By Selva Ozelli Esq, CPA, Author of Sustainably Investing in Digital Assets Globally
President Donald Trump signed the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act (GENIUS Act) into law on July 18th making it the first federal law to regulate stablecoins. Approved by Congress on Thursday, July 17th the bill’s passage saw the digital asset industry assets surge past a $4 trillion market capitalization for the first time, with a report by Coincub showing increased digital asset activity in the US.
Digital Art & NFTS with Digital Artist Michaël Zancan
The US’s new digital asset strategy as detailed in the crypto report mentions the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act (“CLARITY Act”) which is new legislation designed to clarify the regulatory framework for digital assets, including collectible NFTs (this includes Art NFTs). If and when the CLARITY Act is signed into law, the Act is expected to unlock responsible innovation, protect consumers and cement the US’s position as the global leader in the digital asset economy by drawing institutional investors to invest in collectible digital assets. Collectible Memecoins are already included in indexes by FTSE Russell.
In her second “NFT Series” exclusive interview for Irish Tech News, Selva Ozelli Esq, CPA, Author of Sustainably Investing in Digital Assets asks digital artist Michael Zancan the reasons why he embraced digital art and NFTs.
The first interview in the “NFT Series” is titled Can blockchain help artists? Aleksandra Artamonovskaja.
Tell us about your journey to transition from oil painting to digital painting
I learned to code at the age of eight, from reference books, writing programs on checkered sheets of paper. I could only type and test them on a computer every two months or so. Since then, I’ve never stopped making programs—many of them drawing or animating things. I got into the demo scene at fifteen. It would have been pretentious to call it “art” back then, but in hindsight, it was an early form of generative art, though immature and raw.
In parallel, I had a lifelong passion for drawing, which grew more serious—and rebellious—when I started graffiti. I transitioned to oil painting later, after having tried nearly every other medium. It felt like the most intimidating one, and I wanted to confront it. Oil painting became my most intimate relationship with the creative act, a counterbalance to my professional life in tech and code, which I considered soulless at the time.
I had vowed never to compromise that pure, almost sacred relationship with painting by subjecting it to commercial constraints. Being entirely self-taught—with no art school credentials—I didn’t even attempt to conform to the codes of “the art world.”
So, for more than fifteen years, I lived a dual life: passionate oil painter on one side, creative coding studio director on the other.
NFTs changed everything. They became the “right soil” for my art to bloom. I had never entered the art world—but NFTs created a new kind of art world that welcomed people like me. They allowed me to finally reconcile my two practices, developing a style where the painter’s eye meets math and algorithms—what I like to call figurative-generative art.
Tell us about the theme of your current exhibition regarding trees in gallery Bitforms in New York
The exhibition revolves around two main elements: the embroidered tree, and a wall installation I call the Time_Line.
Last year, I released Aux Arbres (which means “To the Trees” in French), a generative collection that produced 76,208 unique iterations across more than 43,000 collectors—making it the largest generative art collection ever at the time. It was innovative in the sense that, beyond the vast set of individual artworks, it revealed a “meta-collection” of 965 distinct trees. The idea was to use collective participation to plant an entire digital forest—a metaphor for the unity required among humans in the fight to preserve the natural world.
This second conceptual layer—the trees within Aux Arbres—was in fact designed from the start as potential material for future artistic exploration.
TREE 138, now exhibited at bitforms, was selected through an empirical process of social randomization. The resulting sculptural piece is the outcome of six months of uninterrupted work from my studio in Bordeaux, engineering and crafting the 83 individual embroideries that compose this tree.
Earlier in the journey, the Tezos Foundation expressed interest in supporting a physical exhibition focused on my past and future releases on the Tezos blockchain. Together, we curated a meaningful selection of never-before-shown physical pieces that trace my progression in on-chain generative art. We chose the tree—a highly symbolic and recurring element in my work since my days as a painter—and also the line, a foundational element of my graphic language, inherited from my experimentation with pen-plotting devices.
Will you exhibit your tree series at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) in Brazil this year since it has a theme of deforestation?
I would, of course, be honored to exhibit in such a context. However, I have a conflicted position when it comes to large political gatherings centered on environmental issues. First, because they are often occasions for grand declarations and well-meaning intentions that rarely translate into effective action. The responses are often worlds apart from the actual scale of the crisis.
Second, because my own personal actions fall short of my ecological ideals. That feeling of powerlessness, that inner conflict, is something I explore in my work—for example, in my Landscape With Carbon Capture series, where each piece is marked by symbolic oil stains.
I feel there would be too much hypocrisy in presenting my art within a context that would primarily serve as a promotional platform for my work.
How did you become interested in NFTs
Like many people, I first heard about NFTs in March 2021, after Beeple’s spectacular sale of Everydays: The First 5000 Days. At the time, things were going badly in real life, and for several months I had been locking myself in my studio every evening to draw, without any clear purpose other than to revisit my anatomy books, convinced that only art could save me.
