An Introduction
I recognize the irony of posting this on fx(hash), but of course hope that it reaches beyond these walls. Regardless of how you find this (if anyone finds this), if you’re an art collector in the NFT space, this article is for you.
I’ve seen quite a lot of debate recently over the last few weeks around the merits of collecting art (and often specifically generative art) on Tezos vs. Ethereum, or vice versa. Despite the fact that I have a long history with blockchain and have had plenty of time to consider the implications of collecting on one chain vs. another, there have been some wonderful thoughts during these conversations which have even got my brain spinning, and I want to thank you all who have taken part in these discussions.
A very special thank you to and his Twitter thread here, which I’d ask any readers here to work through first as there are many important points I’ll reference but not go into detail over.
While an interesting thread throughout, I think there’s particularly interesting merit in the idea that generative algorithms could break; “The code simply stops working”, as Claus says.
I think the core message here really is that there are bigger fish to fry when it comes to those of us who want to protect this art, and I would love us all to keep that in mind as we continue to work our way through this very new industry. We are, after all, all in this together. What I think we collectively want to see in relation to the art we love is not necessarily that one protocol or another succeeds, but that the art itself succeeds.
The protocols as I see it are often nothing more than a vehicle for conviction over the preservation of the art. As Claus points out, people often tout concerns over a protocol disappearing, and along with it all of the NFTs on it. He rightfully calls this silly and makes a number of valid points around how if it is the art we want to preserve, then we are empowered to do so.
That being said, the argument I’m going to make here is not that we can save Tezos (or should), or that on-chain art is better than IPFS (or worse), or that we should all be backing up or jpegs just in case of unlikely disaster (we should).
What I’m going to say is far simpler: I don’t think any (ok, most) of it matters.
What I really mean is, by the time any of this is even a possible concern (let’s say, for example, Ethereum wins the space race and all Tezos node operators throw their hands up and say “fine, you win”), we will have already moved on from any downside risk to the art.
There are a number of things happening in the space already well underway which will help accomplish this.
My Layer 1 Is Better Than Your Layer 1
Addressing this is probably the easiest thing for me to do. I should probably build ethos before making the claims I’m about to but all I can say is “just trust me, bro”.
I know, with 100% confidence, that there are already legitimate companies hard at work at making sure chains simply do not matter when it comes to digital asset ownership (amongst many other things blockchain related). The ability to take your Tezos NFT and put it on Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, etc.… whatever your favorite protocol is, I believe is at most 2-3 years away if not coming to a marketplace or wallet near you way sooner.
This is likely to be enabled by interoperability protocols such as LayerZero or Chainlink’s CCIP, which have made their entire business mission that of connecting blockchains, and are not far off from bringing this vision to the beginning stages of fruition.
And here’s the fun part: If they don’t or can’t succeed, my belief is it means blockchain has failed. Why? Because we still need to build several degrees of separation from this wonderful(ly frustrating) technology before it is ready for mass adoption.
I remember in the early 90’s connecting my dial-up modem in all of its screeching glory so that I could access some very crudely built software portal which allowed me to play insanely redundant and graphically abysmal (for the time) games. Does this ring any bells? Does this feel a little bit like connecting your Metamask so you can play Axie Infinity or Wolf Game?
We are still insanely early in the development of the blockchain stack. The user experience is terrible. I could write a whole book on this alone, but the short message I’ll leave here is that we need at the very least the following three things to occur before blockchain technology (and everything built on it) sees mass adoption:
The end user has no idea what protocol they’re “transacting” on
The end user is able to “transact” seamlessly from protocol to protocol
The end user does not have to custody their own assets if they don’t want to
There are many other degrees of separation we’ll need to create, but these are important for our argument for the following reasons:
1) In this world, we need protocol to protocol exchanges to be able to happen under the hood. An end user should be able to send an NFT to their friend without ever knowing the friend’s NFT custodian is on Ethereum while theirs is on Tezos, because having to navigate that is a massive point of friction for adoption. It is highly unlikely that one blockchain rules them all, and far more likely that multiple blockchains succeed and need to interact with one another.
2) There will be plenty of options for NFT backups & proof of ownership, because there will be competition around securing the revenue which will come from custody and self-custody tooling.
And for what it’s worth, we are already seeing rudimentary chain-to-chain NFT transfers happening. We have wrapped tokens, we have “vault” transfers which are basically IOUs, and we have artists such as Melissa Wiederrecht wilfully burning tokens on one chain to recreate them on another for her collectors.
These are all examples of early stage ways that we already can move an NFT from one chain to another.
What the future holds is advancement on these practices and (hopefully) ultimately a seamless way to move any digital asset across dapps across multiple blockchains, because it is in the benefit of all of those protocols, the end users, and blockchain as an industry for this to happen.
It took about 20 years to go from my screechy dial-up to some semblance of the world we live in today where most people on the planet (and still not all) are connected to the Internet and using it as part of their daily lives. If you think we are even close to what blockchain is going to look like by the time most people are using it, the next time you connect your Metamask to anything I want you to screech as LOUD as you can for 30 seconds straight and realize this is the hellscape we currently operate in. It’s simply not ready for prime time… yet.
The art should be on-chain!!!
I’m not going to debate Artblocks vs. the world here or what’s truly on-chain or what isn’t. Claus’ thread covers that enough to understand the points and counterpoints.
