DIGITAL CAVE PAINTINGS: BAYC Member Wutaner’s Oncave Project Is Preserving Today’s NFT Art For A Millennia!

Projects and their teams may come and go, and cloud storage standards may change, but art shouldn’t!

For over a year, Bored Ape Yacht Club member Wutaner has been working on his project, Oncave, a fully onchain imaging service that aims to make sure the digital art of this era lasts for millennia, just like cave paintings have!

 

“If Ethereum survives, does your NFT survive with it,” Wutaner tweeted earlier this month. “A contract can still record who owns a token while its image, metadata and rendering rules depend on files elsewhere. If those files disappear, what can a future collector still see? Oncave stores the assets, traits, recipes, metadata and rendering rules on Ethereum. Anyone can recover the works even if the Oncave website disappears. I built these archives independently. The original NFT contracts, ownership and identity stay unchanged.”

 

 

To date, Wutaner has already brought the original art from Bored Apes, Pudgy Penguins, MFers, CryptoDickButts, Curio Cards, Quirkies, Nakamigos, and Chimpers onchain, ensuring that NFTs from this era are permanently stored on Ethereum.

Earlier this week, Wutaner joined Yuga Labs’ BaronVonHustle and IllaDaProducer on Meet at the Clubhouse and talked about Oncave and the importance of preserving art onchain.

 

“I want the artwork to remain available even if the website close and the team’s move on,” he said.

 

 

Wutaner went on to explain that Oncave is much more than simply screenshotting images and minting them onchain.

The process required a ton of math, meticulous attention to detail, and the rebuilding of every image while checking each one pixel by pixel to make sure every NFT’s HD artwork was preserved exactly as the founders intended!

“I trust blockchains and that we can trust where something came from, the record is there…I think preserving the artwork should follow the same principal,” he said. “I’m looking after someone else’s art. I don’t get to decide that a small change is good enough. If I changed even a small pixel its no longer exactly the same image, even if nobody notices that doesn’t give me the right to change it. So I checked every pixel against the original…For me, the exact is a way of respecting the artist and the source of the work.”

 

Tonight, collectors can check out their own preserved NFTs, or anyone else’s, and download the HD files with a single click here: https://oncave.io/torch/

 

“One day, I may stop maintaining this website,” he tweeted. “But as long as Ethereum can run these contracts, future collectors should still be able to open the archives, see the works and check the evidence. That's why I built Oncave.”

 

The Gazette will continue to follow Wutaner and will let you know which NFT collections get permanently preserved onchain next. Stay tuned for updates!