Over the past few years, a curious contradiction has emerged in how we create and consume culture online. Social media platforms allow artists to reach massive global audiences that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago, but that enhanced visibility rarely translates into financial stability for the artists. 

It's a system where cultural impact and economic value have become entirely disconnected. And in 2023, after talking to an artist who failed to earn a single penny despite racking up more than 23 million views and amassing more than 90,000 followers on Instagram, Ludovica Rosi decided she had had enough. 

“There’s no middle ground: you’re either an artist who’s leveraging Instagram and TikTok for virality with no monetization, or you’re in the gallery space that is close-minded, elite, and only for a few people,” says Rosi. “There’s been Spotify for music, YouTube for videos, but there was nothing really revolutionary for art [and] that didn’t feel right.” 

To solve this problem, Rosi and her co-founder—Colborn Bell—founded Zero One, a “cultural distribution engine” where the act of sharing art is intrinsically linked to owning and supporting it. Part social network and part marketplace, Zero One is a fresh take on how creative value flows through the digital economy.

@tuukzs

Zero One was initially built on Avalanche’s C-chain and now lives on its own Layer 1 (L1). But for Rosi, the fact that this new creative community lives on the blockchain is almost beside the point. It’s not about the tech, it’s about what the tech enables. In Zero One’s case, that meant building a sustainable way for artists to make a living, and Avalanche was the best tool for the job. 

Today, Zero One is used by more than 55,000 artists globally. It's a platform that was made possible by Avalanche, but artists aren’t using it because it’s on the blockchain. They didn’t join because of airdropped tokens, bounty campaigns, or any of the other conventional crypto marketing tactics (in fact, Zero One has never spent a cent on marketing). They joined the platform because it fulfills Rosi’s promise to help them build a sustainable art career. 

Building Bridges Between Creation and Collection

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Zero One began with a simple, but radical premise: culture should be owned, not just consumed. This isn't about turning art into speculation or reducing creativity to transactions. Instead, it's about creating direct economic relationships between artists and the people who value their work. The platform embodies this philosophy through its unique "create-to-collect" mechanism. Before anyone can collect art on Zero One, they must first create and share something of their own. This requirement might seem like a barrier, but it's actually the platform's most elegant solution to a persistent problem in digital art spaces: the separation between creators and collectors. By requiring everyone to create first, Zero One ensures that every collector understands the vulnerability and effort involved in sharing creative work.

"We're trying to move away from the concept of social media likes and marketplaces toward a more owner-focused culture ecosystem," Rosi says. “Artists can mint and share their work, and collectors on the other side can build meaningful connections with the artists, without any technical knowledge about cryptocurrencies required.”

This approach has yielded surprising results. One emerging artist, fresh out of high school with no Instagram presence, joined Zero One and within a month had earned $180 from 80 collectors. The numbers might seem modest, but Rosi sees them as proof of concept for something much larger. 

“Imagine if each collector gives you $1 to support your journey and the number of collectors reaches a million—that’s more than [most] artists make in a whole lifetime,” she says. But ultimately this isn’t about getting rich from art; it’s about making art a financially viable career choice. “It’s not about the quantity of the collectors,” she says. “It’s about the quality and the value and the support they’re going to give you.” 

The Technical Revolution Hidden in Plain Sight

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Although Zero One runs on Avalanche—first on the C-Chain, now on its own L1—most artists and collectors on the platform would never know they're interacting with blockchain infrastructure. Every technical decision about how the platform was built—email signups, one-click contract creation, gasless transactions—prioritizes accessibility over blockchain orthodoxy.

For Rosi, this commitment to simplicity isn't just about user experience; it's about access. “You can create and collect for free without even paying the cost of gas, so we’re effectively a risk free platform for everybody to join,” she says. By covering gas fees and removing the need for users to acquire cryptocurrency, Zero One opens its doors to artists in countries where crypto exchanges are restricted or Know You Customer (KYC) requirements prevent artists from participating. In this sense, the platform's technical architecture serves its mission: if you're trying to democratize cultural ownership, you can't start by requiring technical expertise or financial prerequisites.

The decision to move from Avalanche's C-Chain to their own L1 wasn't made lightly. During the inscription surge of December 2023, gas prices spiked so dramatically that Zero One had to shut down for two weeks. Rosi and her team simply couldn't afford to cover the cost of thousands of transactions. This crisis validated what the team had suspected: to truly serve artists at scale, they needed complete control over their infrastructure.

Building on their own L1 through Ava Cloud gave Zero One something crucial: the ability to honor artist royalties in perpetuity. Because it's a permissioned ecosystem where all resales happen within the platform, Zero One can ensure that artists always receive their share of secondary sales. This might seem like a technical detail, but it represents a fundamental shift in how digital art markets typically operate. Instead of royalties being optional or easily circumvented, they're built into the system's architecture—unchangeable and guaranteed.

Zero One’s commitment to accessibility has also been the key to its global adoption among an incredibly diverse user base. The platform is wildly popular in Iran (despite the team having never visited), Japan, South Korea and their users range from a 10-year-old artist (who joined under parental supervision) to a 70-year-old retiree exploring digital art for the first time. This demographic diversity isn't accidental, it's the direct result of removing every possible barrier to entry. There’s no blockchain knowledge required, no gas fees to manage, no technical hurdles to overcome. All users have to do is create, share, and connect.

A Model for Cultural Empowerment

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At its heart, Zero One represents a new model for how creative value can flow back to creators in digital spaces. It's not about speculation, trading, or chasing viral moments, it's about creating sustainable economic relationships between artists and supporters. The perpetual royalties, the create-to-collect mechanism, the removal of financial barriers—each element reinforces a simple idea: if we value culture, we need technical systems that support the people who create it.

Looking ahead, Zero One is exploring how AI can enhance the collector experience through personalized curation and discovery, while simultaneously building more social features to strengthen community connections. Every new feature is evaluated against the same question: does this help artists build sustainable careers through direct support from people who value their work?

If you zoom out enough, it becomes clear that Zero One isn't just building a platform for selling digital art; it's reimagining the relationship between creativity and value. This shift from virality to sustainability, and from audience to ownership, could fundamentally change who can afford to be an artist and what kind of art gets created. It's economic empowerment that happens to use blockchain, not blockchain for blockchain's sake. On Zero One, the technology becomes invisible, leaving only the human connections and financial freedom it enables.