New here?
You don't need a crypto wallet, an account, or to know what any of this means to
look at the art. But if the words on the wall labels are new to you, here's the
whole thing in plain English, no hype, no jargon you have to pretend to follow.
Start here: what is this place?
This is one person's art collection, made public. The art is digital, it lives on
computers, not canvas, and it was collected on *Ethereum*, a public network where
you can prove you own a thing without a middleman. Everything you see was bought,
won, or gifted, and every original file has been downloaded and kept here so it
can't quietly disappear. That last part is the whole reason this site exists.
Your first five minutes here
1. *Start with one work.* Open any piece and give it a moment full-screen. Wander the Artists and click into whoever catches your eye.
2. *Read its wall label.* Every work says where it was minted, on which chain, and how it was collected. Any word that is new shows up gold and clickable.
3. *Follow its Story.* Many works carry a timeline from mint to now, the real on-chain history of the piece.
4. *Follow the artist.* Their room shows everything of theirs in the collection, and where in the world they work.
5. *Pull a thread.* The gold links lead to a page for every marketplace, chain, and idea. That is the Index, and it is built for getting lost.
Arriving with doubts? The [common myths](myths/index.html) page answers what most newcomers assume, and everywhere on the site the *gold dotted words are clickable, each one a plain-English explainer*.
The five words worth knowing
What's an NFT?
A record on a public network that says "this specific digital thing belongs to this
specific person." It works like a property *deed*: the deed lives on the
blockchain, while the actual artwork, the image or the video, lives on a file somewhere
else. That gap is important, and it's why this archive exists.
What's a wallet?
A wallet is a *keychain and a signature*, not a place where the art itself sits.
It holds the keys that prove which NFTs are yours and lets you sign for them. This
collection lives across two of them: a "hot" wallet that does the buying, and a
"cold" vault that just holds.
What does "minting" mean?
*Minting* is the moment a work is first created on the network, the artist presses
publish, and the piece exists on-chain for the first time. Collecting a work "at mint"
means you were there for that first moment, not buying it second-hand later.
1-of-1, edition, open edition, what's the difference?
A *1-of-1 is a single, unique piece, one owner, ever. An edition* is a limited
run of the same work (say, 30 copies). An *open edition* has no cap: anyone can mint
one during a window. The wall labels here tell you which is which for every piece.
What's a marketplace, and an auction?
A *marketplace* is where digital art is minted, shown, and sold. SuperRare,
Foundation, Transient Labs, and others, each with its own character (the
Market page explains them). Many sales are *auctions*: when
you see bid amounts in a work's Story, those are the real, on-chain bids from the day
it sold.
The one thing that makes this different
Here's the uncomfortable truth most galleries won't tell you: **an NFT does not store
the art.** The deed is permanent, but the picture usually lives on ordinary servers
and file networks that go down, lapse, or get abandoned. Building this archive, we
found real works whose original files were *already gone*, surviving only as a
marketplace's backup copy, or not at all.
So every original here was pulled from wherever the artist put it, checked, fingerprinted,
and stored on infrastructure the collection controls. When a file couldn't be saved, the
label says so honestly instead of pretending. That's the difference between owning a
receipt and actually keeping the art.
A short glossary
Now go look
That's everything. Wander the Artists, follow the
Timeline, or read How this was built.
The art doesn't need you to understand the plumbing, but now you do.