By LAN Party- Vienna Kim & Benoit Palop
Spoiler: despite the “Web3” community's portrayal of the blockchain as a permissionless, trustless, immutable, and seemingly permanent method of recording data (as long as the chain lives), it is a terrible place to preserve digital artworks. As digital art—and especially NFTs—continues to seek legitimacy within the art world, one of the persistent challenges for artists, curators, and collectors is its inherent fragility, though this is a consideration that is far too often dismissed or not even entertained. NFT platforms can offer visibility for artists, but they do not provide long-term (or usually decentralized) preservation options, leaving artworks susceptible to obsolescence, deletion, or uninvited alteration.
Speaking from personal experience, many of the curatorial projects, online exhibitions, and articles we’ve worked on individually over the past decade have either disappeared entirely or been partially dismantled—images broken, links rotten, and the content lost to time. It's a frustrating reminder of how ephemeral web-based work can be. The perception in “Web3” is that blockchains offer a vital response, preserving these works in a way that guarantees their existence for the future. However, this could not be further from the truth.
How media for NFTs are stored today
Today, most NFTs do not store their actual media files on blockchains themselves. Instead, the media—such as images, videos, and other digital assets—are usually hosted on centralized proprietary storage services, much like how files are stored on typical Web2 platforms, or IPFS. These storage systems are riddled with vulnerabilities, as centralized storage means the media can be changed or even removed if the server is compromised or the platform shut down. A more decentralized alternative is IPFS, a peer-to-peer network that distributes files across multiple nodes. While IPFS is more resilient to data loss, it doesn’t fully guarantee permanence or reliability on its own, as files may still disappear if nodes go offline or if no "pinned" copies are maintained, among other liabilities.
The reliance on offchain storage developed as a natural extension of the blockchain's limitations in supporting large files. “Fundamentally, the blockchains that are most used for transacting in cryptocurrencies and NFTs are not designed for mass storage of data,” explains Christopher King, Co-Founder and CTO of ClubNFT, over an email exchange. He adds that using blockchains to support media storage would not only be exorbitantly expensive (“just to store a regular photo on Ethereum would cost tens of thousands of dollars”) but could also jeopardize the network’s operational efficiency.
King states that the use of IPFS is a pragmatic solution, balancing verifiability and scalability without overwhelming blockchain infrastructure. “[It] makes the NFT-to-artwork relationship verifiable and provably correct,” offering a solution that aligns with the practical needs of the NFT ecosystem. However, IPFS, while valuable, isn’t a bullet-proof solution for long-term conservation. It only serves an NFT as long as people pay to run the IPFS nodes, which means many collectors and artists, when minting an NFT, are putting their trust in others to continue running these nodes, within a blockchain culture that is supposedly designed to be “trustless”. But what about artworks that are actually “fully onchain”?
“Onchain art” is a misnomer
"Onchain art" is a misnomer, as it implies that the artwork itself exists fully on a blockchain, while in reality the media are hosted elsewhere, and only information such as the metadata or ownership records reside onchain. One may protest that there exists the ever so rare and elusive category, the 1-10% of NFTs, that comprise “fully onchain art”, and surely those artworks will stand the test of time. King, for his part, states that fully onchain art “certainly has the easiest ‘conservation story’ to explain: the art will live as long as the blockchain lives” …albeit with a caveat: “(unless the nodes vote to purge the data...)”. He applauds initiatives like Artblocks for providing a platform for generative art within an onchain native space, as well as projects like CryptoPunks, who migrated their PFPs onchain in 2021.
Regina Harsanyi, Associate Curator of Media Arts at the Museum of Moving Image, isn’t so convinced, however. In an interview over a call, Harsanyi states that she has “not found a work that is truly fully onchain.” She admits, “for many years I would have argued that Autoglyphs were fully onchain. They are absolutely 100% not fully onchain.” The reason is that the instructions to display Autoglyphs, a generative art series created by Larva Labs (the team behind CryptoPunks), is noted in the comments of its Solidity smart contract, not in the actual code itself. The comments in Solidity do not get deployed onchain.
In addition, when a viewer decides to load the data from the smart contract to view an Autoglyph, the artwork does not display properly, appearing as warped or truncated depending on the browser or software used. Calling up a work from a blockchain in a terminal window alone cannot visually or sonically render these pieces and an external interface is still needed to fully display the work as the artist intended, bringing into question if this broken display of the work–derived directly from the smart contract of the artwork itself, but displayed through third-party or proprietary softwares–can even be considered a true representation of the work at all. It appears, then, that even the noblest of efforts to bring art fully onchain still involve a few shortcomings today.
