Atomic Lore’s new Media Upload feature was developed after receiving requests from artists to upload additional media files (PDF, JPEG, PNG, GIF, MP4, and MOV) and attest work in progress (WIP) documents, catalogues, pricing data, behind the scene and exhibition photos to their NFTs and profiles onchain. This solution can further tell the story of who they are as creatives, and showcase behind the scenes documents.

It was challenging for artists to juggle dozens of Web2 storage links like Dropbox or Google Drive to send to collectors, curators and exhibitors, on top of sending the work itself, exhibition records, press and more. Artists found that URLs became broken, lost, or completely disorganized and felt unprofessional sending a huge list of links to prospective buyers.

There was a clear need for artists to associate contextualized media files – whether that be a CV, collector history, or photos of their studio – to an NFT, or collection of NFTs.

ancurated, an African and Afro-diaspora digital artist collective, needed assistance in permanently documenting their zine* SIXTEEN X NINE*. It had previously been minted on several marketplaces, only for the team to discover their minting platforms deprecated PDF support. The collective wanted permanent archiving of SIXTEEN X NINE as well as the ability to tie varying artists and artwork to the publication.

Sares, an Argentine emerging artist, was struggling to centralize all of his exhibition records, interviews, and series-related media. For his collection Dogma, Sares was able to attach a “Proof of Craft” document, sharing the complete process and meaning behind the series.

Mixed media artist Cat Russel’s work in progress photos were important for him save alongside Etchings: a labor intensive series of print-like collages. Dozens of documents were saved to his Onchain Collection, meticulously capturing the painstaking process of creating dynamic portraits.

Our team worked alongside One Love Art DAO to document AGAPE – a special collection using a Transient Labs ERC-7160 contract. This Multi-Creation Token holds 20 artworks within a single NFT. In order to further tell the collective story, OLD used Atomic Lore to upload images and lore of all art held within the singular token so they could be seamlessly displayed alongside each other and their history.

Artists and creative collectives are now empowered to permanently associate important documents to any tokenized asset, exhibition, collection, or series. Creating a work of art is not a simple process; our Media Upload feature helps artists show this reality. This feature also supports artists who would like support for NFTs minted on older or closed marketplaces. The ancurated team shared that, “What Atomic Form is doing is perfect because a lot of the marketplaces have removed PDF or visual access [to our NFT]. We really need somewhere to put this because we think it is important.”

https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0x41Ccd79D91Dd18fC40d976e7895a51ff6934375D/1

In November of last year, the Toledo Museum of Art (TMA) made history with their acquisition of Abyssinian Queen by Yatreda ያጥሬዳ, the Ethiopian familial artist collective. For the first time, the TMA used cryptocurrency (USDC) to purchase and officially acquire an artwork for their permanent collection, with Abyssinian Queen now standing as the fifth digital work in the museum's archive.

When the Atomic Form team heard the news of the acquisition, we approached Calvin Burchfiel, the Technology Lead at the TMA, to gather any online cultural discourse around Abyssinian Queen and save on Atomic Lore. Burchfiel states, "It's incredibly important for future institutions that we capture not just the art, but why the art matters on-chain." Our company's mission is founded on the belief that we need to help citizens of the digital world record significant information permanently. Through a combination of IPFS and Arweave storage, we've successfully saved articles, tweets, and media files about Abyssinian Queen that are now archived forever. 

We felt strongly and urgently that we had to document this art history and the story of how it all happened. This event is an institutional embrace of digital art and a marker in the history of contemporary Ethiopian and Black fine art, led by the creative forces at Yatreda.

https://x.com/yatreda/status/1835301960255230416

Yatreda is a family-based artist collective from Ethiopia led by cofounder and creative director Kiya Tedele. Yatreda's creative practice has produced perhaps the most recognizable bodies of work in the digital art and NFT space. Black and white photographs and slow-motion videos capture "tizita," a thematic style that evokes nostalgia. Yatreda's body of work communicates a riveting energy that viewers often feel strongly bonded to. We see people dancing or cinematically engaging with mystical beings emerging from the water; it's a feeling that you've seen this story or feeling before. You just can't place where.

Abyssinian Queen is one of several pieces in a collection that bears the same name, a name that is a nod to the legendary queens of ancient Ethiopia. It marks a new direction in Yatreda's work, stepping away from classical Ethiopian history and closer to cultural and childhood memory. With this work, Yatreda is looking to their own collective experience as fodder for art. The TMA writes that, "This turn towards the fantastical serves as a therapeutic counterbalance to the challenge of modernization, and blockchain ensures the lasting celebration and preservation of their Ethiopian heritage."

Yatreda was selected as a member of the TMA Lab's Digital Artist in Residence program, resulting in the project House of Yatreda, a multi-spatial interdisciplinary experience at the museum. As part of the residency, an Ethiopian coffee ceremony was performed within the exhibit, exemplifying a community-focused Ethiopian tradition in stark contrast to the impersonal American consumerist experience. Participants received a glass cup made by the TMA embedded with NFC chips that led to a mint page for Coffee Proverbs; secret messages revealed themselves to participants with notes such as "On the blockchain, history is written in digital stone*.*"

House of Yatreda was also included in an exhibition titled Ethiopia at the Crossroads, documenting 2,000 years of Ethiopian history and includes texts and works from as early as the 15th century.

In the same pursuit of documenting and exhibiting a rich cultural history, we know that the Abyssinian Queen's history will continue to grow and evolve. We built tools to archive this information forever, not just because we can but also because it's important. Regardless of what happens to Artnet, the TMA, and even our own company, all of this lore is saved on-chain, forever. In the face of a continued historical erasure of gender and racial minorities' art, we want to make sure there is permanence in this historical event.

Yatreda's dedication to documenting history – both the cultural and inherited familial stories through blockchain documentation – has not gone unnoticed by art historians and modern technological figureheads.

https://x.com/SamSpratt/status/1761055391167697079

Vitalik Buterin noted in a 2022 TIME Magazine interview that NFTs have the potential to "fund artists that would otherwise not be able to get funded, like Yatreda in Ethiopia," as a way to empower people "who tend to not really get empowered by more centralized ways of doing things."

Artist Sam Spratt beautifully wrote about Yatreda as a contributor to On NFTs, the first major art historical survey text published by Taschen. "In this nascent NFT world crowded with empty art and outright scams, Yatreda stands out like a beacon of hope for those early bright-eyed Ethereum developers who sought to change the world. Yatreda, which began in their humble front yard in Addis Ababa, has become one of the most powerful and pure expressions of digital fine art in our space."

Yatreda and their work have become inseparable from the technology on which they have built their creative legacy upon. They embrace this element of storytelling and ideological operations through their continued use of blockchain technology. We think they're just getting started.

https://x.com/FKA787/status/1858642084925698347

It was essential to us to document the collective discourse from collectors, friends, and fellow artists as well as institutional publications that provided additional support and history to the acquisition of Abyssinian Queen. Not only was it important to capture articles from cultural, institutional publishers like Artnet, Wallpaper Magazine, Artsy, the TMA, and more, but also those who have been alongside Yatreda for their digital art journey.

While it's extremely important and notable to capture an event considered "novel for a major museum," it's also extremely heartening to see Roger Dickerman's own take on contextualizing Abyssinian Queen, and strong support from the likes of Deca Art founder Bonafidehan, Sam Spratt and cultural commentators like 787 and Benny "Red Beard." Don't worry - we archived all of these too.

https://x.com/RogerDickerman/status/1858848204311126407

We know that the acquisition of Abyssinian Queen did not happen in one day, one year, or even in one lifetime. Yatreda's work is the culmination of thousands of years of history, generational storytelling, perseverance, collective joy, power, and creativity that has come together for this singular moment. The TMA's embrace of digital artwork comes in a swell of tens of thousands of art lovers developing a relationship with Yatreda's work; from Strong Hair (2022) to Movement of the Ancestors (2021), we recognize that Abyssinian Queen stands alone spectacularly as a documentation of the experience of Tadele and her sister, as well as a revelation to the hundreds of patrons in the digital art world.

-

You can learn more about Abyssinian Queen's lore on its Atomic Lore page here.

None of this would have happened without the incredible work of Yatreda ያጥሬዳ, and their relentless pursuit of redefining contemporary art globally. A huge thank you to the Toledo Museum of Art for trusting us with this onchain archival project.

NFTs have revolutionized the digital art world. By linking a digital artifact to an onchain identifier, we have unlocked the ability to track its provenance, prove its ownership, and use cryptographic signatures (i.e. attestations) to connect all the offchain lore to them.

But what about collections of art?

Sadly, these have not yet moved onchain.

A collection of NFTs should be a first-class citizen in the web3 world, yet NFT collections live as centralized data in web2 databases, far off the chain.

Atomic Form wants to change this. Today, we are introducing a new primitive to bring NFT collections onchain.

How NFT collections work today

Unlike an NFT, which is an individual token on a blockchain, a collection is a contextual grouping of NFTs. Collections list multiple NFTs along with their metadata, such as title, description, or cover image.

However, NFT collections have no on-chain representation yet. Artists, collectors, and curators must choose one of the NFT marketplace platforms and create a collection there. To see an artist’s portfolio or a collector’s or curator’s collection, you must visit a specific NFT marketplace or maybe several of them for each blockchain.

Marketplaces use collections primarily to present their offerings. Their collections live in one of their warehouse databases and share all the disadvantages of Web2 data: they are centralized, ephemeral, and unverifiable. While these drawbacks may be overlooked for the purpose of trading NFT art, in the art world, a collection is much more than a short-lived, volatile data set—it can represent an artist’s lifetime portfolio, tell a collector’s story, or prove a curator’s exhibition history.

Why we need a fundamental change

Given the higher demands of art world collections, we are long overdue for a fundamental shift in how NFT collections are managed. The current system has six severe limitations that we need to overcome to make collections universally useful: fragmentation, centralization, incompleteness, fragility, inconsistency, and the lack of a canonical identifier.

• Fragmentation occurs because each marketplace has its own collection system, leading to disconnected and proprietary formats. Collections are disconnected from related collections on other marketplaces, making it difficult to track which NFTs belong to a given collection or which collections a given NFT belongs to. This fragmentation limits the growth and richness of data relationships between collections.

• Centralization results from storing collections in marketplace-specific databases, risking data loss if platforms fail. This creates barriers between marketplaces, making it challenging to transfer or manage collections across multiple platforms due to the lack of a unified, portable data model.

• Incompleteness arises because current NFT collections often lack comprehensive metadata and contextual information, hindering the full representation of an artist’s work, a collector’s holdings, or a curator’s exhibition.

• Fragility is an almost natural property of web2 data. A database record can be deleted in an instant, and without a complete and persistent system of logs, it is next to impossible to verify—or even know—that the record ever existed.

• Inconsistency results from different platforms and databases recording and presenting information variably, leading to discrepancies that undermine the integrity of the collection and erode trust among stakeholders.

• The lack of a canonical identifier prevents referring to a collection as a whole. It cannot have an on-chain representation, nor is there a meaningful way of adding data or metadata that belongs to the whole collection. Additionally, without a standard identifier, there's no single source of truth for multiple digital copies of a collection.

Clearly, the current system is not a good foundation for building and maintaining long-lasting collections. Artists, collectors, and curators need a more reliable solution.

Artists

Artists frequently see their portfolio scattered across marketplaces. How should they present their work as a single collection? They have no choice but to manually assemble a “meta-collection” to catalog the various marketplace-specific collections. For example, the Brinkman NFT collection exists on 57 marketplaces, including SuperRare, NiftyGateway, Manifold, Rarible, and many more. The Brinkman NFT Catalog as a whole only exists as a table on Google Sheets, manually collected from all the marketplaces.But even when this tedious, manual work is done, and everything is gathered in one place, the collection is still not verifiable as a whole. While it is possible to verify each NFT in a collection individually, the exact contents of a collection remain the artist's unverified intention. Moreover, artists must frequently take action to keep their portfolio complete. Whenever a marketplace disappears, artists who have a collection listed there have to replicate it in another marketplace.

Collectors and curators

Collectors and curators have no choice but to trust the marketplace platforms. Unfortunately, the web3 idea of zero-trust transactions has yet to be applied to collections. The nature of web2 data makes verifying a collection’s authenticity, ownership, and completeness virtually impossible. The distribution of collections across marketplaces makes verifying any of these attributes even more difficult.

The only conclusion to be drawn from this flawed state of collections is this:

Collections must move onto the chain.

A canonical, on-chain definition of a collection would solve all of the existing deficiencies once and for all. Based on an on-chain collection, a universal collection standard could be established across marketplaces and chains.

Such a standardized, decentralized collection system would also enable essential features and functionalities of collections that the current system does not support. For example, at present, a tweet about an entire collection must be applied to all NFTs in a collection individually. With a decentralized collection, the tweet could be applied in one step.

Atomic Form’s on-chain collection proposal

To arrive at a world of verifiable collections, the NFT art world must find and agree on a universal collection format that covers all the needs of decentralized, verifiable collections.

For this purpose, Atomic Form proposes a system of attestations with a structured format to build a verifiable, immutable record of NFT collections.

The technical details of the proposal are beyond the scope of this article. In a nutshell, we propose a standard attestation and metadata structure for collections that works across chains and can be easily adopted by marketplaces via API providers. The core of an on-chain collection will be a collection ID that includes the chain, smart contract, and token ID to uniquely identify the collection. The structure is designed to cover different use cases, ranging from simple grouping of NFTs to more complex curation and management of collections.

The Brinkman Catalog example represents a simple use case: All NFTs exist on a single blockchain (Ethereum) but are spread across multiple marketplaces. This scenario presents no particular technical challenges, only organizational ones. All NFTs share the same structure, and the primary task here is to consolidate all the information from different marketplaces.

Transitioning single-chain NFT collections on-chain is, therefore, quite straightforward.

A much more complex use case is the Disobedient collection on OpenSea, with NFTs spread across five different blockchains. This scenario is quite involved on the technical level, as the collection must handle five different blockchain systems simultaneously, each with its own NFT standards. For example, unlike Ethereum, Solana doesn’t require a dedicated smart contract to mint NFTs; its built-in Token Program handles this.

Our on-chain collection proposal addresses these diverse requirements, offering the flexibility and scalability needed to manage multichain collections.

Technical considerations

Several technical aspects have been considered when crafting the proposed structure, including:

• Handling unfinished collections: Collection owners must be able to add NFTs to a collection.

• Versioning and updates: All changes to a collection, such as transferring ownership, adding NFTs, or adding off-chain artifacts, should build up a traceable and verifiable history.

• Cross-chain compatibility: A collection should be able to contain NFTs from multiple chains.

• IPFS integration: Metadata must live in a content-addressable space to remain retrievable at any time.

These aspects have shaped the design, resulting in a universal and highly flexible solution.

Key features and benefits of the proposal

What do NFT artists, collectors, and curators gain through this proposal?

First, collections become transparent and verifiable. By standardizing the collection structure and rooting it on a chain, everyone can inspect the contents and metadata of a collection.

Equally important is decentralization. Collections will no longer be at the mercy of a single company. Decentralized collections will be immune to marketplace shutdowns, securely living on countless copies of the chain and a decentralized storage system.

A standardized collection system also simplifies collection management. Instead of navigating the nuances of dozens of marketplace platforms, we will have a unified way to add NFTs to a collection, update lore, or transfer ownership —transparently and verifiably.

Finally, universal, chain-based collections provide opportunities for enhanced functionality that are not possible with the current system of isolated, marketplace-owned collections. Features like verifications, allow lists, airdrops, mass attestation via collection reference, or usage by AI agents become feasible, none of which work with off-chain, web2-based collections.

For example, an artist might decide to relocate a collection to another chain. Now, two copies of the collection exist. The same happens if a forger copies a collection. Being able to attest which instance is the correct one is crucial. Without a verifiable attestation, humans, algorithms, and AIs would have to rely on the artist’s website, tweets, or other unreliable web2 sources to tell the legitimate instance from the one that’s been forged or obsoleted.

NFT collections will not be the same

Our proposal opens up a world of possibilities for artists, collectors, and curators. Collections will become much more than an entry in a proprietary database. On-chain collections fundamentally change the way we can work with collections or any verifiable grouping of NFTs.

