Overview

OwnerOf.Art is an on-chain message posting protocol that enables all owners of NFTs (ERC-721) to post provenance-related messages.

The owner of a token (or a specified delegate) may post messages for a token.

The protocol aims to enrich the experience of owning an NFT, while also providing a robust provenance record keeping mechanism to provide important context to artworks.

How does it work?

A registry smart contract is deployed to multiple networks that enables owner (or delegate) wallets to post messages about any NFT.

The messages are displayed chronologically alongside other provenance information on the OwnerOf.Art website.

Only ERC-721 and CryptoPunks tokens are supported. The protocol intentionally does not support ERC-1155 tokens to prevent owners of a token posting about a token also potentially owned by other wallets.

Why does this matter?

Digital assets on blockchain technology are still in their infancy. Currently, key aspects of provenance are missing from existing protocols, namely an ability to provide context of a work of art, to future generations in a robust and trustless manner.

OwnerOf.Art provides a decentralized protocol that gives all NFT owners the ability to provide provenance-related messages for as long as their tokens exist. For assets with timelines in the hundreds-of-years, this is important functionality that blockchains can solve.

For more discussion on this topic, please see the following Medium article: https://ryley-o.medium.com/the-case-for-nft-provenance-messages-e2bb9aba852b

Storage mechanism

Messages are stored in a way that ensures they will remain available as long as the tokens are available on the network.

Messages are efficiently stored permanently on-chain via a custom algorithm that combines ArtBlocks-style BytecodeStorage technology + additional on-chain compression technology via solady's LibZip.

Deployments

Contracts are deployed from a keyless safe create2 factory, so they can technically be deployed by any wallet on any evm-compatible network.

Currently, the following registry contracts are supported by the OwnerOf.Art website:

• Contract Address: 0x00000000034C59993500438C8f03867e6E906550

• Supported Networks:

  • 1: Ethereum Mainnet

  • 10: Optimism

  • 42161: Arbitrum One

  • (Testnet) 11155111: Sepolia

Public Subgraphs

Indexing is currently provided via public subgraphs, available at:

• https://thegraph.com/hosted-service/subgraph/ryley-o/ownerof-art-mainnet
• https://thegraph.com/hosted-service/subgraph/ryley-o/ownerof-art-optimism
• https://thegraph.com/hosted-service/subgraph/ryley-o/ownerof-art-arbitrum

Open Source

All smart contracts and subgraph indexing code are open source and available at the OwnerOf.Art github repo: https://github.com/ryley-o/ownerof.art

Monetization

The OwnerOf.Art protocol is free and open, with an opt-in tipping system to support the creator of the protocol cover website and future development costs.

Please tip if you find value when using the protocol and want to support more collector-focused innovations like this!

Wallet Delegation Support

The protocol supports wallet delegation via delegate.xyz v2. Typically, delegations are specified such that all rights are allowed. However, If collectors only wish to grant the right to post messages on the OwnerOf.Art protocol, the smart contract indicates that owners may specify the following rights when assigning delegation:

rights: 0x3814eef715e47fefb0e782972afa908cd0f583157056c2497b8b05ca61c20a16

The rights are equal to keccak256("OWNER_OF_ART"), and users may have to interact on etherscan with the delegate.xyz v2 registry if their frontend doesn't yet support assigning specific rights.

Community

A home is available on Discord for the OwnerOf.Art community: https://discord.gg/9XhnW7Gj8u

Disclaimer

All smart contracts are provided as-is, and all risks with interacting with the contracts and website are the responsibility of the wallet owners. All smart contracts are availble publically on github, as mentioned above.