Since the first NFT was minted in 2014, digital artists and collectors have praised blockchain technology for its usefulness in tracking provenance, the origin and history of a particular artwork. Never before had artists seen a tool that could do it all like the blockchain, an immutable digital ledger that records transactions without the aid of galleries or other centralized institutions.
In theory, “minting” a piece of digital art on blockchain serves multiple purposes: It documents the date an artwork is made, stores on-chain metadata descriptions, and links to the crypto wallets of both the artist and buyer, thus tracking sales history somewhat automatically and making it easier to estimate a piece’s valuation.
As is common with the advent of any new technology, people embraced this narrative enthusiastically. Finally, it seemed, artists working in digital mediums had a digitally native method for doing what they’d previously relied on paper certificates and gallery spreadsheets to do for them.
Blockchain certainly presents a new way of…