After several months of research, I am delighted to introduce Do Not Accumulate, a new 42-edition CBDC art series that imagines a near future in which physical cash has been retired and replaced by programmable Central Bank Digital Currencies. Do Not Accumulate short DNA works as both a title and an acronym, and is an operating principle. The series debuts with two currencies, a Digital Euro and a Digital US Dollar, each with 21 editions, inscribed as recursive Bitcoin ordinals.
Each edition starts as a fictional banknote that reimagines the look of real money. Over a 21-month period, the note is designed to lose value, showing system warnings, adjustment notices, and visible signs of decay. Fifty-five rotating warnings mimic the official voice of a future CBDC authority, mentioning things like limits on holdings, compliance scores, frozen balances, automatic fees, and tighter cross-border controls. In this series, every threat is presented as a feature: confiscation is called “adjustment,” surveillance becomes “security,” and control is labelled “participation.”
Why a CBDC Art Series Now?
Over the past few years, I have had many conversations at conferences and exhibitions about CBDCs, and I have been stunned by how little awareness there is of the subject. Despite the European Union pacing forward and introducing policies and legislation, the general public shows little interest in these fundamental changes to the financial system.
At the time of writing, the EU is said to have reached a point of no return. The European Central Bank has concluded its multi-year investigation and preparation phases, has already selected technical suppliers, and has committed approximately €1.3 billion to launch the first version of the Digital Euro by 2029. The digital currency is increasingly a question of when and under what conditions, rather than if.
I decided to focus on a CBDC-centred series in part because of this disconnect. The work imagines some of the world’s leading currencies turned into CBDCs, using the visual language and familiarity of existing banknotes to hit closer to home, and to introduce, subtly and through the surface of the bill itself, how convenience over time might turn against the general public, how elements might be introduced that allow governments to exploit their currencies. Every threat is reframed as a feature.
Let’s Rewind to June 2014
The European Central Bank’s June 2014 decision to set a negative deposit rate for banks was the moment something quietly broke. Government-issued currencies had long been regarded as an untouchable store of value. That day marks the point at which money quietly ceased to be a neutral store of value and became a policy lever. What followed was an eight-year period of negative interest rates, aimed at discouraging saving and promoting spending to fuel the economy.
This time also prompted further EU investigations into payment systems, which were then beginning to feel threatened by US-dominated monopolies such as Visa and Mastercard, as well as by payment services such as PayPal. In addition, the emergence of Bitcoin challenged the status quo of the banking system by enabling fast, low-cost payments processed within minutes, without intermediaries.
I believe that negative interest rates were crucial in enabling the transition from physical cash to programmable government-issued currencies. Once a central bank has the power to make money shrink in your account, the question becomes how and how visibly it will be weaponized. Every CBDC milestone since 2014 moves along that trajectory.
The Ordinal Architecture as the Timeline
The Do Not Accumulate series is built as a four-layer recursive ordinal structure. Recursion allows a child inscription to pull content such as code, fonts, and SVG from a parent inscription on the Bitcoin blockchain, so a small edition file can reconstitute a complex artwork from already-inscribed building blocks. Each artwork lives entirely on Bitcoin, eliminating the need for file hosting, backups, or external dependencies.
The architecture is more than just technical scaffolding, since every parent inscription intentionally rests on rare satoshis created at milestones in the CBDC policy timeline itself. The artwork’s structure explores and mirrors the structure of policy history.