By addressing the current limitations of NFT collections, we aim to enhance the creative possibilities of NFTs for artists, collectors, and curators alike. We envision a future where NFT curation is more accessible, verifiable, and interoperable across platforms and chains.

So let’s move collections where they belong: on-chain, with the same level of immutability and verifiability as the NFTs they contain.

Classic art makes people travel across the globe. Around 10 million people visit the Louvre each year to see the Mona Lisa, the world’s most famous painting. NFT art has the potential to offer the reverse proposition: world-class digital art brought right into your living room.

NFT art replaces singular pieces of canvas, clay, marble, or bronze with digital forms of art that can be replicated and experienced by the masses. But, the masses aren’t quite there yet. So, what’s missing?

First, we need to make NFTs easily accessible — at no cost — on devices people already own.

Second, we must provide context for the NFTs, helping audiences understand their significance beyond just images or videos. Just as the Mona Lisa is famous for its lore, NFTs are valuable for more than just visual appeal.

That’s where the partnership between Atomic Form and White Walls comes in—bringing curated NFTs, with rich context, to homes worldwide.

Here is how this partnership is set to transform the future of digital art…

Today’s NFT audience: when reality bites

NFTs aren’t new anymore. After moving through the inevitable hype cycle, NFT art has found its place within an active community of artists, curators, and collectors. For the most part, this community exists within the web3 space, primarily attracting blockchain-savvy art lovers.

Gradually, NFT art has also gained momentum among traditional art enthusiasts, mainly through two distinct channels:

1. Traditional art enthusiast exposure by visiting exhibitions at brick-and-mortar galleries or auction houses.

2. Mass consumer exposure occurring through memes on social media (Pudgy Penguins hitting 30 billion views on Giphy) or as kids toys sold through Walmart.

Yet, an invisible chasm exists that NFTs have not yet been able to cross. Most people in the world have never heard of NFT art, or if they have, they dismiss it as computer-generated images with no artistic merit. For them, NFT art is only for “crypto” enthusiasts. Two major factors are keeping most people at arm’s length:

• The steep learning curve required to engage with NFTs — like understanding blockchain or managing a web3 wallet.

• The cost of high-end, blockchain-connected displays.

This situation needs to change. Art, in its many forms, thrives on connection and reach. For NFT artists, the goal is no different from that of traditional artists: to have their work seen, felt, and understood. To touch a wider audience, NFT art must find its way beyond its current niche.

White Walls and Atomic Form are working on different pieces of a holistic solution that removes the technological barriers, making it easier for more people to experience and appreciate NFT art—without needing to become blockchain experts.

Art on demand: How White Walls brings art to every home

Traditionally, displaying NFT art — from “wallet to wall” — requires a high-end display with built-in NFT connectivity and ownership of the NFTs themselves, meaning users must have a web3 wallet. These two requirements significantly limit the number of possible users.

White Walls radically removes these obstacles. With its app, any TV connected to an Apple TV and any smartphone can display NFT art. Purchasing high-end hardware is no longer required to join the NFT art community.

Moreover, established artists license some of their work to White Walls at no cost, eliminating the need for users to own an NFT in order to display it. Enjoying NFT art has become both simple and affordable. Users can select from one of the many curated channels and stream NFT art "from token to TV" for free.

This shift also addresses a deeper issue. Delivering high-quality digital art to potentially billions of people worldwide will help dispel the lingering misconception that NFTs have no intrinsic value and can’t hold their own on a wall alongside traditional art. As people gain easy access to world-class digital art, their perceptions will start to shift.

Art in context: How Atomic Form adds depth to NFT art

Seeing the Mona Lisa for the first time might leave the observer intrigued but perhaps confused: What makes this painting so special?

Reading the title offers some context, but only by learning about the painting’s history and background—its mysterious subject, Da Vinci’s techniques, and centuries of lore—does the full significance of the artwork come to light. With this context, the painting takes on new meaning.

To learn more about the controversy surrounding the Mona Lisa, check out this thread.

https://x.com/TrungTPhan/status/1555218658070147072

A painting is more than just paint on canvas. A painting can become famous for its aesthetics, the artist behind it, and the stories about it. History teaches us that the last aspect often has the highest impact.

This is even truer for digital art, which can evolve and include interactive elements and contributions from people besides the artist. Digital art often generates its own stories, feedback, and connections with communities that are a part of the artwork and ultimately become part of its lore.

Obtaining this kind of information for traditional art usually requires extensive research across scattered sources. If the artist is famous enough, there might be a catalogue raisonné available. With Atomic Lore, all this context is just a few taps away.

Our service, Atomic Lore, helps artists and curators collect and preserve the provenance and lore of NFTs, digitally signed and stored on decentralized networks. Through the White Walls app, people can access an NFTs provenance, background story, and all that makes up its lore, right from their living room.

Distribution and connection: A fusion revolutionizing art consumption

What may seem like two unrelated services have united to create a unique synergy. A closer look reveals that White Walls and Atomic Form represent two complementary aspects of making digital art accessible:

• White Walls redefines NFT curation and display by providing access to NFT art on everyday devices.

• Atomic Form delivers unmatched context and education by providing detailed background information on NFTs.

Together, White Walls and Atomic Form are transforming NFTs from a niche interest into an engaging, educational experience for art enthusiasts at all levels.

NFT art reaches a new level of liberation

NFT art is finally poised to cross the chasm and find its way into homes — and hearts — around the world. White Walls’ curated streams of NFTs to everyday devices unlocks access to digital art for everyone, while Atomic Form adds a new layer of depth to the experience through rich context and storytelling.

By combining these two distinct approaches to accessing art, the partnership between White Walls and Atomic Form paves the way for a new era in digital art appreciation and collection.

Cover photo "How are you?" by @kitahara_keiko

You look down at yourself and see you're in a spacesuit. The world you’re in is like nothing you have ever seen. You walk through ever-changing landscapes, only protected by thin layers of airtight garments. You don’t know if the place you’re in is hostile or welcoming. Slowly, you realize that you are not dreaming at all. However, the world around you is not real either, at least not in the classic sense. In fact, you are the first human to witness a new dimension of reality.

Having come to this realization, the explorer in HUMAN ONE embarks on an infinite walk through the various terrains this metaverse provides. In a certain sense, HUMAN ONE itself creates a new dimension of reality.

Its creator, Michael Winkelmann, a.k.a. Beeple, designed this digital video sculpture to live between the digital and the physical world. Four video screens are mounted on a slowly rotating, phone-booth-like metal case, displaying what Beeple describes as “an illustration of what it would be like when the metaverse exists, and the first person is born in the metaverse.” While the artifacts that HUMAN ONE consists of can be viewed online by anyone as a 2D video, the video sculpture is the only way to experience the artwork in real life and in three dimensions, as intended by the artist. Like paintings or marble sculptures, HUMAN ONE has to be installed in a physical space to be watched by visitors.

This by itself would be notable, but Beeple did not stop here. The metaverse is an emergent, dreamlike digital universe that expands and evolves. HUMAN ONE adopts this characteristic by evolving, too. Whenever HUMAN ONE is exhibited in a new place, Beeple adds more video footage to extend the story of the first Metaverse native. The NFT continues to evolve, even after being sold already. Imagine classic artists doing that with their oil paintings! “Ding dong.” “Hello! May I come in? It’s time for the quarterly re-painting. I brought my oil colors and brushes with me.” It may be a silly idea for classic paintings, but intriguing in the context of NFTs.

The truly unique nature of HUMAN ONE already generated broad media coverage and critical reception from both the traditional and the digital art worlds. HUMAN ONE is building up a large amount of off-chain history from the responses of the media and the public. Add the list of exhibitions where HUMAN ONE was shown and will be shown. Then, add the increasing amount of video footage to be added. Now, you have a rough impression of the vast amount of data that HUMAN ONE has accumulated and continues  accumulating as its lore.

By bridging the digital and physical world, HUMAN ONE has triggered reactions that bridge the crypto-native world with traditional art and mainstream media.

Bridging the physical-digital divide

When art backed NFTs exploded in the early 2020s, digital art had a watershed moment, punctuated by the $69 million dollar sale of Beeple's The First 5000 Days at Christie's in 2021. This success rekindled a debate in the traditional art world. Was digital art as valid a format of art as its physical counterparts? Are atoms more valuable than bits? Is the future digital, physical or both?

These questions are still being hotly contested. However, we are seeing the lines blur as more and more artists create in both worlds. Contemporary art moves on a spectrum between physical and digital with infinite variation.. It tends to embrace and extend itself into the technologies of its time, and this movement is just getting started with that exploration.

HUMAN ONE ingeniously synergizes both ends of the spectrum. The manifold Metaverse landscapes can only be experienced through a life size, unique sculpture. that can only be exhibited in a single place at a time. Its digital core is rooted in a unique non-fungible token on a blockchain: digital soul, physical footprint. This dichotomy embodies the best of both worlds and serves as an entrypoint for art enthusiasts from all backgrounds.

Evolution as an art form

“People really resonate with this idea of art that is evolving, that is a river of time, that you can step back to and is not the same thing.”

• – Ryan Zurrer, owner of HUMAN ONE, on the SquiggleDAO podcast*

Besides bridging the physical-digital divide, HUMAN ONE also breaks up with the idea of artwork being immutable once created. In most traditional art, when the artist lays down the tools and declares his piece as finished, it won’t change anymore except through natural decay or deliberate destruction.

HUMAN ONE is nothing like this. Together with artwork like Unsupervised or Ethereal Rose, it spearheads a new generation of art that refuses immutability. This new kind of art undergoes constant evolution after its initial release. At each exhibition it is part of, HUMAN ONE will be different from before. The factor of time and change adds a new quality: uncertainty. According to Sam Spratt, HUMAN ONE is “a work that has the ability to die if not kept in motion. If the gears stop turning, the code breaks, the power cords unplug, the generator fails, the battery drains, the update fails, the location stops changing, the artist stops creating, or even worse: stops growing: the walk cycle ends—it can die in little ways gradually, or even all at once.”

Art collectors have to deal with this new quality of art. It is a risk and a chance.

Capturing lore and provenance of evolving art

“The token ID is not the end of the story - it's the beginning.”

– @izgnzlz

When the fluidity of time becomes part of an artwork, the dimension of time needs to be preserved as any other aspect of that artwork. If you saw HUMAN ONE for the first time in 2030 and  discovered there were ten previous versions, wouldn’t you be curious to see what HUMAN ONE looked like at its very first exhibition? Or how it changed between two exhibitions?

But if we take a step back, we can see that NFT art already includes a time aspect. It accumulates a track record of exhibitions, social media responses, and other off-chain data, in addition to on-chain provenance like the mint date and the transfer history.

Take another NFT as an example. Sam Spratt’s The Monument Game became famous not only for being a giant digital painting with countless details to explore, but also for including several thematic layers.

• Sam Spratt posted the painting’s backstory on X

• A few dozen selected players were entitled to select a spot in the painting and leave a thought there, leading to numerous inscriptions that are now part of the artwork

• The engagement of the Monument Game to the web3-native community

HUMAN ONE extends these layers in several aspects.

• The artwork itself continues to evolve

• Each evolution contains hidden clues and corresponding rewards, gamifying each chapter of HUMAN ONE for an online native audience

• It created an unusually large coverage on classic media, whereas other NFTs typically observe coverage on social media only

• It gets critical reception from both the traditional art world and the digital art world

Look closely, and you’ll notice that all these layers have two traits in common: they are immaterial and generate ongoing change. Great art, however, is worth existing for centuries to come and bringing joy to generations of art lovers. Preserving NFT art and all of its history for future generations is vital.

This is why we at Atomic Form are pleased to provide the means of capturing and storing NFT art and all of its lore. We leverage the world’s most advanced technology for eternal storage to preserve all key parts of HUMAN ONE’s history, creating a lore yet unseen with other NFTs. As of this writing, we captured about 30 citations in Atomic Lore, along with the evolving assets of the artwork itself. The token on the blockchain is the undisputable root of all the artwork’s assets and lore. It allows us to capture, sign, and preserve the artwork’s history in a decentralized way.

Conclusion: The future of hybrid, evolutionary art forms

The new generation of fluid, multidimensional, ever-changing art has an impact on art collectors and the art world as a whole.

Collectors must embrace the idea of buying a work that is still progressing. They will not know what the final piece of art will be like—if the progress ever comes to an end. Collectors have to decide whether they consider this a risk or whether they decide to stay curious and excited to participate in the artwork’s evolution.

As Beeple said, “It opens up a different type of relationship with the collector. Ryan [Zurrer], the owner of the work, knew that I might say something at some point that he wouldn’t agree with. But that excited him because this was something he couldn’t have control over. There is a level of trust with him that I’m going to update this artwork in a way that continues to challenge people with beauty and new meaning.”

The art world will undoubtedly see hybrid art, evolutional art, and any combination thereof gain enormous momentum. This momentum depends on a reliable, trustworthy way of capturing an artwork's provenance, collecting its off-chain history, and, ultimately, building and preserving its lore forever. At Atomic Form, we work on making this vision a reality.

Atomic Form thanks Lukas from 1of1 for his invaluable feedback during the review stage of this article.

The good news is that anyone can begin using Atomic Lore today! Simply go to an individual NFTs page, pick the template, fill out the form, and sign an attestation.

However, the challenge isn’t in creating a few individual records in Atomic Lore. That’s easy! The challenge for many is the time and effort to import dozens, hundreds, or thousands of records at a time. These practical, workflow challenges prevent most NFT curators from even getting started.

We’ve worked hard the last few months to create an elegant solution to this problem. And we are thrilled to announce this is no longer an issue now that we have Atomic Lore’s rollup attestation feature.

Manual Attestations Don’t Scale

Attestation is an invaluable tool for creating verifiable provenance for a piece of art. The process is reasonably simple: To attest a proof of exhibition (PoE), the artist and the curator provide cryptographic signatures about a document or claim. One party signs the proof document, and the other party countersigns it. Everyone can retrieve the signing keys from either party’s wallet and verify the authenticity of the proof.

Now think of an exhibition with hundreds of pieces, probably from multiple artists. How can a gallery sign the PoEs for all pieces without expending unreasonable effort and time? Manually signing individual PoEs does not scale well for three reasons:

1. Time: Manually signing a PoE takes a certain amount of time. And even if you have all the data ready in a spreadsheet, it’s still time intensive.

2. Quality: Repeated manual tasks are almost always a source of increased failure rate. If someone has to sign hundreds or thousands of PoEs, mistakes are inevitable.

3. Security: A signing party may want to delegate the bulk signing to another person, another wallet, or an online service. However, a valid signature requires the signing party’s secret key. Giving away your secret key is extremely risky, even if you fully trust that person or service. After all, mistakes happen—see point 2. Moreover, exposing your secret key to others breaks the chain of trust, no matter whether the third party actually uses the key for unauthorized signing.

These are three fundamental obstacles to scaling manual signing, and there is no way around them—that’s why they are fundamental. To manage signing at scale while taking on only a reasonable burden of time and effort, we will need to find a different way.

Moving away from individual signatures

To handle the mass signing of hundreds or thousands of PoEs, the signing process must be simplified and made faster—much faster!—without sacrificing quality or security.

A scalable attestation service must combine several features:

• It must be decentralized for true scalability with no single point of failure and no intermediaries for verification.

• It must not introduce any trust assumptions that replace real trust

• It must not have any security gaps

• While fulfilling all of the above, it must still serve all the business requirements of its users

Attempt #1: one-dimensional scaling

A first naive attempt at scaling the signing process is linear scaling. Take hundreds of PoEs and pass them to an intern (along with plenty of Red Bull) or to a tool or an external service for signing the PoEs one by one. This is a simple and straightforward solution, but unfortunately, it has severe drawbacks.

1. The process is still serial. While it is more convenient than signing each PoE separately, it does not speed up the signing significantly, so this solution's scalability has a natural limitation: time.

2. The signing and countersigning parties must still expose their secret keys to a person, a tool, or a service to perform the bulk signing. You don’t want your intern stealing or leaking that key due to poor OPSEC.

To escape the dead-end of serial scaling, we have to take an orthogonal approach.