That night, instead of drawing, I dove into researching this strange acronym I knew nothing about. The universe I discovered was utterly fascinating in its singular counterculture, its way of empowering the artists, the innovative distribution ways it offered. The more I learned, the more I felt it was made for me. I was struck by full-blown FOMO !
At the time, I was developing software to control pen plotters, and I began imagining generative patterns that could “augment” some of my hand-drawn pieces. That’s how I started creating with code while perfecting my plotting technique, which had to be flawless so as not to risk destroying the hand-drawn originals. In doing so, I developed a passion for the generative medium itself.
I quickly abandoned the original idea and shifted my focus to a more absolute practice of code-based drawing.
In April, I experimented with the blockchain by minting a discreet NFT on Tezos (on Hic et Nunc), though I never put it up for sale—and eventually burned it.
Soon after, I became so obsessed with plotting that I practically forgot about NFTs. One of the pieces I created during that time was a large-format generative tree made up of a matrix of 18 A4 plotter drawings.
I started receiving frequent messages asking me to “mint” my work on-chain. In September 2021, I released my first NFT: a digital version of that tree, split into 18 separate pieces on Foundation. I liked the idea of offering a fragmented artwork; something to be shared, in a way, like a visual metaphor for the principle of decentralization.
An NFT artist I was speaking with at the time, Ash White, even fronted me the money for the first mint so I could pay the gas fees. It was very expensive back then!
And it took off immediately.
I think just a week later, I minted the first two pieces in my Lushtemples series on Tezos. They sold out in seconds and marked the beginning of an extraordinary journey.
Why did you choose Tezos as a blockchain to issue the NFT collections spotlighted in the show?
My first experience minting on Ethereum, although a commercial success, felt emotionally and socially quite neutral. Most of the collectors remained anonymous.
By contrast, arriving on Tezos just a week later was incredibly rich in emotion and connection. I was welcomed by a warm, buzzing community in which I instantly felt at home. From then on, I began minting a new piece every Friday.
The release of Garden, Monoliths later that year marked a turning point—it brought a wave of ETH collectors, with budgets rarely seen on Tezos. Within a few months, I had become the top-selling artist on the platform. That came with a sense of responsibility, particularly toward my fellow artists.
This blockchain, beyond its solid technical foundation and impeccable ethics, represented, to me, a space for freer, more social, affordable, and inclusive artistic expression. I’ve always wanted to give back to the community that gave me so much. To offer it the same emotions it had offered me, and to show it loyalty and support.
As for the works in the exhibition, nearly all of the plotter drawings presented are directly tied to my best-known Tezos collections, so that connection felt natural and obvious.
However, this link may seem less intuitive with the piece Tree 138, which stems from a generative project originally released on another blockchain. But in truth, that was my plan all along: that second, meta-layer of the project (the trees) was always meant to nourish future creative explorations on Tezos.
To be honest, despite a few unfaithful digressions, Tezos is home to me.
How can NFT investors/collectors purchase your NFTs?
Well, I would never dare to give investment advice when it comes to my work! If anything, I can promise the opposite: I’ll keep creating regardless of which direction the markets go.
All of my digital collections on Tezos are easily accessible on Objkt.com. There’s truly something for every budget. I’d also say that deca.art/zancan has done an excellent job cataloging my work across all blockchains.
I try to maintain an up-to-date catalog on my own website, zancan.art, as well.
As for the rarer, fine-art physical pieces, the best person to talk to is Steve from bitforms!
How can people reach you?
I’m mostly on Twitter ( Twitter, not X 
) but my DMs are closed by default. My Discord server is another way. Perhaps the best way is through someone who is in touch with me already. It’s a bit sad, but at some point filtering out the opportunities is a matter of survival. This frantic world is wild out there.
Selva Ozelli Esq, CPA is an international digital asset legal expert and author of Sustainably Investing in Digital Assets Globally. Her writings are translated into 45 languages and republished in over 200 global publications. She is recognized as an expert media/TV commentator on global tax and technology matters.
Michael Zancan
Originally from the south of France, Michaël Zancan belongs to a category of insatiable self-taught creators. He started practicing drawing at an early age, at the same time as programming. In high school, before the Internet was widely available, he was already coding fluently in assembler language on an Atari machine for the demo scene. Passionate by oil painting, programming, his work focuses on the convergence of figurative and generative arts.
To him, inspiration can be found everywhere. In the floral spring around his house, in the vegetation taking a hold of stones and remains of ancient battles. Mesmerized by the density, plants, and luxurious trees, Zancan challenges the genealogy of LeWitt, Mohr and Molnar. And with wild abandon, he neglects any pretense of geometric post-minimalism as a result.
His objective? Using mathematical formulas to create patterns inspired by this proliferation. This practice produces a graphic style based on line strokes, and more occasionally some transparent and full shapes. Today, his artworks exceed the “algorithmic aspect”, as if composed with a painter’s eye by their balance and density.
Having become one of the best-selling artists on Tezos, Zancan, above all else, has created an incredible collection over time, notoriously popular for its green theme and the inclusion of artworks by the most accomplished generative artists of our times.
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