About

I'm Aaron Long. along7 is my ENS name, and everything here is mine: the vault, the site, the collection. I loved art long before I loved crypto, art classes as a kid, art history in college, a grandpa who painted, a museum in every city I passed through. I also bought my first Bitcoin at eighteen, in 2013, and have held through every cycle since. I'm a data scientist by trade, which probably explains why this whole place is really a database with good lighting. I was around for the first NFTs and walked away from them, and the art that would pull me back did not arrive until 2025. This is where I ended up: collecting digital art, building it a permanent home, and making a little of my own.

I collect in depth. When an artist gets me, I stay. I followed Justin Aversano's Moments of the Unknown through a full year of daily auctions, polaroid by polaroid, and bid my way into two hundred of them. When the Art Blocks era closed at five hundred projects, I read the whole set like a book and started collecting it; work from more than a fifth of it hangs here now. Some rooms here are one great encounter. Others are a habit I couldn't quit. Either way, every piece earned its place, and in July 2026 every piece came home: the whole collection, moved into one vault, 3,863 works and counting.

I didn't start with art. I started with a game, a 6.8-ETH hero, and a guild. That whole road is in How I got here.

Why this site exists

An NFT doesn't actually store the art. The token is permanent; the image usually isn't. It lives on servers, pinning services, and marketplaces, and those go dark. So every work here is served from my own archive: originals pulled from wherever each artist published them, checked, fingerprinted, and kept. Building it, we found a dozen works whose original hosts were already dead. They live on these walls as honest cached copies, labeled as exactly that. We even found forty-one works the marketplace's own listing had quietly dropped. The blockchain knew; the API didn't. If you want the method, that is how it was made. If you want the whole story, with the art running through it and written for artists and programmers alike, read A Database With Good Lighting.

What I'm doing here

I launched the along7vault in September 2025 with a single line, and it still runs everything: in a space built on speed, this is all about patience. Everything here follows from that. The art gets kept, not flipped. The record gets built slowly and gets built right.

Artist websites are about the artist. This site is about the art, and about the connections between it. Nothing here is for sale; there are no prices on these walls. I'm a collector trying to make a permanent, honest record of a moment in digital art, and to point you toward the artists who made it. If one room here makes you follow someone new, this did its job.

This page is the statement. The living census, works, artists, chains, media, the market record, and where every piece came from, lives on the vault in numbers; the wallets and the road here are on my collector page. New to any of this? Start with New here?, the whole thing in plain English.

How this site was made

A data scientist and an AI turned a wallet into this museum over one summer: every original file rescued from the source the artist declared, every history replayed from the chain, and a program that checks every wall label before it ships. The whole story, with the art running through it and written for artists and programmers alike, is on the stories shelf. The short version is the method page.

A Database With Good Lighting, the whole story How this was made, the short version The technical write-up on GitHub

The chains

Ethereum is where this collection began, and its flagship works hang there. But the archive holds the whole map honestly, six chains now. The other half of the collection lives on Tezos: 1,991 pieces, most of them found on objkt, from hic et nunc era editions to one of one stills and films, downloaded, verified, and hanging on the same walls as everything else (the newest artist rooms there are still being curated). The smaller chapters fill out the map: painted days on Base, my own early AI paintings recovered from Abstract, a guild-era land deed on Polygon, and a clutch of art on Shape, from XCOPY's Bubble to a year of daily drops. Each work is archived the same way wherever it lives and labeled with its home chain; the source wallets are on objkt and OpenSea for anyone who wants to check the record.

I make things too

I collect far more than I make, but I do make things: a series of animated landscapes minted on Tezos, and a photograph or two, including a can of orange Crush I left in the freezer until it burst. They live in the maker's corner.