Attempt #2: roll-up attestation

What if we could sign an arbitrary number of PoEs with a single signing step? Obviously, we can’t simply string all the PoE documents together and sign them as a big, single document. Verifying the signature for any of the included PoEs would become a slow and tedious process. You would have to find all other PoE documents included in the signature, concatenate them, and get the hash digest to compare with the signature.

Luckily, there is another way. We can use a technique that is already used to speed up blockchain transactions on L2 rollups.

Verifying transactions on a blockchain is a rather slow process due to some inherent system characteristics. A smart way out of the inherent limitations is the use of level-2 blockchains that can process transactions in parallel to the level-1 blockchain they were built upon, thus taking the load off the level-1 chain. When enough transactions have been processed, the processed transaction data is rolled up to a single hash value and transmitted to the level-1 chain as a single transaction. The level-1 chain validates this transaction, and this validation can be used as proof of the level-2 transactions.

This roll-up mechanism for transaction is ideally suited for the highly scalable signing of many attestations.

Roll-ups at a glance

Before looking into use cases and benefits, let’s briefly examine the mechanics of roll-up attestations.

From a user’s perspective, the process includes four steps:

1. The user uploads data (proof of exhibition document, off-chain history, etc)

2. Atomic Form rolls up the data into individual and a global content identifiers (CIDs).

3. The user approves the roll-up by signing an attestation containing this roll-up CID.

4. Atomic Form derives individual attestations for each document.

(See the diagram below.)

How do roll-ups work in detail?

If you have heard of Merkle Trees, you may already have an idea of how roll-ups work. The Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS), for example, uses Merkle Trees to create attestations for private data. In a nutshell, an arbitrary number of documents builds the leaves of the Merkle Tree, and their hash representations are iteratively condensed into a single hash value at the root of the tree.

Our roll-up mechanism builds upon the same idea while being simpler and requiring fewer iterations than building a Merkle Tree. Here is a brief description of how we construct roll-ups from proofs of exhibition.

Step 1: You upload

At the start of the roll-up process, there are several proofs of exhibition (PoE) or other offline records requiring attestation. The user uploads them in Atomic Form (one record per row in a CSV file).

Step 2: We roll up

In the roll-up phase, Atomic Form takes the uploaded data, creates individual records for each, and then creates a roll-up file that combines them into a single content identifier (CID). This happens in two steps.

1. Calculate the CID of each uploaded document. Cryptographic hash functions allow for calculating a relatively short value from a much longer document. Virtually every document someone can create has a unique hash value. In other words, this hash value unambiguously identifies the document it was created from. Change a single bit of the document, and the hash function delivers an entirely different hash value. We use this cryptographic hashing to create a unique CID for each document.

2. Concatenate all CIDs into a single document. If you can calculate a CID from a document, you can calculate a CID from other CIDs as well. So in this step, Atomic Form takes all the CIDs from step 1 and concatenates them. Now we technically have a new document from which we can calculate another CID. This CID uniquely identifies all the PoE documents at once.

In this diagram, the roll-up phase occurs in the “We rollup” step, resulting in a single “Rollup Metadata CID” in the “You approve” step:

Step 3: You approve

At this point, all you have to do is to sign a message containing the rolled-up hash value with your wallet. Whether you uploaded ten documents or 1,000 documents, signing them requires only one step.

Step 4: We derive

The last step ensures that each individual document receives a separate attestation, derived from the roll-up attestation. Granted, the roll-up attestation already covers all the individual documents, but if each document has its own derived attestation, it can be individually reviewed and countersigned. A chain of trust is maintained by pointing each derived attestation back to the parent, roll-up attestation where it derives its authority from.

The following diagram visualizes steps 3 and 4 in the third layer:

Because building hash values is way faster than manually reviewing and signing each cryptographic signature, roll-ups are a massive time saver while retaining all the flexibility for validating individual PoEs.

The ingredients already exist: IPFS and IPLD

In the above process description, we used the term “content identifier”, or “CID”, for hash values taken from documents. You may have heard the term “CID” before. The Interplanetary File System (IPFS) and the Interplanetary Linked Data model (IPLD) use CIDs for managing documents. IPFS and IPLD are tested and proven models for content-addressable data. Atomic Form’s roll-ups make use of IPFS and IPLD technology to design a roll-up attestation based on established and future-proof web3 standards.

Note the similarity between CIDs and the hash values in the attestation roll-up description. A CID of an IPFS document is precisely the hash value we can use for a roll-up. So with IPFS and IPLD, we can design a roll-up attestation based on established and future-proof web3 standards.

Use Case: How to quickly and securely sign hundreds of Proofs of Exhibition

The main use case for roll-up attestations is the mass signing of proofs of exhibitions or Tweets. Roll-up attestation enables galleries to escape the tedious process of signing each PoE manually, while artists still have individual attestations available for each of their NFTs. It’s a win-win.

With Atomic Form, this process works as follows:

1. The gallery signs a roll-up of all PoE documents of the exhibited works. By the nature of the roll-up process, each PoE document is now signed and verified.

2. Atomic Form derives individual attestations from the signed roll-up attestation. With an Atomic Form wallet, we sign the individual documents with a back-reference to the rolled-up, gallery-signed hash value.

3. Every artist whose NFTs were exhibited (and thus are part of the roll-up) can countersign the derived attestations for their works to make the proof validation complete.

Roll-up attestations have advantages for both the galleries and the artists.

Galleries can save a lot of time and effort, especially if the exhibition is large. Moreover, the roll-up underscores that all the included NFTs were part of the same event. A roll-up of an entire show is therefore also a historical record of the show, listing all NFTs that were exhibited in the show.

Artists can collect individual evidence for the NFTs in their portfolio from the derived attestations and countersign the gallery-signed PoEs to improve the overall spectrum of proof.

Use cases beyond proof of exhibition

Roll-up attestations are not limited to proofs of exhibition. There are more cases where roll-ups can prove beneficial.

• Collectors may decide to provide attestation for all NFTs in their possession or after obtaining a large number of NFTs.

• If an online community submits dozens or hundreds of attestations, artists or collectors can co-sign them in one step.

• Social media posts about an NFT are part of the NFT’s lore. Roll-up attestation enables artists to collect dozens of posts and sign them in one step.

• If artists want to moderate numerous NFTs, like bulk-revoking them, they only need a single signature.

• Any bulk import of off-chain data, such as data from a spreadsheet or a database, can be rolled up and signed once.

• Data from multiple sources can be mixed and matched as long as you can create a CID for each data entity.

This list shows how versatile roll-up attestations are, and the future may reveal even more use cases.

Who uses roll-up attestation already?

Although we’re currently in a closed beta, we already have flagship users who took advantage of roll-up attestations.

OneLoveDAO

OneLoveDAO is a passionate community of artists built to provide a place for connecting, teaching, learning, and supporting each other. They did an extraordinary job at NFT NYC 2024 ensuring that every artist's work was on display (even video recording each exhibition to capture proof). To commemorate the event for all these works, OneLoveDAO worked with Atomic Form to sign PoEs via roll-up attestation.

Superchief Gallery

Superchief Gallery NFT is an international group of galleries with a massive show history, working for notable customers like Christie’s, OpenSea, and UNICEF. When they faced the task of backfilling attestations for thousands of already exhibited NFTs, they opted Atomic Form’s roll-up attestation service. If these attestations were done manually, at 5 minutes per attestation, they would have taken a staggering 250 hours, or one and a half months (at an 8-hour working day and 20 working days per month). Using Atomic Form for doing roll-up attestations can reduce that time by 50 to one, down to a mere 5 hours.

The time savings were immense in both cases. Large events will continue to take place, and roll-up attestations will play an increasingly important role in capturing provable exhibition history.

Save Time While Not Sacrificing Security

Roll-up attestations are a powerful and versatile mechanism for efficiently signing large amounts of structured attestations. Primarily created for, but not limited to, mass-signing proofs of exhibition, roll-up attestations shine whenever bulk data requires verification by one or more parties. Atomic Form’s roll-up attestation service is fast, secure, and convenient, and saves you time, your most precious resource.

Roll-up attestations are currently in beta. If you'd like to be one of the first beta users, get in touch with us.

Amit Sharma: Blending Classical Photography with AI

Amit Sharma has been a significant figure in the NFT and photography community for the past three years. His work is known for its philosophical depth and academic approach, combining traditional photography with the innovative use of generative AI. Sharma's approach to AI is provocative yet contemplative, seamlessly blending AI-generated elements with his own photographic creations.

The Concept Behind "The Elephant"

"The Elephant" is more than just an art exhibition; it’s a philosophical inquiry into the nature of memory and the role of AI in shaping our perception of reality. Each artwork in the series is a hybrid of 50% real photography and 50% AI-generated content, reflecting Sharma’s exploration of false memory and the essence of human experience. This innovative project challenges viewers to question the value of art created by blending human creativity with artificial intelligence.

Human memory is fallible and unreliable due to its reconstructive nature, meaning memories are not stored like computer files but are reconstructed every time they are recalled. This makes them prone to distortion and alteration. Factors such as confirmation bias, suggestion, and time can further affect memory accuracy, leading to false or inaccurate recollections. Several factors contribute to false memory, including residual decay, source confusion, continuity breakdown, and half truths.

The inspiration for "The Elephant" draws from the digital manipulation of art and its impact on our emotions and thoughts. Sharma cites Andreas Gursky’s renowned image "Rhein II" as a pivotal influence, highlighting the ongoing dialogue about digital transformation in art. The exhibition not only showcases Sharma's unique artistic vision but also raises essential questions about the nature of truth and the future of AI in the art world.

https://x.com/amitsharma_raw/status/1817210034348245476

Atomic Lore: Immortalizing Art and Memory

At Atomic Form, we are committed to capturing and preserving the provenance of significant art moments. For Sharma’s "The Elephant," our Proof of Exhibition technology will document and validate the exhibition history, ensuring that this groundbreaking work is permanently recorded. By integrating offchain details with onchain assets, Atomic Lore provides a comprehensive and secure record of each artwork's journey, enhancing its credibility and value.

Sharma's belief in the need for a mass registry that is searchable and accessible aligns with our mission at Atomic Form. As part of this collaboration, we will also be incorporating countersigned Proof of Exhibition (PoE) and curating relevant tweets to enrich the narrative around this exhibition.

Looking Ahead

Amit Sharma’s project is poised to be a reference point for the future of AI and art. As he prepares to release a book detailing his printed works and the philosophical underpinnings of "The Elephant," we are excited to be part of this historic moment. The exhibition represents a pivotal crossover between digital art and AI, and Atomic Lore’s role in documenting this milestone underscores our commitment to preserving and showcasing the rich history of contemporary art.

Stay tuned for more updates on this remarkable collaboration, and join us in celebrating a new era of art that bridges the gap between human creativity and artificial intelligence.

For more information on "The Elephant" and to explore how Atomic Lore is documenting this innovative project, visit Atomic Form.

Exceptional artists spend their days immersed in the art-creating process. Some are so deeply focused on creating that they neglect all the other steps required to build a brand and make a living. That is, unless the artists join forces with an art agent and/or manager.

Art management is an underrated role in the NFT art ecosystem. When discussing artists and curators — galleries or museums — that exhibit their art, we can easily miss that a connection must first be made between artists and curators. Art management agents take over this important step. They pitch artists to curators and galleries not only to sell their art but also to help the artists build credibility over time.

Hildabroom Management, or HILDA for short, is an artist management firm “focused on growing the reach of artists in the digital and physical realms,” as its tagline states. HILDA supports artists with getting out pitches to curators, coordinating connections and events, and documenting everything.

In this article, we explore the world of art agents and management firms and examine how HILDA uses Atomic Form to present artists to galleries like Colonna Contemporary.

Great art agent work doesn’t scale easily

At a superficial glance, the work of art agents seems straightforward. After all, artists and their agents share the same interests and goals. Agents work to get artists into shows and exhibitions. They can also manage the artists’ social media presence, marketing, and even accounting.

However, agents face a fundamental problem that is rooted in the very nature of their work: the need to balance time and complexity.

Art agencies work for multiple artists, yet each of them deserves the agency's full attention and time. Nevertheless, agencies need to focus on activities with a high return on investment to stay in business. To get both time and complexity under control, agencies must build highly efficient workflows. In this context, agencies face a particular challenge:

How can they make an artist visible to curators –

• quickly and with low effort;

• deeply, which includes providing plenty of details about the artist’s pieces of work, their histories, whereabouts, and accompanying this with a verifiable track record.

To achieve a delicate balance between the two requirements, agencies need capable tools for collecting the details and building up a track record. NFT lore is the fundamental building block for this track record.

NFT lore is a “shop window” for artists, agencies, and curators alike

In traditional arts, the value of art is derived from multiple factors: The aesthetics and virtuosity of a piece, the artist’s reputation, the originality, the history, and other aspects that ultimately form a catalogue raisonné for a piece of art.

Unfortunately, the NFTs/web3 space hasn’t caught up to these standards yet. Sure, onchain records show the NFT’s price and history of ownership. However, we are nowhere close to capturing the rest of the provenance that would make up one’s onchain, verifiable catalogue raisonné.

Provenance emerges from building a track record of an artwork’s history: its creation, all exhibits at galleries and shows, and everything that happens around the artwork, such as mentions in social media and other places. All this information, collected from all the artist’s artworks, adds considerable value to the artist’s portfolio. This information should, therefore, be provable and stored safely.

Today, more and more artists and agencies are relying on Atomic Lore to preserverecord the history of an NFT over time. This growing record builds up an NFT’s lore and, at the same time, creates a living résumé for the artist. Atomic Lore cryptographically verifies and permanently stores everything that is added to an NFT’s lore, thus increasing the evidence for, and hence the value of, each added artifact.

Over time, the accumulated lore of an artist’s NFTs becomes a valuable part of evaluating the artist’s oeuvre beyond the work itself.

Above and beyond this, Atomic Lore creates a compound interest effect for all involved parties.

• The artist can build up a portfolio of their performances and services, including comments, shares, and feedback from the public

• The agency can improve its workflow and time management, thus improving its ability to handle more artists

• The curator can quickly get profound insights into an artist’s work and assess the artist based on verifiable provenance

Additionally, all three parties can –

• sell at better pricing due to the trust factor of verified provenance (improves appraisal $),

• and build up a portfolio of artwork they created, offered, or curated, respectively.

Having a verified provenance stored securely on Web3 services is a massive improvement over traditional means of art presentation and evaluation.

Connecting the dots: HILDA, Colonna Contemporary, Bhare, and Atomic Lore

Let's dive deeper into the three contributors and benefactors of those contributing to the lore.

About HILDA

HILDA is an artist management company that bridges the gap between artists and curators, helping to create meaningful connections and opportunities. What began as a side project has evolved into a full-time business, with HILDA working tirelessly to secure spots for their artists in prestigious shows and exhibitions. Their mission extends beyond mere representation; they are committed to building sustainable careers for the artists they work with.

Provenance is crucial for establishing value and authenticity. In the traditional art world, however, the methods for building provenance are rudimentary and limited. The NFT art world is a different game. HILDA can tap into existing provenance stored in Atomic Lore and collect more events and artifacts related to the NFT as they occur on the web. This is particularly important on social media platforms that suffer from short memory. Saving this short-lived content on Atomic Lore creates a comprehensive record of an artist’s journey.

In HILDA’s words, “We're working directly with artists to build sustainable careers. Recording and providing a CV + Provenance packet in the traditional art world is standard, albeit a pile of papers collected over who knows how many years… Comparing that to now, with digital art, is quite interesting. Instead of chasing provenance over decades and centuries, we're laser-focused on catching the significant moments in a social media landscape with a shorter memory than a goldfish. (No offense to goldfish!)”

Bhare’s exhibition at Colonna Contemporary

An example of HILDA’s success is the story of Bhare, an artist who creates images with acrylic paint on canvas (and other surfaces) composed of shapes and figures that virtuously combine abstract and figurative painting. After Bhare had first connected to Colonna Contemporary through fellow artist ADHD, HILDA stepped in during the creative planning process to help secure the auction and real-life solo gallery event at Colonna.

