The Ethereum token can then be traded on a marketplace such as OpenSea. The two layers remain distinct: the token on Ethereum is a representation of the underlying Namecoin asset, not the original 2014 record itself.

Emblem Vault introduced project-based curated collections in 2023, separating historical projects into their own marketplace collections rather than leaving them scattered through a broader collection of vaults. Its June 2023 announcement explicitly listed Blockheads among the planned curated collections.

The Blockheads curated collection on OpenSea is the result of that later process. OpenSea dates the collection to August 2023. When checked on 23 October 2026, the page displayed seven items and seven unique owners, with no floor price or trading volume reported. These are marketplace figures at the time of checking, not a complete measure of historical trading or proof that every original Namecoin record remains active.

The modern collection is another layer in the history. First came the avatar system, then the Namecoin identity records, and finally the effort to preserve and trade selected records through Ethereum. Each layer has its own date.

The catch: a name can expire

There is one technical detail that makes Blockheads more complicated than its age alone might suggest.

Namecoin registrations do not last forever without maintenance. According to Namecoin's official FAQ, a name becomes semi-expired after 31,968 blocks, roughly 222 days, without renewal or an update. If it remains untouched for another 4,032 blocks, roughly 28 days, it expires and can be registered by someone else.

This means an old name and an uninterrupted ownership history are not necessarily the same thing.

Imagine that a name was registered in 2014, left unrenewed and eventually expired. Someone could later register the same name again. The text of the name might look identical, but the new registration would not establish uninterrupted ownership from the original record.

For a collector, that distinction matters. The historical record may still be visible on the blockchain, while the current asset may have a different ownership history. A modern Ethereum wrapper adds another question: does it still contain the intended Namecoin asset, and is that registration active?

The collection's historical age is only the beginning of the provenance investigation. Each item needs to be considered individually.

What Blockheads leaves behind

Blockheads is not a story about a team setting out to create a famous NFT collection. It is a record of people using the internet as it existed at the time: making pixel portraits, registering online identities and experimenting with a new way to establish ownership of names and information.

The avatars were created with a tool that predated their blockchain registrations. The registrations were made for identity purposes rather than as a coordinated collectible release. The group was assembled retrospectively, and some of its surviving representations now exist through a modern cross-chain system.

Blockheads shows that people were linking personal images to blockchain identities before Ethereum became the centre of the NFT market. The people who registered these names were not necessarily trying to anticipate the future. They were solving the immediate problem of how to represent themselves online.

Years later, those ordinary decisions became historical evidence. The appeal of Blockheads lies in that gap between what its users were doing at the time and what collectors came to see in their records.