Benoît Couty

BnoiitC is Benoît Couty, a French lawyer and founder of the Museum of Crypto Art (MoCA), established in Cryptovoxels (now Voxels) in 2018.¹ The museum provides a permanent virtual exhibition space for part of his collection.¹ Couty’s MoCA is a different project from the Museum of Crypto Art at museumofcryptoart.com (M○C△), whose founding team includes Colborn Bell.² A 2021 interview likewise identifies Couty as BnoiitC and explains that MoCA was established in Cryptovoxels to exhibit and collaborate with digital creators.³ In an earlier interview, BnoiitC described building and maintaining the museum to celebrate, promote, and display crypto-inspired art, and framed the project around artistic visibility, decentralization, and resistance to censorship.⁴

In an interview for Hackatao’s Hack the Minds series, published on 14 October 2026, Couty explained that BnoiitC is an anagram of “bitcoin”. He had used the handle in cryptocurrency discussion groups before adopting it on Twitter. His route into cryptoart began through researching blockchain technology as a lawyer: exploring Cryptovoxels brought him into contact with artists and prompted him to establish a place to show their work.⁵

He recalled initially exhibiting artworks in the virtual museum without buying the NFTs. XCOPY then gave him a one-of-one in recognition of his interest and efforts to display the work. Receiving the token, followed by enquiries from people who wanted to buy it, made digital ownership tangible to him and encouraged him to collect. He also said that the proceeds from a later sale of the XCOPY work expanded what he could afford to acquire. This is his retrospective account; the interview does not identify the gifted work by title.⁵ Breaker (2019) was transferred directly from XCOPY to Couty on 10 April 2019 and sold by Couty on 30 July 2021 for 200 ETH, recorded by Raster as US$480,710 at the time.⁶⁷⁸

For Couty, preservation depends on people continuing to care about an artwork, as well as on its technical storage. In the same conversation he distinguished durable blockchain records from the files and interfaces needed to make art visible, and argued that collectors have a direct interest in maintaining what they own. He described displaying Pascal Boyart’s covered-over mural in Cryptovoxels as a contribution to keeping its memory accessible.⁵

He also defended curation as a personal act of selection and commitment, rather than treating a museum as an indiscriminate store of everything. By October 2026, he located much of his enthusiasm in on-chain art, where he recognised the experimentation and desire for independence that had attracted him to early cryptoart.⁵

In an October 2026 interview with Nicole Jacobs for Fundación Paiz, Couty recalled discovering NFT art in 2018, when he estimated the active community at only 50 to 100 artists. What attracted him was the possibility of artists reaching collectors directly, outside established gallery networks. The interview also records his co-founding of 0x4rt Consulting in 2018 and the presentation of a collection of more than 800 digital works through Cryptoart Revolution in 2021.⁹

His curatorial work extended to Criptoarte: Territorios Latentes at Fundación Paiz in Guatemala, co-curated with Frank Neidig of Flux Collective and bringing together more than 20 artists. In that conversation, Couty emphasised the opportunities for artists outside established art-market centres to reach international collectors, drawing on his work with artists in Cameroon. He described technical familiarity and practical education as important to wider participation, and treated artificial intelligence as a tool through which artists can express their humanity.⁹