Provenance is the origin of something; in history and art, it specifically means the chain of ownership. Along with other recorded details, this is used to verify the authenticity of an object.

Why do people care about authenticity? People are enthralled by stories. If they can be convinced that an object (physical or digital) has really experienced the events in its story, then it is imbued with this magical property - first through the individual and then through the social network of people who have had their imaginations captured the same way. Owning a recorded object inextricably weaves you into its history. This is why people desire the real thing instead of an identical faux replica; this is how, through an ownable object, a digital image can have value.

NFTs are the native format for digital objects.

We believe that a digitally native piece of art should be minted as an NFT, as a way of transforming the work into a concept we traditionally understand as an object. This NFT can be transferred between addresses - enabling the creator to sell it in order to monetize their work, while permanently engraving these transactions into the ledger to forge an immutable chain of provenance as it journeys from owner to owner.

Authenticity through provenance is a social construct. In the physical art world, the provenance of an object is a subject of great controversy - chains of ownership are foggy, and rely on 'experts' who can spin and manipulate things to create a profitable reality for themselves. As much as 20% of art in public museums may be fake.

However, if something is openly verifiable and impossible to forge, it will be trusted and used more frequently. Money as a social construct relies on the same principles. The same way that Bitcoin disrupted money by becoming the perfect form of it, NFTs promise to do so to any object that can be reliably recorded on chain.

With NFTs, counterfeiting is impossible, as no one else has access to the creator's address. It may be the case that the creator has only given the address their blessing, and have delegated control of it to someone else - this is still valid, as long as it is socially understood that the artist has given their consent. As long as the creator does not expose their private keys, they will be the only one able to mint from the address. The social contract around the value and story of an object becomes reinforced by provable data, as long as the blockchain it is stored on exists. However, this is only verifiable for someone who has the context that an address is linked to a creator.

How do we verify this context? The most typical way is through social media. If an account publicly claims to be behind an on-chain action, people will first verify the account is not compromised. After some grace period, it can be committed to memory and further proven with on-chain signatures linking to the off-chain identity. We can usually trust that long standing social media accounts are linked to who they say they are.

However, over time, these links will decay. Social media posts will expire and sites will become defunct; anecdotes suffice, but this may return us to the problems faced by the existing art market. After all, someone may create fake copycat collections with bogus on-chain activity in order to pass it off as real in a future where there is less readily available information - so how can we trust the objects on-chain are really what we think they are?

Some projects choose to tackle this by being purely on-chain, entirely recoverable in their intended format by anyone regardless of their outside knowledge. Sadly, this is not possible for something that we wish to link to the real world. There is no perfect solution to this problem. But we can try.

The primary failure of provenance is in its recording. We have no way of knowing that the Mona Lisa is the same one that was stolen in 1911, or its whereabouts in WWII. The blockchain has solved this for us. All we need to do is keep alive the contextual link to this data, at any point in its provenance. It seems likely that this context can survive without intervention - but we must not assume this. We must be resistant to bad actors; artistic fabrications may be minted and written to the chain, or performed virally. The flow of information evolves rapidly alongside technology, and we cannot know what to expect.

Memes are a modern language, a way of expression that can penetrate language barriers. They are cornerstones of online culture, instantly and easily recognizable. This iconography is just as culturally important as any work of art, world event or movement; it is discounted because its digital origins are not taken seriously by older generations.

The DAO intends to act as stewards for online culture, cataloguing all instances of the intersection of blockchains and cultural phenomenons. We aim to be as unbiased as possible in our recording (but not in our purchasing). Many online publications mint their articles onchain, and many users with their own stories will interact with our contracts - this data can be cross referenced by future historians to reveal the truth; we intend to continue being publicly visible to the degree that this becomes viable. We intend to mint our own record keeping on chain. Being first is not enough on its own, but it strengthens our case. Lastly, our non-trivial financial commitment to uploading some of the content fully on-chain, even if it is not properly linked to its token, is far beyond what anyone else has attempted in this field.

The long term result of these actions is an anti-extractive and reduces the saturation of collectible culture. Duplicate tokens exist for everything as they can be spun up instantly and spread by a mob of insiders for profit. These actors often have no loyalty to the ideals of the decentralized network we have built, or to the culture they pretend to champion. Our 0% fee onboarding is designed to grow our brand's trust rapidly, while starving out any competitors. This is done for the love of history and culture in the hope that it will endure. This is an extremely low time preference undertaking, a project that rejects the fast attention economy of the present for the hope that it will be appreciated in the future - one that looks so uncertain for the concept of truth.

It would be disingenuous to pretend that the DAO and its members have no profit incentive. Art speculation has always existed, and is almost unavoidable - it has taken hold of objects from jewellery to stamps. However, one can argue that the history of man is the history of capital; of different forms of power. Take Ea-Nasir, for example. We are sincere in our mission and take great risk in doing so. Cultural definitions around this medium are still being decided; values are malleable. All of our members have a great enthusiasm towards this concept and are confident to take the first step towards cementing on-chain provenance as a normalized medium for art and culture, for all the world.

Written by path.eth

I have written previously about this concept on twitter:

https://x.com/Cryptopathic/status/1740832131159306326