Tokenising Sustainability (2021)

Essay by Harm van den Dorpel, edited by William Kherbek, 2021; original title "Tokenizing Sustainability". Full text.

TextEdit window showing the file_id.diz of Event Listeners, edition 47 of 100, in ASCII art — *Event Listeners* (2015), `file_id.diz` of edition 47/100

The image is the information file that came with an edition of Event Listeners, opened in a text editor: ASCII-art lettering for the title and "HARM.VAN.DEN.DORPEL", then "event-listeners.saver (47 / 100)", "MacOS Screensaver", "Created in 2015", "Nightly built in 2020", "Generative Lindenmayer systems … iterating over dissociative … feels of social inadequacy!", a support address at left.gallery, and "ERC721". The essay's whole history is in that one file: the 2015 work, the rebuild, the token.

The history

Van den Dorpel minted his first NFTs in 2015 with ascribe.io, a service that "allowed creators to upload their work, mint editions on the Bitcoin blockchain, and to transfer them as tokens when sold." The MAK in Vienna bought 20 tokenised editions of Event Listeners through Cointemporary, paying in Bitcoin, which he calls "the first time a museum bought NFTs, and paid with a cryptocurrency"; all 100 editions then sold "to collectors and another museum". That success led him and Paloma Rodríguez Carrington to start left gallery, where buyers could pay "with crypto, PayPal, or credit card" and tokens were transferred by hand to those who wanted them: "most didn't understand what a blockchain was at all."

Ascribe "stopped offering their service around 2017, and they pivoted to become a database company." In 2018 he deployed an ERC721 contract and minted Ethereum tokens for the editions that had been sold; few buyers asked for theirs, and minting and transfer costs came to exceed "the sales price of the actual artworks by orders of magnitude." For the 2020 relaunch, "as only a few buyers in the previous years had shown interest in owning an NFT for their purchase", he did not build an Ethereum integration again, and left gallery "had lost some of its 'blockchain soul'." The gallery closed in March 2022. Its full history, with the are.na records of the token site and the 2020 registry design, is on left gallery.

Immutability is not accessibility

Although the token provenance information that ascribe stored on the immutable Bitcoin blockchain will always remain there, in practice, we have lost access to it, as their web interface to retrieve it was discontinued.

The data is still on the Bitcoin blockchain and no one can delete it, but the interface that read it has gone. In the wiki's reading this is the essay's lasting point for the archive: the durability of a record does not guarantee the durability of access to it.

Field (2023) takes the other route. Its code and renderer are both in the contract: "As long as Ethereum exists, and our computers are able to display SVG, it should be fine" (→ Field). Ascribe kept the data on one chain and the means of reading it on its own server, and lost the server. The argument about what on-chain storage keeps and what it lets go is developed on Mediation and the Archive.

Two chains at once

Because the Ethereum tokens were minted for editions that already had ascribe records, "some editions were now tokenized on two blockchains at once": an inaccessible record on Bitcoin and a usable one on Ethereum, neither replacing the other. Mediation and the Archive reads this as provenance laid down in layers.

The 2021 boom

In my humble opinion, the works now offered as NFTs were not very interesting, or just plain ugly. Why were people suddenly willing to pay so much Ether for such bad "art", while they often hesitated to pay for the affordable, non-NFT artworks on left gallery?

He also took part: older and newer works "suddenly very well fitted the editioning, format, and price range of NFTs", and "I did profit from this second(?) wave of NFT." The hype, he wrote, "was not grounded in a genuine appreciation of the artworks." In the ZORA interview later that year he describes the same lull and surge: little interest in tokens in 2017–18, then waking up in 2021 to "see the whole world trading NFTs for high prices" (→ Subdued Iconoclasm).

Proof of work and proof of stake

The essay makes two moves. First, he questions the comparison: he finds it "hard to judge exactly how wasteful the Ethereum blockchain is" compared with "the Google data centres that power our daily search queries, or CI/CD pipelines, or credit card payment networks", and argues that the popularity of NFTs "does not correlate to the general energy use of the validators": "Were all artists to abandon Ethereum en masse, it would not make our planet greener." Second, he grants the point: "I think that it's hard to deny that the current Ethereum blockchain is wasteful by design", since proof-of-work burns electricity "to crunch meaningless mathematical riddles". Proof-of-stake, he wrote, is "not a silver bullet" but would "improve on the environmental issues associated with NFTs", and he would keep using Ethereum "for selected artworks, in anticipation of the announced transition".