How this 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.
Why bother?
NFT artworks don't live on the blockchain. The token does, the art lives on ordinary servers, pinning services, and marketplaces, all of which can go dark. While building this archive we found 16 files whose original hosts were already dead; for those works, a marketplace's cached copy is now the only surviving image. They're on these walls, honestly labeled. That is the entire argument, discovered inside our own vault.
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. IPFS, Arweave, their own servers, even fully on-chain. 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 three 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. Today 1140 original files, 16 GB, are verified, checksummed, and served from storage the collection controls.
Later, a chain-first recount caught something the marketplace never showed us: 41 works that were sitting in the vault the whole time, quietly dropped from the marketplace's own listing. The blockchain knew; the API didn't. They're 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.