Solutions for conservation
NFTs (or at least the media associated with them) are therefore not the exemplars of “permanence” and “immutability” that is marketed to us, and “onchain art” probably doesn’t exist. Are our JPEGs doomed?
The short answer is: mostly, yes. But thankfully, there are preventative measures that artists and collectors can take in order to prolong the life of the digital artworks that they mint for as long as possible going forward. For collectors who have never considered the preservation of their collection, using services such as ClubNFT is already a first step. ClubNFT allows collectors to “pin” NFTs (create a “copy” of your NFT on another location in IPFS, in case the IPFS node that a platform pays for is ever neglected), thereby providing a back up.
If collectors and artists want to be even more rigorous in the preservation of their works, taking it into their own hands is the safest method. Harsanyi warns that these processes are arduous and “anti-capitalist”. There is no homogenized or quick-buck way of preserving an artwork file, as each piece needs to be considered and treated according to its unique file formats and conditions. However, they are the best approach for artists and collectors who believe that their works will go on to be exhibited in museums and bought by patrons across decades.
For artists, a lot of the preservation is actually preventative and occurs in the pre-mint phase. Harsanyi shares that artists can create what are called ‘Submission Information Packages’ (SIP) or ‘Archival Information Packages’ (AIP), which are folders that contain all files, metadata, and archival information that can help someone understand the work so that it can be exhibited and restored well into the future or after the artist has passed. It should include archival data for the artwork from an export of an uncompressed and lossless file (such as DPX for video and WAV for sound), an exhibition copy of the work that is much lighter and used for exhibitions (such as standard H.264 MP4 files), and a web copy (usually under 100 MB) that is used as the media to mint the NFT. Within this folder, artists should also include a plain text file with the metadata of the artwork and instructions on how they would like the work to be preserved in the future (for example, can the file be migrated to another format if in the future certain file types are made defunct? Or is the format an essential part of the concept of the work and should not be tampered with? etc.).
The last step, according to Harsanyi, is to put this folder on multiple hard drives, with at least one or two in a different geographical location, should there be a disaster such as a fire in the artist’s studio.
In the mint phase itself, artists should upload their artwork (the larger exhibition or archival version) to IPFS themselves, and then include the IPFS link in the description of their NFT when minting. Putting the self-hosted IPFS link in the description of the artwork means that this information will be on the blockchain, allowing for the image of the artwork to be directly associated with the token itself, whilst also providing collectors with the higher resolution file that most NFT platforms today do not allow. Taking the additional step of self-hosting a work on IPFS also provides the artist with more control over the maintenance of the IPFS nodes storing their artwork.
Conclusion: we don’t need the blockchain, we need a shift in mentality
One of the inherent contradictions in the idea of preservation of art on the blockchain is that the blockchain is an immutable technology whereas, as Harsanyi argues, digital art benefits from mutability in order to survive and be preservable. File formats, software, and even the blockchain itself will all invariably be updated in the future (anyone remember the Merge? Well wasn’t that a big change), so having the flexibility to adapt is a crucial aspect of digital art conservation. Blockchains and image-based artworks are actually not that compatible, and so Web3 needs a shift in mentality, approach and practice towards the preservation of digital artworks in the form of NFTs. King reminds us: ‘We all feel that the blockchain is somewhat magical, and one natural assumption is that everything it touches becomes permanent. For art, at least, this is mostly untrue. All art, including digital art, needs someone to take care of it.’
It is therefore in our hands–artists, collectors, curators in Web3–to take responsibility for the care and preservation of these artworks. Blockchains are totally unreliable as a preservation tool, our NFTs will almost all disappear one day, and this fact needs to be more widely understood within the Web3 community. Once this fact sinks in, artists and collectors who wish for their artworks to stand the test of time or one day reside in the collection of a museum, should take the steps above to document, archive and protect these works as thoroughly as they can.
And for other creators and collectors, perhaps the ephemeral nature of digital and web-based media is a fate to be accepted rather than resisted. These individuals submit to the experience of creating and collecting NFTs as just another historical slice of time, briefly gorgeous, inebriated with art, internet friends, and–if you’re lucky–money, links left to rot, JPEGs to the wind.
V&B