Collecting the provenance around Bhare’s solo exhibition Building a Happier Home began with signing and countersigning a proof of exhibition through Atomic Sign. Atomic Form then documented the entire history of the event on Atomic Lore, including both the auction and the gallery event. An example is the painting Mid Pacific Atlanta, whose proof of exhibition and provenance are stored safely with Atomic Lore.

https://x.com/BHAREBOY/status/1790067380720160886

The result of this provenance-building process was a resounding success: Bhare is now listed at Colonna Contemporary, and the collected provenance also played a role in placing the show at Artnet, further increasing the artist’s reach and reputation.

Michele Colonna, founder of Colonna Contemporary, sees an “incredible leverage Lore and PoE offers [artists and agencies] when pitching collab opportunities to legacy brands. For art management/agencies firms like HILDA, the real revenue drivers are the collab deals they eventually make with legacy brands, say, for example, Bhare x Diesel, and those brands are all about social validation. That’s ultimately the end game because there’s not enough revenue from the fine art-related activities to make it sustainable for an agency. That’s the big unlock.”

Provenance is a long-term game

The value of art is connected to its provenance. This has been true over the entire history of art. Collectors love the stories behind a piece of art as much as they love the piece of art itself. In fact, the stories have a high impact on a collector’s buying decision. Still, the impact of provenance is difficult to measure when the accumulated lore reaches back only weeks or months. Provenance increases value over the long term.

This shouldn’t distract us from taking the process of building provenance seriously. Every artifact related to an NFT must be meticulously collected, verified, approved, and securely stored for ages to come. Building up provenance like Atomic Lore already makes a difference to everyone involved in NFT creation, collection, and exposition, to artists, agencies, galleries, and the NFT community as a whole. Verifiable proofs of exhibition and exposition on social media are of immediate significance, but also contribute to the NFT’s future value.

Bhare is a prominent example of Atomic Lore’s impact on efficient provenance building, but he is not the only one. HILDA also successfully uses Atomic Lore with other artists:

“Of the many examples I have from this past year, I'd love to highlight the upcoming Brand drop we're doing with a one of a kind artist in @Cat_Russell_. Cat takes a unique approach to art and provenance for the long-term as he’s often spending months on a single work of art. Recording that unique journey, the events, shows, videos,tools and supplies, whatever it may be are so important in telling Cat's story to the under-informed.”

Empowerment for agents

Great art management builds upon a close relationship between the artist and the agency. Atomic Lore moves the tedious parts of collecting, verifying, and storing provenance out of the way, leaving more time for agencies to work with artists and galleries. Moreover, with Atomic Lore, an NFT’s lore is readily available to any curator, creating the “shop window” effect described earlier.

For every art agency, efficiency is the key to managing many artists while keeping a close relationship with each one. If you are an art agency, Atomic Lore can be your single most important tool to optimize your workflows. Free your time and mind for working with your clients to increase their reputation, community size, and sales.

"An exhibition that was not published didn’t happen in 10 years time" – Pamela Joyner

Is your NFT art well-received? A track record of exposure at noteworthy galleries or museums underscores — and increases — its value.

If you can prove it. And here is where the problems start.

Offchain “proof” isn’t a binary—it’s a spectrum

Everything that happens on a blockchain is provable beyond doubt. In the off-chain world, establishing >99.99% proof is inherently difficult, if not outright impossible. To name only two examples where Web2 fails: link rot causes data decay, and pieces of evidence are prone to forgery, even more so with the rise of AI deep fakes. Providing proof of exhibition faces an extra challenge: many digital exhibitions happen at physical locations. How can we create a closed, verifiable chain of evidence from the physical location (say, a gallery in Venice) to the on-chain NFT?

Thankfully, Web3 innovations have led to powerful tools that bring us significantly closer to a 100% reliable proof of exhibition.

The three levels of proof

Every artifact — be it an object or an event — requires three parts layered on top of each other to prove that it happened:

1. Declaration of a fact

2. Evidence provided to support the declaration

3. Verification of both from a party you trust (or an overwhelming social consensus)

Let me walk you through these levels of proving a fact to see why achieving 100% certainty for any proof outside the chain is not possible.

“I hereby declare that…”

Everything starts with a declaration. Someone claims that something is a fact, but this declaration is unproven. Anyone can declare anything to be true. “This NFT was exhibited at The MoMa.” Really, was it? Maybe you believe the person because of past experiences, but that trust doesn’t extend to everyone in the world.

To gain credibility, a declaration needs further support.

Show me the evidence!

Collecting evidence is the next level of proving a fact or a past event. Photos or videos might have recorded the fact, and a journalist or media outlet might mention it. The more evidence, the more plausible the fact.

Carrying pieces of evidence together might feel like solving a big puzzle, and every piece of evidence makes the puzzle more complete. But even Sherlock Holmes couldn’t just collect evidence to prove a murder. He had to interpret every piece, connect them together, and put them into the right context.

Yet, the murderer could have laid a false trace. Evidence can be forged. How many photos show an entirely made-up scene? How many counterfeit $100 bills are circulating right now? How many false certificates have been sealed and signed? How many false testimonies have been given under oath?

Moreover, evidence that is just circumstantial may lose its value if the original assumptions about the circumstances change.

Evidence must be trustworthy.

This may seem like a high-bar to demand, but we’ve seen elaborate hoaxes pulled in the web3 space. Entire founder teams have been made up to raise money from unsuspecting investors chasing the next hot deal.

How to verify evidence

A degen trader known for pump-and-dumping his bags claims to have seen Sam Spratt’s The Monument Game exhibited in Pyongyang. Would you believe him? Probably not.

Your best friend tells you that she has visited an exhibition in Venice to see The Monument Game. Would you believe her? Absolutely!

A trusted party, or social consensus from a larger group of people, can verify a declaration or a possible piece of evidence. Verifying the validity of a declaration or evidence elevates its trustworthiness.

Still, verifying evidence is not the same as an airtight proof. We may need to fact check the fact checkers, who could be paid off. A trusted party may hand you a written verification, but what does that prove to another person that you show that verification? To them, it’s not more than a possible piece of evidence.

We start running in circles!

The limits of Web2 become apparent here. Web2’s unreliability blocks everything that’s required for reliable provenance. Try to use Web2 technology to provide any of the following in a trusted way:

1. Timestamps of events: When was data created or changed?

2. Attribution: What is the nature of the data?

3. Authorship: Who created the data? And can we trust that claim?

4. Authenticity: Has the content been tampered with? Can anyone prove it?

These are the four main attributes of strong provenance. Web2 does not have the means to verify these attributes reliably. For reliable verification, Web2 would require an incorruptible, trustworthy verification system and permanent, immutable storage, which would be very difficult, if not impossible, to achieve there. And we would be stuck relying on a trusted, centralized intermediary, which is a dependency that web3 desperately tries to remove.

How web3 elevates a proof to near-100% possibility.

The existence of an NFT and any NFT artifact that lives on a blockchain, such as transactions and their timestamps, can be proven without any doubt. If someone claims to possess an NFT for a year but the transaction on the chain happened only two months ago, you can instantly prove that claim wrong.

A blockchain cannot lie about its contents. It meticulously keeps records of what was added and when, and its design effectively prevents changing the history of data. Outside the chain, however, proofs are less credible.

Proofs live on a spectrum

As discussed earlier, proving an artifact's existence and identity is difficult if it exists outside the chain. Any of the three layers— declaration, evidence, and verification — must be evaluated with caution.

• Declarations can be correct or wrong.

• Evidence can be authentic or forged.

• Verifications can be made by a trusted party, a party not trusted, or — in the worst case — an impersonator, resulting in unwarranted trust.

Every layer needs to be inspected separately, resulting in varying degrees of confidence. Therefore, every proof lives on a spectrum.

In the offline world, verification relies on central authorities like government institutions, authorized representatives like notaries, or reputable cultural entities like famous museums or galleries.

Web2 doesn’t do any better here, either. If you need a globally valid verification, you have two options:

1. Rely on a central institution like a certificate authority. These institutions are only trustworthy until the next data breach. They are also permissioned, blocking out most of the population from participation.

2. Seek some form of crowd-based proof by getting verification from communities. Here, you would rely on the amount of verification as a measurement of trustworthiness.

But in the end, even when acquiring one of those forms of verification, Web2 is inherently forgetful — as we discussed earlier —, and so even the best-effort verifications may deteriorate by being modified, tampered with, or even deleted.

Web3 takes a significant step forward from here.

How can we get away from the unreliable process of proving something without actually being able to prove anything?

Technically, a proof of exhibition consists of these parts:

1. A cryptographically signed document in which the artist declares that the NFT was shown at a given exhibition.

2. Evidence in the form of artifacts like social media posts with photos, videos, or audio, of which the artist takes immutable snapshots and signs these snapshots.

3. A countersignature of the proof of exhibition, done by one or more trusted third parties.

4. Permanent, timestamped storage of the signed document and evidence.

Taken together, these parts cover the four aforementioned attributes of provenance — timestamps, attribution, authorship, and authenticity — and ultimately deliver the strongest form of provenance. This is only possible because Web3 enables its users to sign and countersign artifacts and store them permanently and immutably.

Atomic Form is the easy path to creating a reliable proof of exhibition

It’s difficult to combine all these ingredients and steps manually, and it would be a chore to do this repeatedly for every new proof of exhibition.

This is why Atomic Form worked hard to create Atomic Lore, a service that turns a proof of exhibition into an easy-to-use, repeatable, consistent process with the necessary infrastructure already in place for you.

Atomic Lore provides the following:

• Structured templates for attestation documents that an artist, collectors, and curators can fill out and sign with their wallet.

• Workflow for capturing evidence and performing countersignatures.

• Storage concept that ensures permanent, tamper-proof, timestamped, and readily available storage.

Everything, from the first declaration to the permanent storage, is available in one place.

We are working on making Atomic Lign universally available across blockchains and wallets to make signing off-chain artifacts safe and painless.

Conclusion

100% certainty is impossible to achieve — at least in this part of the universe and on Web2. Declarations of facts can be wrong, evidence can be forged, and verifications of evidence require a great deal of trust in the attesting party.

Web3 greatly reduces the reliance on trust by adding provable cryptography to the picture. By combining declarations of facts and evidence with cryptographically signed and countersigned attestation, securely saved and timestamped on an immutable ledger, we can achieve near-100% certainty for proofs of exhibition and any other proofs of off-chain digital artifacts.

To collect proof of exhibition for an NFT without hassle, try Atomic Lore.

This question is not an exaggeration. Even Nifty Gateway changed their website branding to reference this event. It was the main conversation for an entire month.

Sadly, like a massive parade that leaves behind an empty street, only those who were there remember the energy and the experience of witnessing it in real time. Sure, with enough diligence, you could manually search X to find the bits and pieces of how it unfolded... but there isn't an easy way on X/Twitter to replay that experience in a chronological fashion (assuming you know what and how to look for in the first place!).

This is the story of the evolution of The Monument Game and how Atomic Lore is the solution that keeps all its off-chain artifacts from drifting into oblivion.

The Monument Game: A Masterpiece of Interactive and Evolving NFT Art

It’s not just a painting. It’s not just a game, either. With The Monument Game, Sam Spratt created a groundbreaking way of perceiving and interacting with artwork. The Monument Game is composed of several layers:

• The artwork itself, an impressive digital painting

• The artist’s intensive storytelling during the time of preparing the launch

• An interactive component that was available for a limited set of players for a limited time

• An ongoing stream of discussions, fan art, and more on social media and elsewhere on the Web

Had The Monument Game been “only” a digital painting, it might have held viewers’ attention for only a few seconds. Some wouldn’t even have noticed the rich details hidden in plain sight. However, if you take a close look at the painting in its original 20K resolution, you quickly get an idea about the enormous effort that went into this image. It took more than a year to paint this detailed scene on a screen canvas by hand.

Sam Spratt was aware of this, and he wanted the audience to immerse themselves deeply into the painting. He offered the unique opportunity for 256 players to select a spot within the painting to add their observations to one of the many scenes and stories captured there. The result is available as an interactive image, allowing the viewer to zoom in and pan across the painting to discover the details and the observations the players left behind — many of these being short pieces of poetic art.

The reception of The Monument Game has been tremendous. Even before the game started, fans posted raving comments or even created their own fan work. As a great storyteller, Sam Spratt contributed a lot to the ongoing stream of activity. The timeline of X postings about The Monument Game almost feels like fan fiction but for fine arts. The community exposes an enormous creative energy, thus actively shaping the NFT’s story.

https://twitter.com/SamSpratt/status/1697686317260284010

The original painting and the players interacted at the smart contract level, and their observations are safely stored on-chain. However, all the feedback, fan art, and mentions aren’t. Yet, all of these reactions belong to The Monument Game’s communal memory, adding to its value and legacy. They deserve to be preserved along with the original NFT. In fact, it’s imperative.

The Challenges of Preserving NFT Lore

All the feedback, comments, thoughts, and fan work become part of The Monument Game’s lore and deserve to be conserved along with the NFT itself. As things currently stand, they won’t be.

Unlike the player’s observations, this fan work lives on the edge of getting lost forever. Imagine an account being hacked or banned, data being lost due to suboptimal planning at the social media provider’s end, or other incidents outside the control of artists, collectors, and their audience.

In fact, NFT art is breaking at an alarming rate. Up to 40 percent of all NFTs use off-chain storage for all or part of the artistic piece. Classic storage services, however, are known to break. Even the simple relocation of off-chain data can render an NFT worthless, as the location-based link to the data becomes invalid.

And that’s just the NFT data itself! Imagine how much harder it is to capture, preserve, and serve the off-chain history (which was never connected to the onchain data in the first place).

The lore of an NFT mainly accumulates off the chain. Whether the NFT is exhibited in galleries or talked about at conferences, or whether collectors and art audiences discuss an NFT in forums, chat apps, or on social media, as we’ve seen above, these artifacts become part of the artwork. They should get the same level of preservation as on-chain data gets.

Capturing all these artifacts is difficult. In the current NFT art world, everything that happens to an NFT or is said about it is little more than an echo that quickly fades. In oral traditions, information is changed and diluted while being passed along. If you weren’t there, you can’t experience what it was like.

Our modern, digital world has the tools to stop the decay and preserve an NFT’s lore forever. We only have to make use of these tools.

Atomic Lore: The Ultimate Solution for NFT Art Preservation

Atomic Lore is a preservation tool that is perfectly tailored to NFT art: a comprehensive, multi-chain service to capture and preserve the provenance of NFT artworks.

Preserving NFT art requires four key ingredients: curation, storage, connection, and access and display.

• Curation is the important process of identifying and selecting off-chain artifacts related to the NFT art. Artifacts must be collected and carefully reviewed for preservation, to neither lose valuable artifacts nor add irrelevant ones (and decrease the signal-noise ratio).

• Storage is the cornerstone of any artwork’s longevity. Storage made for eternity must be robust against failure and data reorganization. Atomic Form combines Arweave (a blockchain-based storage) with IPFS (a content-addressed storage) for maximum reliability.

• Connection is about linking and storing social interactions around the NFT in a meaningful way, to make the data easily discoverable for humans, apps, and dApps.

• Access and Display ensures the availability of NFT art to everyone. What’s the use of an oil painting masterpiece if it is tucked away in the attic of some museum? Likewise, digital art exists to be exposed and viewed.

These four ingredients are Atomic Lore’s pillars for creating a time capsule of communal memory and experiences around NFT artworks.

The Monument Game and Atomic Lore: A Perfect Match

Many of the activities around The Monument Game became highly valuable assets on their own, worth preserving along with the NFT. Atomic Lore collects and preserves these assets for current and future generations. For The Monument Game, Atomic Form curated, signed, and stored more than 150 tweets as of this writing, along with metadata and provenance information. Every tweet is captured, signed, and stored in Arweave and served through IPFS under a permanent content ID.

Every off-chain artifact that is added can enrich the lore, allowing The Monument Game to remain a living and evolving *Gesamtkunstwerk, *a total art work that withstands the test of time. Atomic Lore is your digital catalogue raisonné for your NFT art and every background information that belongs to it.

