How this was made

NFT artworks usually live in many places at once, the token on Ethereum, the image on IPFS or Arweave or an artist's server, the metadata somewhere in between, and every one of those places can go dark. This gallery is built so the collection survives all of them. Two things worth knowing: how the art is kept, and how the site itself came to be.

How the art is kept

For each of the 934 works in the vault, the archive reads the token's on-chain tokenURI, fetches the artist's original metadata document, and downloads the artwork files from the exact sources the artist declared, never from a marketplace preview. Every file is verified by content type (magic bytes, not file names) and stored with its SHA-256 checksum. When an original host has already died, the marketplace's cached copy is kept instead and honestly labeled as such.

Where the originals live

IPFS, 730 files · Arweave, 293 files · artist-run servers, 75 files · fully on-chain, 6 files

Provenance

19,730 on-chain transfer and sale events are recorded across two independent sources (the marketplace's index and the Ethereum ledger itself), giving 911 works their verified mint records and every piece its collecting history, traced through the collection's wallets back to the first acquisition.

Today

1140 original files archived (16 GB); the rest of the vault is catalogued with source URLs and awaits download. Nothing on these pages depends on any third party being alive tomorrow.

How the site was built

One day before this page existed, there was an empty folder, an OpenSea API key saved in a text file, and a profile link with a few hundred NFTs on it. This gallery, every archived original, every wall label, every provenance line, was built in a day-long conversation between the collector and an AI (Anthropic's Claude), and refined over the days after. The collector made every curatorial decision; the AI wrote and ran the code. It now holds 934 works by 269 artists.

How it happened

First an inventory, catalogued in an hour. Then a pilot, 25 works chosen at random and taken all the way through the hard part: reading each token's on-chain pointer, fetching the artist's original metadata, and downloading the true files from wherever the artist put them. The pilot caught a marketplace habit of dressing static artworks in fake "video" files; from then on, only the artist's own declaration counts.

Then the full sweep: eighteen thousand on-chain events from independent sources, every sale, every mint, artist profiles, royalty rates, and the piece that made the Timeline possible: tracing each work's history back through the collector's first wallet to the moment it was truly collected, not just the day it moved into cold storage. A later chain-first recount caught something the marketplace never showed us: 41 works sitting in the vault the whole time, quietly dropped from the marketplace's own listing. The blockchain knew; the API didn't. They are all here now.

The rules the gallery lives by

The artist's metadata is the only source of truth. No prices on the walls, this is a museum, not a storefront. No outside dependencies on any page: no CDNs, no trackers, nothing borrowed, the whole site would still work from a USB stick decades from now. And anything not yet archived says so honestly rather than borrowing someone else's copy.

Build your own

The entire pipeline, database, archiver, provenance tracing, and this site's generator, is open source. Point it at your own wallet: github.com/along7gallery.