L0: Artist Root: This inscription acts as MLO’s digital identity, signing the artworks on-chain. Its satoshi is drawn from July 19, 2018, the year I first sold my digital artwork depicting the Bitcoin blockchain. It marks the genesis of my personal digital art practice. View on ordinals.com
L1a: Shared Assets: This inscription serves as a folder containing everything reused across the series’ editions: typefaces that ensure visual consistency across browsers and operating systems, the DNA Series Engine that drives the demurrage and decay, currency-specific render scripts, and style configurations. View on ordinals.com
L1b: Do Not Accumulate (Series Root). The series-level artwork. Its sat is drawn from June 11, 2014, the day Negative Interest Rates came into force at the ECB. Crucially, it sits on the closing sat of the bitcoin mined that day. Every layer below it sits on opening sats. The series, in other words, is bracketed between something that ended and something that begins. View on ordinals.com
L2a: Digital EUR. The currency-level artwork. Its sat is drawn from November 1, 2023, the day the ECB closed its two-year investigation phase and entered the preparation phase, the day the European Union committed to building its programmable successor. View on ordinals.com
L2b: Digital USD. The currency-level artwork. Its sat is drawn from August 13, 2020, the day the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the MIT Digital Currency Initiative publicly announced Project Hamilton, the multi-year research collaboration that became the technical heart of the US digital-dollar effort. View on ordinals.com
L3: The 21 Editions per Currency. Each edition is a single text/html file that recursively pulls fonts, scripts, configuration, and currency artwork from the layers above. Editions 1/21 of each currency rest on their own cornerstone sats:
Digital EUR 1/21 on March 26, 2024, the day the Council of the European Union formally adopted eIDAS 2.0, the framework that establishes the European Digital Identity Wallet through which any retail Digital Euro would be held, authorized, and spent. Before the currency, the rails. View Digital EUR 1/21
Digital USD 1/21 rests on January 20, 2022, the day the Federal Reserve published Money and Payments: The U.S. Dollar in the Age of Digital Transformation, the central bank’s first formal discussion paper on a US CBDC. Before the currency, the inquiry. The remaining 20 editions of each currency share the currency-level parents and sit parallel to the 1/21. View Digital USD 1/21
In a nutshell, the Ordinal architecture carefully replicates the CBDC policy timeline: paradigm shifts and institutional research milestones that lay the rails before the digital currency arrives.
The Two CBDC Artworks: Digital Euro and Digital US Dollar
Digital Euro: The Digital Euro draws on the visual language of the current 20 Euro banknote, such as the ECB strip, the star ring, the wordmark typography, the anti-counterfeit guilloche, and the architectural and heraldic motifs that have circulated in the European Union since 2002. The note appears as a recognizable artifact that relentlessly promotes threats as features. Holding caps, compliance scores, expiry dates, and conditional payments, written directly into the money itself, surface on the bill as the demurrage cycle progresses.
Digital US Dollar: Similarly, the Digital US Dollar draws on the iconography of the current USD banknotes: the eagle-on-shield, the Federal Reserve and Treasury seals, honeycomb patterns, Lady Liberty, the wordmark typography, and the anti-counterfeit guilloche.
Both currencies are rendered as single-file HTML artworks running in real time, pulling from the shared series engine. They are the same code, only parameterized differently.
The Series Engine and Mechanic
The 21 editions of each currency are offset against a fixed anchor date (June 14th, 2014, the effective date of the European Central Bank’s negative interest rate policy) in one-month increments. At any given moment, no two editions display the same state. The collector who holds edition 17 sees a different stage of decay than the one who holds edition 3. As a series, the 21 editions display every state of the demurrage cycle exactly once, in continuous order. A currency that erodes by design is built on a substrate that does not.
Numerology within Do Not Accumulate
The 21/21/21 structure is intentional. Twenty-one editions per currency, a 21-month demurrage cycle, 21 value states. Twenty-one is, of course, also Bitcoin’s fixed supply ceiling in millions, the anchor against which programmable money is being designed. The number intersects with several of my recent series; here, it inverts the register: where Bitcoin’s 21 defines a hard limit on issuance, the series’s 21 constitutes a hard limit on holding.
Premiering at Bitcoin 2026
The first editions of each currency, Digital EUR 1/21 and Digital USD 1/21, were inscribed in the days leading up to the 6th Annual Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas, where the series will be presented in person for the first time. I worked hard to get the first editions inscribed in time. The remaining 40 will be inscribed in the weeks following my return.
Each inscription is viewable directly on ordinals.com at the links above. Dedicated pages for the Do Not Accumulate collection and for the Digital EUR and Digital USD currencies will follow on mlo.art shortly.
The 21-month cycle has begun for the editions inscribed. The notes will continue to decay. The question they pose, what programmable money does to the people who hold it, is being written elsewhere, by central banks, on the same timeline.