The Future of NFT Art Preservation

The NFT art world is in urgent need of solid and long-lasting strategies for preserving an NFT’s lore for generations to come. In the case of The Monument Game, Atomic Lore consolidates all of its off-chain artifacts into a consistent viewing experience, securely stored on Arweave and IPFS. Without a preservation strategy like this, NFTs and their provenance, history, and contextual information are prone to get dismembered by a forgetful Web2 and undermined by waves of AI-generated noise.

We believe serious creators, collectors, and curators will require this level of preservation as a standard going forward.

Like the masterpieces of ancient artists, NFT art is worth being preserved for future generations.

Learn how Atomic Form can help you preserve your NFTs and all their offchain history. Contact us today.

Article cover image courtesy of Sam Spratt’s Tweet (found by perusing The Monument Game’s Atomic Lore page.

Suddenly, an error message arises, and the hairs on the back of your neck start to rise.

“404? Wait, the image is broken?”

You start to realize that something is very wrong.

You contact the artist, and they say not to worry. Within no time, the minting platform creates a 2nd version and airdrops it to your wallet while retaining the original.

Wait. Isn’t this worse? Now there are 2 Mike Tyson NFTs that are supposed to be 1/1s (here and here). And one of them you own, but the other is still in another wallet?

The dilemma of duplicate NFTs

This isn’t a story of fiction. This actually happened to someone, and it happens to people all over the world all the time.

Which one is the real NFT?

How do we reconcile duplicate NFTs?

When it’s time to sell this piece, the owner is going to have a really hard time explaining why there are two versions of the 1:1. Even worse, the provenance (including all details about the purchase history and the bid history) is on the original, whereas the one in his possession does not.

This begs the question, how do we reconcile duplicate NFTs? Which one is real? Is it based on which one was minted first? The contract of who minted? The one that had bids and sale information? Or the one that the legitimate buyer has in his possession?

Now imagine that the buyer has both of the NFTs, does he get the ability to sell two of them? Or does he need to burn one (and which one? And how?) to legitimize it back into a 1:1?

What if the platform refuses to comply with this procedure? Or what if his purchase remained trapped on the platform without an airdropped copy? Would he have the authority to re-mint on his own behalf? Is there a social consensus around this? And who else would have the authority to re-mint in extreme circumstances? What is protecting the minter OR owner from losing thousands of dollars in value of digital assets?

There are simply no industry procedures or standards for dealing with duplicates.

If you figure we can just kick this down the road to deal with in the future, think that over for a minute. In a world where markets go up along with the number of chains, inadvertent duplication of NFTs will increase, and so will forgeries and scams.

How NFT software can help reconcile duplicates

As we already saw above, the problem of duplicate NFTs spawns numerous questions about how to resolve it, and each question branches into multiple follow-up questions.

But there is an aspect that none of the above questions touch. Recap these questions: They all revolve around the owner of the duplicate NFT. What can the owner do? And what consequences arise if the owner tries to reconcile the duplicate NFTs? If we try to locate the solution with the NFT owner, we fall down a rabbit hole of endless problems.

Likewise, the solution is also not to be found on the blockchain because the NFT and its duplicate are both immutable. As blocks get added, the NFT and its ghost twin are baked deeper and deeper into the chain of proofs.

No — we have to look elsewhere, but we don’t have to look far. There is a person who is at least as involved with an NFT as the NFT owner: It’s the artist. As the creator of the NFT, the artist has the ultimate authority to decide an NFT’s identity.

How can the artist make their decision incontestable and auditable for everyone? Through an attestation with a cryptographic signature. Here is where platforms like Atomic Sign and Atomic Lore come into play. Atomic Sign enables you to provably add any relevant contextual or historical data to an NFT. With Atomic Sign, an artist can create an attestation for the correct NFT and sign it with their wallet. From this point onwards, the duplication is resolved once and forever.

Now Fixed!

We’re happy to report that there are no more questions on this Mike Tyson 1/1. The true version has been updated with an attestation here (signed by the artist’s wallet). The other piece can remain in existence, but it’s not the original.

The initial attempt to purchase and mint the NFT occurred at contract 0xb8df793c5d7abedac69595fa5051b3844b335413 and token ID 0. However, there was and continues to be a problem with this contract. Therefore, this NFT was minted and is the correct and sole 1/1 of this work. I attest this as the NFT creator - Cory Van Lew.

Resolving Provenance Dilemmas

NFT artists! You can do this too. If any of your NFTs gets into a “Mike Tyson scenario,” you’re in the position to clarify and correct this information in a provable way. All you need is a capable attestation service like Atomic Sign. Contact us for more information on how to get started.

It may sound unlikely, but there is a solution. But first, let’s discuss the main problem of NFT attestation in its various forms.

Problem: most attestation services are specific to a chain or contract

Collectors and curators share a problem: NFTs exist on multiple blockchain platforms. Any sizeable NFT collection inevitably contains NFTs from several sources unless the collector explicitly focuses on one particular platform. Likewise, galleries and other curators receive NFTs for exhibition from any blockchain platform that supports NFTs.

Attestations for NFTs are typically made on the blockchain platform where the NFTs were minted. Therefore, an NFT owner needs to find appropriate attestation services for each blockchain. Newer or niche blockchains might not even provide any attestation services, which means that some kind of cross-chain attestation must be found for these chains.

The result of this situation is fragmentation and complexity.

• Fragmentation happens when attestations are saved on different storage solutions per chain.

• Complexity and overhead occur from having to manage all chain-specific attestation solutions, and each new chain adds more tooling and increases the maintenance efforts and costs.

Users, especially galleries, are therefore faced with a dilemma. Either they take on the management overhead of managing lots of different tools or they give up trying to capture and store these attestations altogether.

The lack of a suitable cross-chain attestation solution

Unfortunately, NFT attestations have no simplified and unified user experience across all blockchains. Ideally, an NFT owner could use one wallet to sign NFTs of any provenance. Moreover, the attestation and other NFT metadata should be stored in a unified way as well.

Common storage and indexing services are insufficient

The current, chain-specific attestation services use their own storage solutions that differ between blockchains. As a result, an NFT collection sooner or later ends up being spread across storage solutions. Retrieval of NFT metadata becomes increasingly difficult.

Even if one of those solutions would emerge as a cross-platform storage for NFT metadata, this solution alone would be insufficient.

• Example: IPFS Despite the name “Inter-Planetary File System,” IPFS is a peer-to-peer data transport protocol rather than a file system. Peer nodes may or may not hold the data sent to them for an extended period. It is possible to pin data to specific IPFS nodes (by paying an incentive to the node owner), but even this does not ensure the longevity of the stored data. Nodes can go out of business or disappear for other reasons, and the data disappears along with them.

• Example: Bitcoin block storage Bitcoin provides a form of block storage through inscriptions. Blockchains like Bitcoin were not designed to provide ample storage space (e.g. a behind-the-scenes video), however. Storing NFT attestation information would be prohibitively expensive, and the Bitcoin community still discusses the feasibility of inscriptions long-term.

• Example: Ethereum calldata Calldata is a space reserved for passing arguments to Ethereum contracts. The calldata space can also be used to store data, by sending a transaction to a contract’s method. Querying the transactions to that contract returns the information stored in the calldata. While calldata space is reportedly cheaper than other on-chain storage options, it is not as permanent as it may seem. Ethereum nodes and clients may prune historical data, including calldata, to save space.

In summary, no single on-chain or off-chain storage solution has the required quality for long-term storage of attestations.

Current NFT attestation solutions in the market

The NFT market is well aware of the problem and currently offers two solutions:

1. A smart contract (SC) protocol for the entire chain

2. A smart contract library that can be optionally included in a specific smart contract

A smart contract protocol for an entire chain governs how NFT attestation works across the entire network (e.g. EAS). The main benefit of this approach is that it creates a cohesive and standardized attestation system for all NFTs on a specific blockchain, but this concept cannot transcend to covering multiple blockchains in a unique way.

A smart contract library works with a specific minting contract. An NFT would therefore only be able to use the SC library feature if such a library is included in its specific minting contract. With more than one billion NFTs, there are many different minting contracts in use, so an SC library approach serves a more limited set of NFTs.

How Atomic Form solves the problem of multi-chain attestation

The fragmentation of the NFT landscape causes three separate complications for NFT attestation:

1. Uncertain attestation availability — whether an attestation service exists for a particular chain,

2. Lack of attestation standardization — attestation services on different chains are not composable with each other.

3. Lack of a unified, reliable, long-term storage.

Atomic Form has developed a system for NFT attestation that solves all three problems. We ensure cross-chain availability and standardization by supporting multiple chains and wallets, and we solve the storage problem with a unique combination of two tested-and-proven decentralized storage services.

Multi-blockchain support

Atomic Form expands beyond Ethereum to support attestations for NFTs on other major chains. Solana is the second chain to join the list, and more chains will be added over time.

Every new chain supplies new attestation logic that is specific to the implementation of the chain and its wallets. Atomic Form replaces all chain-specific attestation mechanisms by a universal attestation process that reads and writes directly from and to IPFS and Arweave (more on that below).

Multi-chain wallet signing

Atomic Form enables the creation and signing of attestations for NFTs across different blockchain networks without requiring smart contract functionality. Wallets from any supported blockchain can sign an attestation for an NFT on another blockchain. For instance, a user with a Solana wallet can sign an attestation for an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain and vice versa. Atomic Sign's design separates the content to be signed from the signing mechanism, allowing for a more flexible and interoperable system for NFT attestations.

Permanent decentralized storage

Blockchains provide permanent storage — until they don’t. Storage space inside the blocks of a blockchain is rare and extraordinarily expensive. Plus, block data is increasingly challenging to find as newer blocks are added to the chain. Auxiliary storage spaces have been designed around the core blockchain; however, these have limitations as well, as discussed earlier.

Because of these limitations, Atomic Form created a new kind of storage that is both permanent and easily accessible. This storage is a blend of IPFS and Arweave. Atomic Form combines both in a way that leverages each storage system’s strengths. Arweave guarantees long-term storage and provides features like verifiable time stamps, while IPFS (being a peer-to-peer protocol at its core) provides distributed storage with easy access that can be linked to an NFT. (Read more about IPFS and Arweave in our article “IPFS & Arweave: A Winning Combination For Extending NFT Metadata and Provenance.”)

This storage design decouples wallets from storage. Owners and curators only need a single wallet and do not need to worry about storage internals.

The various benefits of Atomic Form’s multi-chain attestation

So far, we have discussed how multi-chain attestation is possible from a technical perspective, but what benefits does this solution have?

A common user experience

The most visible benefit of unifying the NFT attestation processes and attestation storage is a uniform user experience regardless of the blockchain or wallet being involved. This dramatically simplifies the attestation process and thus directly increases the ease and joy of capturing this history for their NFT art.

A single, aggregated data source

Our storage solution consolidates all attestation data that originates from different chains and makes this data accessible from a single source. Attestation data that is fragmented across multiple, chain-specific solutions is a thing of the past.

Widest NFT coverage

A natural consequence of our multi-chain attestation solution is the broad coverage of NFTs. As we keep adding more chains, our attestation process is available to the largest pool of NFT art.

A significant cost advantage

Provable, long-term storage is costly. Until a clever alternative is created, as we did at Atomic Form: Our combined IPFS/Arweave solution makes storing attestation data provably and reliably possible for a tiny fraction of the cost of most blockchain storage space. And we’re talking about orders-of-magnitude cheaper.

Summing up: Why Atomic Form is your perfect partner for NFT attestations

Building a valuable NFT collection is next to impossible without a functioning multi-chain attestation service. The more chains support NFTs, the more fragmented an NFT collection becomes. Multiply this by the number of wallets needed and the added problem of affordable, reliable storage space for attestations and other NFT metadata.

Atomic Form removes the need to manage multiple, chain-specific attestation services at a fraction of the cost of on-chain attestation storage.

Try Atomic Sign’s new Solana integration, or contact us if you are interested in a new integration.

"Artworks most dear have, for countless moons, escaped the grip of oblivion - and such strange, bewitching treasures, borne of genius arcane, shall persist eternally beyond the gloaming of generations yet to come."

– Edgar Allan Poe, or maybe just an unprovable AI hallucination

The most precious works of art have been preserved for centuries, and precious art is worth being preserved for centuries to come. During their travel through time, works of art have built up, and continue to build up, a record of historic events, such as changing owners or getting shown at important exhibitions. And they also collect stories along the way: stories the work of art tells us and stories that are told about it.

Digital art (in the form of NFTs) is just as worthy of preservation as traditional art. Imagine you could store a digital work of art in a safe and provable way, together with provable information about its provenance and its history, like previous owners, galleries where it was exhibited, and so on.

And yet, the NFT space is still in the Wild West stage of exploration and experimentation. It happened (and continues to happen) that an NFT file and its history vanishes within a short timeframe because they were not stored in a future-proof way. There is a certain irony here, because what better place should there be for storing digital art than a blockchain?

The blockchain storage dilemma

Blockchains are designed to store information provably, reliably, and securely. Invented initially as an infallible ledger for financial transactions, blockchains have since evolved further to store unique, identifiable information: Non-Fungible Tokens, or NFTs.

Therefore, storing related metadata along with an NFT on the blockchain seems a natural choice, but this approach has two problems.

1. A blockchain grows steadily. New blocks are added, but none are deleted. To make a blockchain grow as slowly as possible, only the most essential information is stored directly on the chain.

2. Storing large amounts of data on-chain can be prohibitively expensive or, for large files like 4K videos, outright impossible. The entire Bitcoin blockchain is approximately 500 GB, which would store less than 25 hours of 4K video.

Off-chain storage, on the other hand, is cheap and abundant. Web2 has various options for storing any kind of data, but they lack the required properties for storing data provably and in the long term.

1. In Web2, data is typically identified by location (primarily through URLs, IP addresses, or other address identifiers). When data moves, location identifiers become invalid and must be updated to reflect the new location.

2. In Web2, data is usually stored in centralized locations, making it heavily reliant on individual data centers or companies that may discontinue services without notice.

If neither on-chain nor off-chain storage meets the needs for reliable, provable storage of NFT metadata, could a hybrid solution solve this problem?

IPFS to the rescue

A solution to both problems of Web2 data storage exists: The inter-planetary file system (IPFS) addresses data by content rather than by location. IPFS stores immutable chunks of data that are irreversibly bound to a content identifier (CID) immune to location changes. You can think of each CID like an unforgeable fingerprint that is unique to each file. Change one byte of the file, and the fingerprint changes.

IPFS also supports distributed information storage, thus solving the problem of centralized storage. And IPFS storage is much cheaper than on-chain storage.

IPFS would, therefore, be an ideal solution for provable, long-term data storage: Once the data is stored immutably on IPFS, its CID can be stored on-chain to tie the data to the corresponding NFT.

However, IPFS has some shortcomings that get in the way of storing digital art metadata.

1. Files on IPFS have no timestamps. It is impossible to tell when a particular file was added to IPFS. What is the history of a piece of art worth without provable timestamps?

2. The lack of file metadata makes querying for data on IPFS next to impossible without relying on third-party indexing services.

3. IPFS does not guarantee permanent storage. IPFS is like a peer-to-peer network where nodes can come and go. Data can be distributed across multiple nodes, but once the last of these nodes goes offline, the data is lost.

4. The only way of keeping data more or less permanently on IPFS is by paying a pinning service to keep your IPFS content alive on their nodes. Just be sure to watch your pinning service regularly. If it goes out of business, you’d better have your data already pinned with another service (that you would have to watch for going out of business again, so the cycle repeats ad infinitum).

These shortcomings must be overcome to create a truly reliable storage of NFT metadata.

Existing solutions on top of IPFS, like FileCoin, strive to make IPFS storage more reliable, but these approaches are onerous for the casual user to set up and maintain. Other services strive to make the process easy, but they don’t offer a complete solution for all kinds of files.

How can we achieve permanent storage, metadata, timestamping, and easy querying?

Enter Arweave

A solution already exists that offers the features missing in IPFS, such as permanent storage, metadata, and easy querying. Arweave is a blockchain-based storage service, meaning a blockchain network secures storage. Arweave data is timestamped, thus allowing users to verify the minimum age of NFT metadata (when data was added to Arweave). This feature is essential for attestation of historical data of NFT art. Finally, Arweave data is trivial to query by tags, an aspect that sets Arweave apart from IPFS and blockchains built for transaction verification rather than storing and retrieving historical data.