What I think is important about this argument is that people want security; They want to know the art isn’t going to disappear overnight. The same can be said of arguments against or for IPFS.
There is a wild amount of NFTs you can view on platforms like OpenSea today in which the metadata actually points to dead images. For a very large part, it is the creators who have held responsibility over maintaining the images. Many of them (of course, typically of lesser quality collections) actually used things like AWS servers to host, and when their project went south or they simply abandoned it, so did the payments to AWS and thus the images. OpenSea still caches them, but those NFTs are nothing but tokenized metadata leading to dead links.
This is the fear I think we all have about our NFTs which are not on-chain. But being on-chain certainly doesn’t completely exclude us from that fate. If the nodes cease to operate, or if somehow the data is corrupted, even on-chain art could theoretically disappear. Yes, this outcome is highly unlikely, but it’s not impossible.
What I don’t see people talk about is whose job it is to create this security.
Marketplaces such as fx(hash) and of course Artblocks are trying to take ownership over some of this, and that’s much appreciated. I hypothesize in the future two things will happen:
On-chain options will continue to improve, even to the point that something like a generative algorithm could be stored on-chain and potentially be opened to edit access via some securitized mechanism (so if the code breaks, and the artist is.. Uhh.. dead let’s say… it can still be fixed!).
There will be more and more companies trying to tackle the space of NFT & digital asset security, helping to ensure the risk of losing an asset forever is severely diminished.
Similarly to our protocol vs. protocol argument, I believe if these things don’t happen, NFTs die a horrible death. If we don’t get better at ensuring security, we don’t get to see mass adoption. People will simply not engage with something at scale where total loss holds a reasonable sized risk.
The good news is, IPFS & on-chain assets are actually both solid solutions to have as a baseline, and added layers of security will likely reduce this risk to almost nothing.
So uhh… do I have to back up then, or not?
I think you should. I mean, you love the art, right? You might as well make sure you have an image file somewhere so that in the highly rare circumstance it does disappear into the nether, you have what’s needed to potentially remedy that.
In the end, our tokens currently function best as essentially certificates of authenticity. The art itself functions best as an image. I do think it’s likely in the future even old NFTs will be able to be “ported” into some sort of new iteration which brings the image on chain and/or merges metadata and image data effectively into the token, but until we cross that bridge, we should do our best to preserve what we own.
When it comes to reselling, a token with a broken image link may be difficult to pawn. Who is to say that the image you’re providing is actually the image the token originally pointed to? So, backing up isn’t really a solution for lost images in all contexts, but it is a solution for you personally to never get to look at that thing you love again.
If my predictions are wrong and I’m basically envisioning “flying cars” while writing the movie “Back to the Future II”, at the very least owning the image will allow you to store the art in other ways for yourself, or print it.
And this brings me to my last suggestion: Print the things you love (if they’re print-friendly). Yes, many works are meant explicitly as digital mediums, but many translate well (even better, I think) to printed mediums. A print is just another form of backup, and one you can hang on your wall!
So what’s the case for Tezos, exactly?
What we are collecting is art, not tokens. The tokens are essentially representations of ownership & an effective storage solution, and neither of those value propositions require them to be on a certain L1.
If you follow an artist you love and that artist has art you love on Tezos, if you are an ETH maxi you’re currently avoiding collecting that art because of “muh chain” or “muh on-chain”. But remember this: None of that matters. What matters is there is art you love for sale, and often at a fraction of the price.
In a world where the protocol fades into the background (i.e., a world where blockchain succeeds), all you have is one jpeg vs. another. A price equilibrium is inevitable. Whether that means Tezos based art all rises dramatically or Ethereum based art all depreciates dramatically, I do not know. Certainly, valuations on all chains are on average severely bloated. Most of this art will likely go to zero when the market reaches oversaturation and there is less speculative financial gain to be made.
But, if you believe what I do, which is that some of the art we are collecting today is being made by the “Picasso’s” and “Van Gogh’s” of the future, then if you’re lucky enough to collect those pieces, respective value on any of of them regardless of what chain they’re on is going to skyrocket over the next decades. What this means is it likely doesn’t matter if you’re paying $100 USD equivalent on Tezos vs $1000 USD equivalent on Ethereum.
Focus on building a collection you love, and supporting the artists you want to win, wherever they may currently be minting. Tezos inarguably has some of the best art & artists in the NFT & generative art space, the community is amazing, and fx(hash) frankly is a better marketplace than anything else currently in existence.
Listen, I’m not really looking forward to the possibility of a mass flood of ETH collectors who are happy to pay $1500+ for everything they collect effectively pricing me out… but the art deserves the attention, and we as collectors need to stick together.
It’s my firm belief that if you’re an NFT art collector and not collecting on Tezos right now, you’re going to be kicking yourself down the road. There is no better place to be right now from a cost:quality perspective, and the art supersedes all both from a theoretical and practical standpoint.
1 Tyler Hobbs = 1 Tyler Hobbs. Simple as.
Disclaimer: This is not financial advice and I may wind up completely wrong about all of my predictions as I’m just some anonymous jpeg fanatic on the Internet. These are theoretical ramblings which are certainly subject to debate, presented in a format where I can evade having to defend them to any humans smarter than me (of which there are many). Do with this information as you see fit.
