OpenSea has added a work from Elman Mansimov’s alignDRAW project to its Flagship Collection, bringing one of the earliest text-to-image AI experiments into the marketplace’s curated NFT reserve. The acquisition centers on alignDRAW #2438, a 32-by-32-pixel attempt to generate an airplane on a surfboard from a written prompt. OpenSea announced the addition on September 17, framing the 2015 project as an important artifact in the history of generative AI.
In its official announcement, OpenSea described alignDRAW as the first text-to-image AI model and highlighted the primitive, blurry character of its outputs. Mansimov also acknowledged the Flagship addition. The new development is a curatorial acquisition rather than the launch of alignDRAW itself, which has existed as an Ethereum NFT collection since 2023.
Joining OpenSea's Flagship Collection…
alignDRAW by @elmanmansimov: the first text-to-image AI model, built in 2015, whose blurry 32×32 outputs were the first images ever generated from a written sentence.
More below 👇 pic.twitter.com/3KF3H7u19x
— OpenSea (@opensea) September 17, 2026
A 2015 AI Experiment Becomes On-Chain Art
Mansimov developed alignDRAW with Emilio Parisotto, Jimmy Lei Ba and Ruslan Salakhutdinov for the 2015 paper “Generating Images from Captions with Attention.” The system generated images iteratively while attending to words in natural-language descriptions. The surviving archive contains 2,709 images generated from 36 prompts, with every output preserved at its original 32-by-32-pixel resolution.
never imagined that the outputs from alignDRAW would become a flagship collectible 🙏
thanks to you and @fellowshiptrust for helping make this work visible to the digital art community and to @opensea for adding it to the flagship collection!
— Elman Mansimov (@elmanmansimov) September 18, 2026
The images gained a second life when digital-art organization Fellowship worked with Mansimov to bring the archive to Ethereum. The NFT release began in 2023, with the project using progressive storage to place the original files on-chain as gas conditions allowed. By May 20, 2024, alignDRAW’s image data had become fully on-chain in its original file format, preserving the early outputs rather than recreating or enhancing them with newer AI technology.
Recognition also extended beyond crypto-native venues. Christie’s included “A stop sign is flying in blue skies” in its December 2023 Next Wave digital-art auction, while the Worcester Art Museum acquired three alignDRAW print works for its permanent collection in 2024. Those acquisitions positioned alignDRAW within institutional art settings before its latest OpenSea Flagship selection.
OpenSea Expands Its Curated NFT Reserve
OpenSea launched the Flagship Collection in September 2025 as an NFT reserve backed by a commitment of more than $1 million for acquisitions. A committee of OpenSea employees, with input from external advisors, selects works based on their perceived historical and cultural relevance. The Flagship Collection is therefore a specific portfolio held by OpenSea, not simply a label applied to notable marketplace collections.
Its acquisitions have continued to span different areas of NFT culture, including established profile-picture projects such as Nakamigos. With alignDRAW #2438, OpenSea is extending that curatorial strategy toward an artifact whose significance comes primarily from AI and digital-art history rather than the launch of a new collection.
The distinction matters because alignDRAW was already available for viewing and secondary trading before the Flagship acquisition. OpenSea’s purchase does not change the collection’s 2,709-item supply, its underlying 2015 images or its fully on-chain structure. Instead, it adds another layer of institutional-style provenance to a project that has already moved from academic research to Christie’s, museum collections and Ethereum. The next tangible development will be how OpenSea continues building its reserve around historically significant AI and generative works.