Unfortunately, even Arwave has some limitations that get in the way of storing NFT metadata.

1. Arweave apps default to using Web DNS for routing (despite efforts to establish a new routing standard). DNS records are stored with a single registrar and are ephemeral. Changing or deleting a DNS record can remove access to data.

2. Arweave does not use content identifiers (CIDs). Its identifiers (TIDs) are not derived from the content they represent. There is no way of proving that a given TID belongs to a given data object.

3. Being a blockchain, Arweave cannot be self-hosted on typical end-user hardware. If the Arweave network goes down completely (which can happen for many reasons, such as becoming financially unviable), access to the data is lost (or, at least, frozen).

4. There is a lot of controversy around Arweaves claims to “permanent” storage. If the network was to ever go down, this promise would be broken. So files uploaded to Arweave need to have a redundant way to export and reconnect any relationships (ideally through IPFS).

The disadvantages of IPFS appear to be the advantages of Arweave and vice versa. Can we get the best of both worlds?

IPFS and Arweave should join forces. But how?

It turns out that both systems can be woven together so that all the desired features of a permanent, provable, and affordable storage system come together.

Arweave has

• permanence,

• timestamping, and

• metadata,

and IPFS has

• content-addressability and

• distributed serving.

IPFS can, therefore, act as a “frontend,” providing distributed access to content-addressable data in a peer-to-peer fashion. Arweave can act as a storage backend, providing failsafe, on-chain backup storage with metadata, timestamps, and querying capabilities.

At Atomic Form, we have put this approach into practice. Atomic Sign stores NFT metadata on IPFS and in Arweave and links the data together by tagging every data object with information from both Arweave and IPFS.

Here is an excerpt of tokens stored with an object on Arweave:

• App-Name: Atomic Sign

• App-Version: v0.1.0

• IPFS-CID: $IPFS-CID

• Type: Attestation

• Topic: Attestations

• Content-Type: application/json

• chain-ID: $CHAINID

• contract: $CONTRACT

• tokenID: $TOKENID

(If you are curious, see a live example here.)

Without going too much into technical details, the main point is how Atomic Sign connects data from IPFS and Arweave: The simple introduction of the IPFS-CID tag creates the link to the data stored on IPFS, and the three tags chain-ID, contract, and tokenID represent the NFT itself.

Advantages of hybrid data storage

This hybrid solution creates synergy effects that make it ideally suited for storing NFT metadata. Several advantages emerge from this hybridity.

Link backup

IPFS is a peer-to-peer network in nature, as mentioned earlier. Storage permanence is not IPFS’ main goal. Data stored on IPFS can be replicated to multiple nodes and pinned there to stay online; however, every node owner can decide to shut down their service and take the node offline.

Here is where Arweave comes into play: If an IPFS link breaks because the last node that stored that link goes offline, Arweave can be queried for the CID to re-seed and pin the data in IPFS.

Content typing and tagging

IPFS does not describe the content behind a link. Unlike traditional file systems that store file metadata like creation date along with each file, IPFS focuses on making data provably accessible through content addressing.

Three problems are associated with that approach when it comes to saving NFT metadata.

1. Without file metadata, IPFS content is not queryable.

2. As we will see in the next section, without a timestamp for each stored object, building a verifiably documented NFT history is impossible.

3. Dapps/apps rely on knowing what type of file they are trying to render. Without this, the onus is on developers to download and identify the mimetype of a file before they can use it. This is something we faced a lot with our hardware displays at Atomic Form.

Arweave tags can fill this gap. Tags can hold any metadata associated with a data object. Atomic Sign’s hybrid approach adds queriable metadata to every IPFS object.

Proof of existence

Without a verifiable timestamp, IPFS data does not reveal when it was uploaded. To verify the history of digital art, it is crucial to know the age of each historical document added to the NFT metadata. Otherwise, there would be no way to verify an NFT’s history.

Atomic Sign connects IPFS uploads to the Arweave blockchain. After connecting the Arweave and IPFS parts of the NFT metadata through Arweave tags, the data is anchored to Arweave’s blockchain, therefore providing proof that the uploaded file has existed at least since the date and time of the upload. Any attempt to add a newer document and claim it as the original one would fail.

Arweave’s blockchain makes the complete history of an NFT tamper-proof.

Richer relationships

When a file is added to IPFS, IPFS creates a cryptographic hash value of the file called content identifier (CID). Files and directories can be linked to each other using these CIDs as a reference. With a given CID, IPFS can quickly look up the corresponding file through a distributed hash table. From there, a user can explore the file’s relationships to other files using the CIDs the file refers to.

Arweave, on the other hand, can connect files through context rather than content. Unlike CIDs, Arweave tags can be chosen freely. So looking up a tag can return one or more documents that carry this tag, independently of how they are linked up in IPFS.

Combining both mechanisms results in a richer data set with more options for querying and traversing this data set. Moreover, with two complementary querying techniques available, querying becomes faster by picking the one that is optimal for the query at hand.

Self-sovereignty: Stay in control of your data

While Arweave greatly solves the problem of permanent storage, it is a blockchain that steadily grows rapidly in size. Few people have the resources to keep a complete copy of the Arweave blockchain at home.

You can, however, run an IPFS node on minimal hardware (think Raspberry Pi) to store a copy of your NFT metadata. Content addressing makes this personal copy as valid as any copy on other IPFS nodes. Atomic Sign links the CID of your data to Arweave’s on-chain data for provability.

Conclusion

Combining two different storage technologies has significant advantages over existing concepts. Digital art, and all its history and the stories that surround it, can be saved permanently while remaining verifiable, searchable, and linkable. Although blockchain storage is involved, prices remain affordable.

For anyone who wants to preserve digital art along with all records of provenance, history, and any background information, Atomic Sign is the perfect solution.

About the Exhibition, Artist, and Gallery

From January 12th - 29th, BHARE will be opening up his solo exhibition “Building a Happier Home” at the Colonna Contemporary Gallery. He’s a first-generation Barbadian American abstract artist and possesses a multidisciplinary approach, yet his primary focus lies in working with acrylic and oil pastels on canvas. Through the utilization of a wet-on-dry technique, he skillfully layers colors and incorporates minimal illustrations, resulting in a captivating and simplistic abstract style.

BHARE draws inspiration from personal journals, where he explores and dissects his own prose, breathing life into his artwork. Constantly seeking growth and development in his craft, he draws influences from a variety of art movements, including modern abstract, impressionism, and Neo-expressionism.

Based in North Carolina, Bhare merges traditional and digital styles, showcased at galleries in New York, Copenhagen, and Los Angeles, and now here. In 2021, he embraced the Web3 ecosystem, finding success and solidifying his unique artistic identity, contributing to the contemporary dialogue at the intersection of introspection and technological innovation. “Building a Happier Home” is one of those collections, offering both digital and physical works.

His artist journey into Web3 is in safe hands with Michele Colonna.

Owner of the Colonna Contemporary Gallery, Michele’s mission with the gallery is rooted in a profound respect for artistic traditions while embracing the dynamic shifts within the art world. The gallery serves as a conduit, celebrating the diverse spectrum of creative endeavors that span centuries of craftsmanship and propel us into the future of artistic exploration. The gallery curates a collection that honors the classical strokes of paint and the avant-garde manifestations of digital artistry, intertwining these threads to weave a tapestry that tells the story of human creativity. Michele has conviction in his role as a bridge between these two worlds, resulting in many traditional collectors purchasing their first digital pieces of art because of him.

Back for an encore at the Colonna Gallery!

We at Atomic Form are thrilled that this  is the second show that we provided a white-gloved onboarding for Proof of Exhibition. However, we are thrilled by Bhare’s feedback at the end of the call.

“That was easier than I thought it was gonna be.”

Music to our ears.

Artists like BHARE and curators like Michele are setting a professional standard for digital artists. Artists, collectors, and curators all over the world have started to understand that this is what digital artists should be doing.

https://twitter.com/ColonnaContempo/status/1745085259383804269

Our platform empowers artists, collectors, and galleries to connect this offchain history to these onchain digital assets. Here is one result.

And if you click “view metadata” and inspect the exhibition record, you’ll find some very important points:

• This is an attestation (e.g. a claim of something being true, factual). It includes things like the exhibition name, start date, end date, etc.

• The power of two signatures - it has been signed by two independent parties:

  • BHARE as the artist and current owner of this NFT, asserting that this work was exhibited here on this date.

  • Colonna Contemporary gallery as a place of exhibition, confirming BHARE’s claim.

  • Cryptographic signatures are not forgeable, meaning we can be assured that unless either party was hacked, that only BHARE and Colonna agreed to this assertion.

• This message has been stored in web3 storage (IPFS and Arweave), so it can remain forever accessible for years to come.

• Each Proof of Exhibition takes minutes to create, but the milestone lasts forever (or at least as long as the IPFS and Arweave protocol stay in existence!).

Minting Proof of Exhibition Acceptance for NFT

Contract Address: 0xd91d8fc31a8b0c554dacef6d95df0361bbd09130
With TokenID: 20

Metadata Type: Proof of Exhibition

Metadata Payload:
        - Start Date: 2024-01-12
        - End Date: 2024-01-29
        - Exhibition Name: Building a Happier Home: A Solo Exhibition by Bhare
        - Exhibition Location: Colonna Contemporary, Wayne PA
        - Owner Wallet: 0x4de31ffa366271f90a6da19130d7ae8ba2541437
        - Exhibition Wallet: 0x6559b24c8c573771aa2a210add88bdd85790bb93
        - Exhibition Details: Home is where the heart is, I guess.” rings quietly through the profound artistic journey of Bhare, whose narrative unfolds through a muted collection of contemplative artworks. Drawn from a childhood marked by the absence of home to the family name, the artist's odyssey weaves through small apartments and townhomes, with each dwelling leaving its indelible mark on the intricate tapestry of their identity. The quest for a space to call their own becomes a poignant refrain, echoing throughout the exhibition. Against the backdrop of this search for permanence, the artist explores the learned desire to create a home that mirrors personal identity and fosters holistic well-being. "Building a Happier Home" becomes a visual symphony of color and form, each brushstroke carrying the weight of familial expectations and personal aspirations. In this exhibition, viewers are invited to traverse the emotional landscape of the artist's personal journals, shaped by the relentless pursuit of a dream.
        - External Link: https://www.eventcreate.com/e/bahh
        - Countersign Status: Accepted
        - Countersign Requirement: Required
        

A New Professional Standard for ALL Your Exhibitions.

Including Proof of Exhibition in your artist workflow is  a must. At Atomic Form, we have made this process dead simple. If you haven't already, let's get your first win  with a white-glove onboarding.

White-gloving Proof of Exhibition (PoE) at Atomic Form means:

• Onboarding call showing you how to use PoE for this show and for all of your future shows

• Working with your gallery to obtain counter-signatures

• Free support in getting your submission optimized for the long term.

• This tool is free for artists and curators to use for now while in beta.

Why use it?

• Collectors benefit from having this information available for appraisals and future sales.

• Galleries benefit from being able to attract NFT native artists.

• Artists benefit by being able to have their CV build and grow across all their collections.

In the NFT space, you may have heard the term provenance. Its usage in the traditional art world is restricted to a complete ownership history of a piece, but we’ve expanded its meaning to include anything of historical significance about an NFT:

• Sale price

• Bid history

• Exhibition History

• Twitter conversations

• Media

• The list goes on.

In short, it’s all of the history behind and the stories beyond the NFT - all of the Lore.

Before Proof of Exhibition,  it’s been difficult for multiple parties to assert that an in real life (IRL) event happened in a manner that can be retrieved and proven cryptographically.

We believe this platform  is among the first at making this feature available to anyone.

In the age of forgeries, fakes, and spam, we can better trust the authenticity of a claim if multiple trusted parties agree to it.

This doesn’t mean that an individual attestation is untrustworthy, but given the high stakes for high value assets, we want to make sure that people in the future will trust these assertions.

Ready to Turn Your IRL Moments Into Milestones? We are.

Have an upcoming show and want to leverage Proof of Exhibition? Send us a note on AtomicForm.com or send us a DM on Twitter!

Check out BHARE’s show here and start building a happier home:

This moment with BHARE and Colonna Contemporary is setting a professional standard for all digital artists and curators. At Atomic Form, we are beyond excited to have the opportunity to partner with these forward thinking individuals.

Thank you, BHARE and Colonna for the opportunity to participate in this with you.

See you at your next exhibit!

Adam Disbrow’s career started in the physical, traditional art world. In 2021, he began his artistic evolution from the traditional art realm to the digital and NFT space, and officially rebranded to AD_AD (Adam Disbrow_Analog to Digital). His recent works continue to bridge this divide, being produced and available in canvas and NFT formats.

In tandem, Michele Colonna, the visionary force behind Colonna Contemporary Gallery in Philadelphia, mirrors this convergence of traditional and digital art. Like Adam, he has conviction in his role as a bridge between these two worlds, resulting in many traditional collectors purchasing their first digital pieces of art because of him.

It’s only fitting that these two are at the forefront of this new bridge with Atomic Sign’s Proof of Exhibition  as part of their arsenal. The platform empowers artists, collectors, and galleries to connect this offchain history to these onchain digital assets. Here is one result:

And if you inspect the exhibition record, you’ll find something that looks innocuous, but it’s historically significant.

Minting Proof of Exhibition Acceptance for NFT

Contract Address:
0xb932a70a57673d89f4acffbe830e8ed7f75fb9e0
With TokenID:
45840

Metadata Type:
Proof of Exhibition Acceptance

Metadata Payload:
    - Start Date: 2023-11-17
    - End Date: 2023-12-13
    - Owner Wallet: 0x2b6f3817ba1a643bdcf9de0112cf5382cbc6f442
    - Exhibition Wallet: 0x6559b24c8c573771aa2a210add88bdd85790bb93
    - Countersign Status: Approved
    - Exhibition Name: Adam Disbrow || AD_AD: From Pigment to Pixel
    - Exhibition Location: Colonna Contemporary, Wayne PA
    - Exhibition Details: There is a relationship between technology and art. Throughout history, the work has inherently been defined by the technology accessible to the creator in their time – from the media they had access to, to the substrates they interacted with, to the tools they used to create. In my opinion, the best art created today explores the boundary of self-expression and attempts to push it further.  From Pigment to Pixel is about finding the boundary of human expression, stepping beyond it, and in doing so blurring the line between physical and digital art to the point that the delineation disappears and all that is left is Art.
    - External Link: https://www.colonnacontemporary.com/adam-disbrow-from-pigment-to-pixel
    

Along with the signature and counter signatures:

signature: `0x3b8c7951379da24d97de13d2374396d840409a651ba0c4a16078f453ad12109524168acd669c4f0d97641ec962add70e1d15cfc829f75a2f421b7045081ee9d61c`
counterSignature: `0x283af78404af3c7058c965716064087c82076555a2942c6c048fae0724c6aa4140e9191e1e663827e29ffe1af624e169b26611e9dca72bf75f92f410682e94f71c`

What are you looking at?

Let’s break it down.

• This is an attestation (e.g. a claim of something being true, factual). It includes things like the exhibition name, start date, end date, etc.

• It has been signed by two independent parties

  • AD_AD as the artist and current owner of this NFT.

  • Colonna Contemporary gallery as a place of exhibition.

• This message has been cryptographically signed by each party. More below!

• Cryptographic signatures are not forgeable, meaning we can be assured that unless either party was hacked, that only AD_AD and Colonna agreed to this assertion.

• This message has been stored in web3 storage (IPFS and Arweave), so it can remain forever accessible for years to come.

Each Proof of Exhibition takes minutes to create, but the milestone lasts forever (or at least as long as the IPFS and Arweave protocol stay in existence!).

Why is this important?

In the NFT space, you may have heard the term provenance. Its usage in the traditional art world is restricted to a complete ownership history of a piece, but we’ve expanded its meaning to include anything of historical significance about an NFT (sale price, bid history, exhibition history, Twitter conversations, etc).

In short, it’s the history behind and the stories beyond the NFT.

Up until today, it’s been difficult for multiple parties to assert that an in real life (IRL) event happened in a manner that can be retrieved and proven cryptographically. We believe Atomic Sign’s Proof of Exhibition is among the first at making this feature available to anyone.

