Artists and collectors often ask us: “Are artworks created using your tools stored on-chain?”

We answer this with an enthusiastic “It depends!” This is because we pride ourselves on providing options to artists instead of dictating a specific approach, including how they choose to bring their works on-chain.

In this post and subsequent updates, we share the longer answer.

It’s Not a Binary Question

Many people consider “on-chain” as binary—an artwork is either on-chain or off-chain. But, as alluded to above, there is an entire spectrum regarding on-chain art. So, it is usually better to ask, “How on-chain is it?” rather than “Is it on-chain?”

The degrees of “on-chainness” depend on how much of the artwork’s essential information and assets exist and rely on the blockchain.

While we’ve seen dozens of specific configurations, there are a few broad categories of on-chainness that can be helpful to artists and collectors for thinking about how on-chain their artwork should be.

The Core Goal is Digital Preservation

Being on-chain is not the ultimate goal in and of itself. The fundamental objective is to achieve permanence and longevity for digital artworks, and — for code-based artwork — on-chain storage is one of the best methods.

Storing an artwork’s code on-chain in an immutable way provides assurance that the artwork can exist as long as the blockchain does.

While being on-chain does not inherently guarantee permanence because blockchains can and do fail or become obsolete, it establishes the conceptual groundwork to enable the preservation of digital art.

Beyond this, reducing the reliance on other external dependencies can also be a goal. Sometimes called “in-chain,” artwork that is stored, assembled, and rendered purely from the blockchain itself has the fewest possible dependencies. By contrast, projects that can only be recreated through on-chain data but use off-chain file storage to display the art for speed, cost, or performance reasons are considered somewhat less on-chain.

At this point, you might wonder—why do people care? Are we splitting hairs, and is this just a form of code golf? While perspectives differ, there are very valid reasons why projects that are more on-chain or even in-chain are essential:

• First, collecting art is often viewed as an investment. Good investments, especially long-term ones, have little risk of disappearing or becoming irretrievable. At the same time, digital data tends to erode or get lost over time. Platforms, databases, technical standards, and the hardware we use to run all of it becomes obsolete. A widely decentralized blockchain such as Ethereum, which has a lot of value, is likely a better place for permanently storing digital assets. And an asset that depends on more systems to exist is riskier relative to one with fewer dependencies.

• Second, the blockchain is an exciting new medium for creating art. Artists have gravitated to the blockchain for at least a decade because of its unique properties. Creating art is self-expression, and a medium with the potential to make digital work with very long-term permanence, not to mention its independence, dynamism, and openness, is fascinating to artists. These properties lead many artists to explore how self-contained their work can be as pure expressions of the digital medium.

Levels of On-Chain Art

With this context in mind, let’s explore the levels of on-chain code-based art:

1. Fully Off-Chain: The artwork assets and metadata live in centralized storage like AWS or Google Cloud. The NFT merely consists of pointer links to this off-chain data. This approach can be better for performance, e.g., displaying your artwork simultaneously to millions of viewers over the internet.

2. Decentralized File Storage: Networks like IPFS and Arweave provide decentralized storage, but the code to produce the artwork remains off-chain. This is an improvement over centralized services, but critical assets are not stored on the blockchain itself.

3. On-Chain Data, Off-Chain Dependencies: Critical artwork data and assets are stored directly on-chain, but required libraries and metadata often remain off-chain, especially for performance reasons. Shout out to Art Blocks for pioneering this model for generative collections.

4. Fully On-Chain: All artwork data, metadata, dependencies, and anything else required to recreate the work is stored wholly on-chain. This provides full assurance of availability as long as the underlying blockchain exists.

5. In-Chain Generative Art: The art is not just stored on the blockchain. It IS the blockchain. Projects like Autoglyphs and Math Castles store, generate and render art natively in transactions on-chain. The blockchain is the entire creative medium.

   1. Highlight smart contracts fully support in-chain generative art. Creators can either swap in a custom in-chain renderer they’ve built (for example, see Bit Rot) or use our global in-chain renderer, which is coming very soon.

As a final note, the data that seeds outputs in a code-based generative collection also has a spectrum of on-chainness. For example, Highlight enables creators to use all sorts of transaction data as inputs, such as the minting address, token ID, gas price, and more. The EVM uses three data structures to store critical data: the state trie (contract storage), the transactions trie, and the transaction receipts trie. Data stored in any of these tries can be considered equivalently “on-chain.” For example, the minting wallet address is stored in the transactions trie, while the tokenID is stored in the state trie.

How On-Chain is Highlight?

With the above in mind, creators using Highlight can make collections at any point on the spectrum above, except option 1. Choosing where your project should exist on this spectrum depends on your goals, values, and budget for your project. In short, we provide the flexibility to target the appropriate level of on-chainness for each collection, depending on the artist.

Highlight’s also unique because you can graduate levels based on what we’ve built.

For example, you release a project using level 2 above, which deploys your generative script and other assets to Arweave for decentralized file storage. This reduces upfront costs since you won’t add your script or any other dependencies on-chain.

Because your work is a brilliant project that collectors adore, it sells out quickly, and a brisk secondary market starts around it. Several collectors say that while they love the project, they are concerned about its long-term preservation and prefer to see the script and other dependencies brought on-chain.

Thankfully, you’ve used Highlight, so your contract has a built-in file system that will let you, as the contract creator and owner, put your project onchain. Even though the project has already been deployed, you can add your script later, moving your project from level 2 to level 3.

Fast-forward another few months, and your project is now an iconic example of contemporary generative art. You want to ensure it’s fully preserved on-chain to the best of your ability. You take the version of p5.js that you used and deploy it on-chain while updating your script to reference the on-chain version recursively. Doing so moves your project from level 3 to 4.

Finally, you can entirely swap in either our in-chain renderer or a custom in-chain renderer of your choice, which will do the work of our engine but “in-chain,” seeding your collection outputs with transaction data, as usual.

In sum, we meet creators where they are regarding on-chain preferences while providing complete control over data-storage options. We believe that the journey to fully on-chain art is both a spectrum and a progression, not a binary or immutable choice, and we’re here to help artists however they decide.

By deploying a collection on Highlight, you can focus on making art with the confidence that under the hood, you maintain optionality with a very flexible and upgradable on-chain architecture that can support more on-chain artwork as your creative practice, community, and career evolve.

Let us know if you have any other technical questions by reaching us at gm@highlight.xyz. We’re always happy to dive deeper into how Highlight empowers onchain creativity.