Yes, there are other solutions on the market. The Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS) is a protocol that provides the ability to define schemas and submit data, but it’s not opinionated and tailored to address specific use cases. Artists and Galleries looking to use the base protocol for proof of exhibition would have to create their solutions on top of EAS, which may be part of our future roadmap.

An important distinction is that, out of the box, Atomic Sign’s Proof of Exhibition requires multiple parties to sign an attestation (this is possible in EAS with a custom UI). In the age of forgeries, fakes, and spam, we can better trust the authenticity of a claim if multiple trusted parties agree to it. This doesn’t mean that an individual attestation is untrustworthy, but given the high stakes for high value assets, we want to make sure that people in the future will trust these assertions.

Where to Go From Here?

Turning these moments into milestones is just the beginning. What about all the dapps and marketplaces that need to verify this data? Imagine an NFTfi application attempting to appraise the value of an asset without knowing its provenance? Imagine these applications trying to do this without cryptographic assurances that the claims came from the relevant parties…

The possibilities are endless.

In the future, as Atomic Sign’s repository of attestations grow, APIs will be available to provide this data to app, dapp, or protocol that can benefit from this.

This moment with AD_AD and Colonna Contemporary is historic, because all future buyers of this piece will benefit from its history being connected to it.

• Collectors benefit from having this information available for appraisals and future sales.

• Galleries benefit from being able to attract NFT native artists.

• Artists benefit by being able to have their CV build and grow across all their collections.

At Atomic Form, we are beyond excited to have the opportunity to partner with these forward thinking individuals. Thank you, AD_AD and Colonna for the opportunity to participate in this with you.

Ready to Turn Your IRL Moments Into Milestones?

You can visit us at AtomicSign.io, or see one of AD_AD’s proof of exhibition pages in action.

1. Their content ranked higher against other content.

2. Their content received more real estate on the page.

3. They controlled the exact title, image, and description that would appear.

These were transformative changes. So how did each generation do this?

In Web 1: Search Engines

The metadata within the HEAD tag of an HTML document was read by search engines. This allowed Google (and others) to extract the exact information to be used on their search engine results page (SERP). Before that, Google would have to scrape the page and make an educated guess. Many times it was right, but other times it might pull a random image from the sidebar or pull the wrong summary of text.

By giving Google metadata that included the explicit, optimized information, SERPs became more accurate for end-users, resulting in better experience for end-users. As a result, Google would boost a results ranking AND more prominently feature thumbnails and other information.

In Web 2: Social Media Platforms

Social media platforms faced challenges similar to the early search engines. If you posted a link on your feed, Facebook would scrape the page and determine what to show. In the early days, Facebook would just pull 10-20 thumbnails (effectively every single image on the web page) and make the user decide. It would also require the user to edit the description because it was often wrong.

Facebook created the Open Graph Protocol to fix this problem. These new metadata tags allowed web pages to tell Facebook the exact title, image, description, etc. The result? Facebook gave an accurate rendering each time (no work required by the person sharing!). It also expanded the space given to the media and description, allowing the content to stand out against other shares.

See the pattern yet?

The better you feed your indexers, the better your data indexes, ranks, and displays.

In web3: Apps and Dapps?

Here’s the challenge in web3. There is so much history and backstory to NFTs (both as a collection and as an individual token), but it’s disconnected from the NFT collection and individual tokens. Some of it exists within Twitter threads and conversations. Some of it exists as an OpenSea collection page. Regardless, it’s hit or miss and generally lackluster.

If you go to OpenSea and look at Crypto Punks (arguably one of the most important historical collections), this is what you see when looking at token ID #1.

It’s important to note that the About CryptoPunks section is not a part of the NFT metadata, but rather information added on OpenSea by the account that controls this collection.

If you look at raw metadata, say for another popular project like Board Ape Yacht Club NFT, you’ll see a limited set of information.

Imagine trying to create a compelling search engine result or social media share with just this information. Where’s the name? Description? What would be an optimal image size to use for Twitter vs Facebook?

Fortunately, many NFT APIs attempt to fill in some gaps. However, this is done without the content creators input, scraping offchain information (such as OpenSea description). We’re back to the reliance on guessing and scraping to determine how to best represent a web3 NFT any place we want to experience it.

We know this challenge first hand at Atomic Form. We build gallery-quality NFT displays, and only have access to a limited amount of information about an NFT (like the title and mint date). However, we would love to expose additional information (the history behind and the story beyond the mint).

This is both the challenge and opportunity we see ahead of us in web3. If we start providing a richer set of NFT native metadata, then all consumer apps and dapps using this information will be able to offer up the same benefits as previous generations of the web. Better metadata = better indexing, rank, and display. It just makes sense.

This is why metadata matters!

So, how do we get there (standards and adoption)? We have some ideas (check out Let’s Talk About a Schema.org for NFTs). But if you’re interested in joining the conversation, please connect with us on Twitter at @atomicform and DM us!

Unfortunately, these two things are disconnected.

The NFTs are built on public, immutable blockchains where connecting them to meaningful memories and experiences should be trivial. But the conversations that led to their creation are isolated on Twitter. Go to an individual item on OpenSea, and you reach a dead-end. The only details are as follows:

By visualizevalue

This artwork may or may not be handmade.

There is much to be desired here from a user experience. If you were a child of the 80s and 90s, you may remember what it was like to buy CDs for your collection. You got to experience the artwork, the lyrics, and the occasional liner notes that gave some history behind the music.

NFTs have a significant advantage over CDs. The amount of information, stories, and history we could attach to an NFT could be infinite. And it’s not just BEFORE the mint. All the conversations stories that occur AFTER could be added as well. We discussed this in earlier articles: AF Lore Framework and Metadata Minting. 

To his credit, Jack is aware of this challenge. A week ago, he revealed the beginnings of a website dedicated to the most popular Tweets. This is a great first start. There are several threads that were pivotal moments in the history of Opepen and VV Checks, and those can now be surfaced to buyers and observers alike.

However, I can’t help but think this is a challenge that goes beyond Jack and his communities. What about all the other collections out there (current and future)? And what about the maintenance of this website? Will Jack and the community continue to tweak and iterate this custom webpage for the next 5-20 years? How will the history of these pieces be accessible through other browsers (Wallets, Marketplaces, Displays, etc)?

We need solutions that span space and time. We need solutions that are interoperable with other components of the ecosystem. We need ways to surface this to people who don’t live on Twitter 24/7.

One potential path forward could be a metadata standard for minting NFTs that store, index, and serve additional off-chain data for these NFTs. Here’s what that might look like.

• Capture: Tools like Pin Tweet to IPFS can create a permanent, web-friendly snapshot of a key Tweet.

• Curate: Jack and the community can vote on and filter with Tweets that were pivotal moments to the entire collection or to individual NFTs.

• Connect: Curated Tweets could be minted as new NFTs that contain the IPFS CID.

• Index: Technologies like The Graph could index all of these metadata NFTs and provide a means for Jack’s website to consume the data in a web3-friendly way.

• Experience: Any app/dapp can be provided a link to this index so that they can access this information and provide it to their end-users.

• Standard: If enough people followed this pattern and found it valuable, it could turn into a best practice for off-chain information to be associated with on-chain NFTs.

Imagine a future state where Atomic Form hardware could not only beautifully display your NFT but allow you to see and experience these pivotal moments in history. How it’s displayed could vary greatly. Apple Vision Pro? A companion app that you can pull up history from a QR code?

We know this entire toolchain isn’t available in the market today, but a full end-to-end solution could include and connect the following context (originally published on this Tweet):

• @opepenedition 007

• Created by @jackbutcher

• Dev by @jalil_eth

• w/Tweet by @BoredOpepen

• Archived by "Pin Tweet to @IPFS "

• All linked as metadata by attestations by @eas_eth

• Context added w/hardware displays by @atomicform

so we at Atomic Form are working on a much simpler version we call The Metadata Minter. It picks up where Pin Tweet to IPFS leaves off and allows you to cryptographically sign, search, and serve metadata for a specific NFT.

If you’re interested, please follow us and hit us up at contact@atomicform.com.

We propose a new way of approaching these challenges. Rather than trying to control and update the single metadata file referenced from an NFT’s tokenURI, why not mint additional blocks of metadata that backlinks to the original? This crowdsourcing-style approach would allow the ability to search, sort, and filter by the public keys of each contributor. If done correctly, NFTs with a large, quality set of contributions could grow in value because of their richer stories and datasets.

Demo The Metadata Minter UI

Seeing the tool in action may answer some questions and spark ideas before we go into details. Here is a video.

What did you just see? Let’s break it down.

1. Select NFT: Artist loads token with frozen metadata (i.e. it can’t be changed).

2. Select Template: They pick the copyright template.

3. Fill Out Form: They input copyright license & owner; create a draft metadata block.

4. Sign: They cryptographically sign this new metadata block with their private key.

5. View Results: All metadata contributions chunks are displayed noting public key.

What didn’t you see in the background? Let’s break it down.

• Conversion: The metadata and signature were converted into IPLD blocks.

• Storage: Blocks are stored to various web2 (S3) or web3 (IPFS) endpoints.

• Privacy: If enabled, blocks would only be stored in private, secure endpoints.

• Index: Searchable index in Postgres and served over a GraphQL API endpoint.

When we release this demo to the public, you’ll be able to see for yourself. There will be an option to click “raw JSON” button to get a copy of the consolidated metadata w/contributions, and IPFS CIDs.

Why This Matters

Imagine 27 pieces of art selling at an auction for $1.6 million dollars. Months later, an NFT collector stumbles upon one of the pieces on Opensea, but sees no transaction or sale history. Next, a financial analyst fires up Dune Analytics to look at monthly NFT sales volume, but is missing all off-chain sales at galleries all over the world. 

This isn’t a fictitious example. This recently happened in June 2022 at the Christie’s event Cartography of the Mind: A Curated NFT Sale to Benefit MAPS. While Dustin Yellin’s piece Psychoprogeny - Mother Tree was sold for $63,000, there are only transfers listed on its Opensea page. 

Now consider all the other scenarios where art is changing hands without any onchain record. What about private trades between two collectors? What about private sales that happen just to skirt around NFT marketplace royalties?

Then there are the non-financial aspects. Up and coming artists rely on an up to date CV to showcase their work and land their next opportunities. Not only does it matter what their work sold for, but where it was on display and who purchased it also matters. It adds to the overall story, The Lore of a piece of art.

So how could we fix this?

Minting Sales Data

Dustin was fortunate enough that he placed the Christie’s event data in the metadata.json before the auction. In doing so, any NFT marketplace (that knows how to ingest that information) could benefit themselves and the artist by displaying it on the NFT page.

Now what about the sales information? For that, we need to go back to the metadata minting UI.

Before we used this Copyright template. This time, we will use the Off-chain Sale template. Here we enter:

• Date

• Sale Amount

• Sale Currency

• Event Name

• Other

While this information can be added by anyone with an Ethereum account, the veracity of this information is strengthened by the signature. If two people submit different entries for this sale, we can decide which one is more trustworthy. Since the public keys from Christie’s have been verified in the public domain, we can extend more trust to those signatures versus unrecognizable keys.

We could further amplify the veracity of these submissions by adding counter-signatures. Let’s imagine an artist submitted the sales information themselves. A person seeing this data might question whether an artist is lying to inflate sales figures. However, if a gallery or auction house signed that same block, we effectively have a handshake of two verified accounts submitting the same information. This provides further strength on the data claims.

And Beyond

In a previous article, we identified 28 potential metadata fields that are not commonly present in most NFTs minted to date. Similarly to how websites went from being simple business cards in the 90s to full-blown applications in the 2010s, we predict NFTs will become more advanced in terms of the types and quantity of data connected to each one. Given that not all of this information will exist onchain and at the time of mint, we need a strategy for properly appending data to these NFTs over time.

This Metadata Minter UI is our attempt to create a web3-friendly mechanism of creating, storing, and serving crowdsourced contributions to an NFTs metadata. In doing so, we hope that it’s a valuable approach to add value to the NFT ecosystem.

Atomic Form is creating a full-stack solution for NFTs: from data management and provenance to hardware and exhibition. The topics in this article include media file store redundancy, metadata tagging beyond minted data, interchain record keeping, and exhibition data. Atomic Form is largely addressing the following:

• Creating superior data granularity to enhance record keeping, search, and discovery. A P2P economy for data availability, provenance, and exhibition with AF’s OS and Hardware. Creating hardware solutions that fully integrate with this superset of data.

Part 1: On Stories as Metadata

Pop Art was a pioneering artistic movement between 1950-1960. The works of that era are about 60-70 years old, and their records provide an important basis for contemporary cost estimates at auction. One famous artist from that era is Andy Warhol, who, throughout his career, has influenced the price of artifacts by simply once owning them and producing artifacts with illustrious stories, influencing their worth.

Let’s begin with Warhol’s ‘Shot Marilyns’

The “Shot Marilyns” was once just… the Marilyns. Andy Warhol printed five of them and stacked four against the wall at The Factory. Dorothy Podber, a performance artist, had asked Andy if she could shoot them. Andy thought she meant to take a photograph, so he obliged. Dorothy instead pulled out a revolver and shot them with a bullet, famously denting each print with varying degrees of damage. One of these shot Marilyns sold this year for $200,000,000.

This is a good and unseeable example of a small dataset from an influential artist undergoing a contextual modification that differentiates specific pieces from a larger body of work despite having similar subject matter and mediums. Sort of similar to baseball error cards. Today, we may consider “Shot Marilyns” to be five different token IDs from the same minting contract where four were exposed to some vulnerability or other unique event that influences their worth or makes them ultra-novel.

In 2090, people searching for iconic works of the early NFT movement will look to works minted in 2017-2022, just as pop art collectors look to the 1950s now. Their stories will influence the works, just as their owners will. Their stories can now be recorded through a series of decentralized blockchains and public centralized databases, influencing a new degree of provenance and information efficiency. By doing this, we can take advantage of owners' and creators' cryptographic signatures to make records on hashed data structures.

Consider in 10 years, you are presented with a variety of works from the 2018-22 era: would you value them differently if they were the first NFT sold at Sotheby's? Would you value them more or less if used for a marketing campaign? What if they were owned by somebody famous? Any collector, archivist, or historian knows the answer: there are unique circumstances that can create legendary artifacts.

Part 2: On Web2, Web3, and Distributed Filestore Data Combination.

The ability to own an NFT makes some assumptions about the reliability of the blockchain network's state and the off-chain storage locations where the media “lives.” NFT critics often note that you don’t “own” the media. This is kind of true. Practically speaking, you own a token that is a bearer bond to the data, as issued and assured by the contract's publisher with various addressable content and attributes. Figure 2 below helps illustrate the breakdown between an NFT’s on-chain and off-chain data.

Atomic Form seeks to maximize the redundancy of digital object indexing as well as enhance reliability and search through their categorization and provenance using IPLD blocks (see Figure 3). While Ethereum has blocks that must exist on its own, IPLD is a network-neutral settlement layer for interchain data. This means IPLD blocks can be distributed across any/all filestore systems. We do this with a number of partners who we can announce in the coming months.

There is a misnomer that Ethereum (or any public network) is immutable. In fact, the blockchain state is always at risk. Adding more trouble, tokenURI data is inconsistent, and its dependence on external databases for file storage (for media and other data) may not work out well in the long term. Finally, there is not yet a consistent methodology for adding arbitrary tags and incomplete data to NFT’s that go beyond publication (just like the story of the Shot Marilyns). The most consistent follow-up question to working with private collectors and galleries for exhibition solutions is “how do you know?”

This is a good question. In many ways, the Atomic Form Lore Framework is built around knowing. Built around matching IPFS/Arweave hashes with Ethereum hashes. Built around matching user signatures blockchain state. Built to provide proof and tying together shreds of data from various places for various purposes in IPLD Blocks that can link parent data to other Blocks from other networks.

As we have analyzed before, in some collections, there is a significant dependency on IPFS and some media links are simply dead. NFT owners hold the token in this instance, but the visual component (media) has expired only 1-3 years!  How will people trust their assets, will they still be there for a few decades later if we can’t sufficiently store them for a few years?. Despite all the dead links, you continue to hold that token, the bearer bond for data. The media files of these dead links can be stored and preserved by artists on other filestores like Filecoin or a renewed IPFS link.

For the avoidance of doubt on how NFTs work beneath the hood and on the fragmented nature of relatively high-value assets, let us consider Psychoprogeny - Mother Tree by Dustin Yellin:

The beautiful piece holds the data below as per the Christie’s website, which is a source of truth for this auction. Indeed as Christie's notes (see Figure 5 below), the contract address, ID, and address of the current owner are on chain. This data will not change without a 51% attack on ETH. The final sale price of $60,000 is off-chain and Christie's can become an oracle for that information on a blockchain, like the ones Atomic Form is making with the generation of yielded Metadata, Events, Multimedia, and other data including but not limited to analysis or tags. Furthermore, the tokeURI data is nestled inside the token ID and is not discoverable on any database that is not reading that. You would not be able to search for “physical+digital” releases, for instance.

Worded differently, summarizing off-chain, on-chain, and anecdotal yet provable data, in a single data structure is the greatest leap forward in information efficiency for digital art.

Continuing down the rabbit hole, the token ID published by Christie's brings us to the Arweave link holding the data below (see Figure 6). The MP4 is also stored on Arweave but realistically can have redundancies within an IPLD block. This data is the end-of-the-line for discoverability and attributes. It is possible to remint tokenURI fields over time, but these changes should be event's that add new blocks to the Lore IPLD chain.

However, these changes may not be properly logged on a time-series database and may fail to exist if a contract owner loses their keys or in 2090, the artist fails to survive. This data may also not survive bridging to other networks and is subject to various risks.

These are costly problems to overcome. Data that is fragmented, lost, incomplete, difficult to obtain, or untrustworthy will undermine the potential value of these pieces at time of sale. How would you know, by buying Mother Tree that there was a sculpture? It’s original price?

The solution to this issue is not necessarily imposing standards, which won’t always be adopted or adhered to. Rather, we can solve this by providing tools for normalization and contribution by other actors.

This is why we have such high conviction regarding the Atomic Form’s Lore Framework. It will allow us to create a singular blockchain based on all on-chain and off-chain data. We will have the flexibility to create public, private, and hybrid APIs based on the permission levels of the data pulled into these datastores. Atomic Form may also provide this service alongside artists, collectors, game developers and/or anyone else interested in hashing token data or non-token data for canonical reference. AF’s IPLD chains can use any number of storage solutions (e.g.IPFS, Filecoin, Arweave or others as blockstore solutions) and in the future will be audited by independent actors in the way ETH is now.

As we will soon announce, we are contributing to a network to prove blockchain state data.

Part 3: On Exhibition as a Lost Piece of Metadata and the P2P Exhibition Economy

Atomic Form has also found itself as a centralized Web2 source of truth regarding the exhibition for Christie's x MAPS sale (discussed in the previous section); Atomic Form used custom display hardware to support the show and powered it entirely through a hardware device called the Photon. Well, 27 Photons as seen below:

Each Photon is independently registered with a single exhibition device which includes but not limited to: a High DPI Projector, 1:1 custom display or a store-bought 65" OLED. The Photon is also tied to an AF user profile or wallet address. In this instance, Christie's essentially had a user account on AF that received exhibition rights.

The Photon is a small computers that are optimized for GPU, CPU and Memory. Photons do not cast digital art. Instead, AF’s software parses the tokenURI fields for the media links and downloads them locally. The owner of said NFT must authenticate the local downloading of the media. In this process, users sign messages authenticating display and exhibition to specific devices.

Users may also sign said authentication remotely, allowing users to lend exhibition rights without losing custody of the token, from my photon to yours. For example, a user in New York City may wish to loan an exhibition to a gallery in Europe or a friend in Hong Kong. Through the Atomic Form OS, the signature that authenticates ownership of an NFT and its exhibition on a specific photon or user can be stored in the same database that combines the Ethereum, Christie's, and Arweave data mentioned in the section above.

Bringing It All Together

Imagine going to an NFT auction in 2025 and you have no idea about NFT’s and digital art but you have recently sold your laundry share start-up and know a lot about memes. A QR code at the door lets you bring up an app with a map of all the digital collections on display along with a search function tied to Lore. You approach a high-resolution particle whirlpool that looks familiar. You snap a QR for the piece and are redirected to a provenance page that uses the tools mentioned in this article to add a myriad of securities and context to this particular sale.

By taking a quick look at the blockchain data associated with one piece you know it was minted and transferred in 2018 but the receiving wallet has used 100’s of ENS names and the history of registrants has not been captured or indexed easily. By reviewing annotations based off of Lore, you discover that this piece was somehow on exhibition both at the Venice Bienale and a Snoop Dogg concert in 2019. You feel happy because signatures that attest exhibition purposes for the concert have been logged and even if they have not been logged on Ethereum, sources of truth such as Snoop Dogg’s Twitter or Rolling Stone verify this provenance. You rest easier knowing the original 4k IPFS associated with the token now has an 8k render on four different filestores on a special blockchain.

You wonder about the history of cryptopunks.

You search historical records on Lore for punks that fit 3 criteria: have been licensed, are V2, and have received high value loans. You find punk #2499 fits these classifications. The punk has over 50 contract interactions with Defi protocols generating solid yield. You scan a QR code and Lore has been used to hash data around vital points of the punk.

You discover that this punk, call it #2499, was licensed to a chain of restaurants for a laughable annual sum, making its loan-to-value ratio more rational. You now confirm the IP of this punk was considered interesting. You also know for a fact that the CC0 rights for the punk are intact because Yuga has been Oraclized into Lore as a source of truth (like Mother Tree having a physical sculpture on the Christies page, or Snoop Dogg’s Twitter showing him performing in front of the same piece you are considering buying). You are also astutely aware of the fact this was the first punk to go through a bridge from ETH to DOT as well (even if you don’t know what DOT is). Finally, you have not only ETH pricing history for the punk, but Web2 auction house pricing, and a series of loans. Your information set is vast.

Finally, you have made a considerable sum from P2P exhibition economies based on AF hardware and software products. You, as an individual, are so integral to the future of cryptographic royalty generation that you seek pieces that have high rates of signature generation for exhibition purposes as a part of your collection. You loan your new works to an auction house using photons in Hong Kong to generate revenue from exhibition while you sleep. The data is recorded. You become the Lore.

At his recent NFT drop, Jesse Woolston faced a bit of a challenge.

He was pushing the boundaries of computer-generated art, resulting in breathtaking computer simulations of millions of particles smashing off of each other. Initial exports of his masterpieces were a hefty 1.6GB apiece. Unfortunately, the upload limit at SuperRare is 50MB, and compressing the file nearly 100x would result in a significant drop in quality on a 4K screen.

What was an artist to do?

In an ideal world, Jesse and other artists would export several versions of the video file. At the extremes, one file would optimize for an 8K screen while another might optimize for a smartwatch. Additionally, there might be several versions in between for various smartphones and consumer displays.

Unfortunately, Jesse was under a time crunch and needed to make a decision. Looking around, there wasn’t a best practice on how to do this. 

• Should he upload the 50 MB file and hope for the best?

• Should he contact people purchasing his NFT and offer a link to the original?

• Or should he create multiple file variations (and which ones?) in the hopes that various players would be smart enough to find the right one?

Ultimately, we suggested including the following:

1. The maximum allowable file size the marketplace allows.

2. An additional version optimized for HD screens.

3. The original export.

This is better than nothing, but still an incomplete solution. Would anyone else clearly understand the difference between video_url, video_url_original, and video_url_atomicform_optimized? Would we need to include other parameters (e.g. video height, width, file extension, and bitrate) in order for others to make the determination of which file they could use?

These questions are just the tip of the iceberg.

What About The Other Jesse’s Out There?

While this resolved the immediate challenge, it’s one of the many challenges that the NFT space will run into over the next 0-10 years if we don’t have a conversation about NFT standards.

What about Parallel Alpha, an NFT project planning to use its cards as a multiplayer game? At present, all of their NFT imagery uses English. What if the game takes off in South America and they need translations for other languages?

What about needing to search, sort, and filter by a Creative Commons license? What if I need a CC0 option like I can find on Unsplash to use in an upcoming ad?

Anyone attempting to meet these (and many other needs, see below) would address them in an ad-hoc fashion. Even if someone was thoughtful enough to include them, dApps wouldn’t necessarily know to look for and use them on any consumer-facing dashboard.

This is why I believe the time is right to unearth and solve these challenges and opportunities with the broader community.

Where the Puck is Going

In the future, most NFTs will be all data and no media -  j1mmy.eth

Since NFTs exploded into the culture, the rate of change has been so astounding that most people are struggling to keep up with the present.

However, NFTs as a web3 primitive akin to index.html in web1 will continue to evolve and push the boundaries. This is why j1mmy.eth is correct to say that NFTs of the future will be all data and no media. Perhaps more accurately, they may contain media, but that might no longer be the centerpiece.

Additionally, several leaders in this space are noting a lack of ERC-721 standards around metadata, and how this may create barriers to adoption, interoperability, etc. If NFTs are trapped in hundreds of fragmented islands, this will limit dApp developers and, ultimately, end-user customers. This is the challenge and opportunity in front of us.

Some efforts to spin up an informal working group emerged but lost momentum almost as quickly as it was formed. Frankly, everyone is busy and the initiative is very ambitious and time-consuming.

This is why I’m going to take a different tactic.

I’ve Been Here Before

A decade ago, I saw a similar pattern within an open-source, e-commerce platform regarding credit card security. PCI compliance was a legal requirement for all merchants, and yet thousands of sites were running transactions without a clue how to meet said compliance. Like all public goods, everyone needed the information, but no one person or company had the time or expertise to solve it.

I posted a proposal to write a Drupal PCI Compliance White Paper, got it funded, and it’s been downloaded thousands of times over a 10-year period. It remains cited on many module pages so merchants can make smart choices to reduce their legal burden to accept credit cards.

Round 2: NFTs

What I’m intending this time is similar but different. A full-blown metadata standard akin to an HTML 5 spec or schema.org-for-NFTs is a tall order. However, we need to start somewhere.

I intend to write a white paper titled “The Need for NFT Metadata Standards”. It’ll make the case for this initiative as well as outline all the possible fields or categories (25+) that are currently missing/overlooked in today’s NFTs. It will also provide example implementations and proposals on how to include this either on-chain or as part of secondary metadata layered on top.

Make no mistake. This will not be perfect. It’ll occasionally be incomplete or incorrect. But the hope is that this solicits the proper support and feedback to convert this to a true standards working group (or metadataDAO?) to take this to completion.

If you’re so inclined to join, help, fund, sponsor, etc. Feel free to contact me at rick@atomicform.com.

The Goal

The end goal is a peer-reviewed (no, not you, Charles) white paper released under the Creative Commons (open to CC0, but likely sticking to attribution required if people sponsor/fund the work).

In an ideal world, this will serve as a starting point for what could ultimately be a schema.org for web3 set of recommendations. Below is the initial inventory of topics that I believe need to be addressed in the final white paper.

Missing Metadata Factors

Here is a non-exhaustive list of things I consider to be missing in today’s most popular NFT projects:

• Copyright: All/no rights reserved? Somewhere in between?

• Royalties: What are costs for commercial use? Where are payments sent?

• Intellectual Property: Any considerations that need to be noted?

• Contact: Who to contact in case of questions?

• Creators: Array of all contributors (both on and off-chain).

• Entity Relationships: An NFT’s relationships with other NFTs, blockchains, etc.

• Language: What is the primary language?

• File Localization: Are their language-specific versions of media?

• File Variants: Are their optimized versions from 8K down to smartwatch?

• File Metadata: Extension? Height? Width? Codec? Bitrate?

• Accessibility: Compliance with Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)

• Closed Captioning: Used to power feature for videos and generative art.

• Utility: An array of features granted with ownership (e.g. access, royalties)

• Encrypted Data: For situations where private data is attached to or contained within.

• Write and Execute Rights: Who has the ability to make future changes to the metadata? Who can execute encrypted executable files referenced by it?

• Source Code: Any files used for interpreting on-the-fly NFTs (e.g. Artblocks)

• Source Code Licenses: Any open source and/or dual license associated with code.

• Logic: Code/configurations/contracts that apply to the NFT data

• Playback: List of software and versions needed to operate.

• Reverse pointer: link back to the blockchain, smart contract, token, etc. This is helpful in situations where the record becomes detached and needs to referenced to the original source of truth.

• Schema Definition: links to definition & version for interpretation (e.g HTML5)

• Sub-components: If NFT has sub-component NFTs with their own metadata

• Off-chain Pointers: Social media handles, websites, discord, Wikipedia, etc

• Extended Properties: Derived from AI analysis of media and text.

• Derivative Works: Pointers to any officially recognized derivatives (or parents)

• Versioning: Some NFTs may never change. ENS records may change regularly and in-game items may change multiple times a minute. The ability to know which iteration one is on provides context as to the value/velocity of an NFT.

• Changelog: A metadata snapshot at each version.

• Ownership history: A log containing every transfer and/or lending activity.

• Proofs: cryptographic attestations that validate off-chain claims of on-chain data.

It’s worth noting that many of these fields would be optional for the simplest cases. However, if we look forward 10 years in a world that has between 1 billion and 1 trillion NFTs, having the ability to search, filter, and sort off these values would be critical for everyone from developers to end customers.

Now, more work needs to be done to further justify and explore each of the above categories. Let’s explore 1 as a preliminary example.

Example: Copyright and Intellectual Property

Example Structure

Fields in metadata.json would take a form like follows:

• legal:

  • copyright: “all rights reserved”

  • IP: “all rights reserved”

  • terms: “ipfs://asdfeghijklpmnoqrstuvwxyz”

  • code-license: “NA”

Justification

Imagine spending/acquiring millions of dollars of NFTs, but being unable to then build a brand or business around the likeness or IP.

@punk4156 learned this the hard way after being an ardent supporter and collector of Crypto Punks.

Now, he ultimately was smart enough to earn millions of dollars along the way, so it’s hard to paint him into the role of a victim per se. However, the entire snafu would have been avoided if there were clear metadata properties that could be reviewed before the time of sale. By having machine-readable values, marketplaces like Opensea could allow customers to filter/sort by available legal rights. Smart contracts attempting to use NFTs could reject using ones that didn’t allow derivatives or commercial use.

In a sense, it’s somewhat absurd this doesn’t already exist on the major minting platforms. Flickr popularized the ability to tag all uploaded photos with the appropriate creative commons license.

And to keep things easy, the default could be “all rights reserved” and let minters opt-in to more permissive licenses. For those uploading or bulk-generating NFTs on the command line, sane defaults can be in place with the option to override by passing through flags.

Possible Implementation Variations

Things like terms of service might be overkill for most implementations, but a default copyright field would be trivial to include. Ideally, a UI would provide a dropdown on a license selection. Intellectual property becomes a bit hairy and might be optional unless someone is trying to be sophisticated.

We may need to consider (given some may include code and custom logic) that code licenses need to be introduced. This might range from the default open-source licenses to dual open/commercial licenses. In extreme situations, there may be patents cited for particular logic included within or used by a given NFT. This may be an extreme outlier, but having a plan for citing 1 or more patents would be trivial to add as an optional value.

Moving Forward

I’m barely scratching the surface in 1-2 of the 25 potential categories listed above. Further conversation and stress testing is needed to put together something sensible.

Like a previous white paper, I believe this might take 100-200 hours to do correctly.  A full-blown standards proposal with community buy-in might take north of 1,000 hours. However, the outcome could be a critical document that can push the NFT industry forward and benefit it.

10 years from now, if we still lack standards, the friction this will generate will slow adoption and innovation. However, if we can start getting some metadata best practices rolling out, we can start to see these benefits compounding right now. Interoperable NFTs are the goal.

Maybe this needs a legit Metadata DAO. Until that point, I plan on taking the 1st stab at a white paper.

Are you interested? Would you like to help stress test? Fund? Review?

Even if you would just read it, please drop me a line at rick@atomicform.com to let me know you’re interested (and what specific aspects you’d love to see resolved).

wagmi