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# System prepended metadata

title: Onchain Media

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# Onchain Media

Digital content secured by blockchain.

Popularized by smart contracts, onchain media can be anything from an image, piece of text, video, audio, or even interactive program.

### Provenance

A key aspect to onchain media is immutable record keeping provided by blockchains to authenticate the creator and owners of tokenized content.

However, these historic records are not guaranteed to always be widely accessible. As blockchains naturally grow in size over time, they're subject to finding optimizations to reduce storage needs. One proposed optimization is pruning away events and transactional data in favor of only keeping only the latest information of a given smart contract. Preservationists may run their own archival nodes that maintain this pruned information, though it is uncertain how common practice this will be.

### Intellectual Property

A common value proposition of tokenized ownership is the idea of monetizing intellectual property. The idea being that the owner of a token may have rights to the asset they own to use to the fullest capacity that the token creator has granted. However, this has been hard to not only enforce but understand as intellectual property law differs by country and regions.

On the other extreme end is waiving all copyright and protected status of onchain media by licensing it as CC0, releasing it to the public domain. This goes hand in hand with the decentralized ethos of blockchains, allowing for permisionless brands to remix freely.


### Storage

Under the hood, onchain media is typically a tokenized pointer to some persistent location. This can be the URL of a web server, a cryptographic hash of the media stored on a decentralized file storage system like IPFS or Arweave, or even stored and assembled entirely on a smart contract.

The range of storage options comes with its set of tradeoffs.

- Web servers: brittle, subject to downtime or even being overloaded, but offer infinitely flexibility and interactivity options as they can directly tap into the Internet
- Decentralized storage: most commonly used method, relatively inexpensive given the generous file size limitations, requires ongoing or one-time payments to upload
- Smart contracts: expensive up front, immutable, limited to media sized in kilobytes, interoperable, and if stored correctly can be as durable as the very blockchain it is stored on

<!-- ## CryptoPunks

The first and most notable creation of on-chain media was CryptoPunks in mid-2017. It was a simple smart contract that allowed Ethereum users to claim a CryptoPunk token, which was any available number from 0 to 9999, list tokens for sale, or put them on auction.

The numbers represented a pre-generated grid of 10,000 CryptoPunks, of which only a cryptographic hash of the composite image was stored in the smart contract. This concept laid the foundation for the ERC-721 standard, which defines NFTs as we know them today. -->


## Brief History

- 2017: CryptoPunks, a collection of 10,000 unique 24x24 pixel art avatars, is launched by Larva Labs and eventually helps define the standard of NFTs
- 2019: Autoglyphs, the first onchain generative art collection created by Larva Labs, is introduced. Each piece is generated entirely by smart contract
- 2020: Zora, an NFT marketplace designed to empower creators to bring their creations and imaginations on-chain, is founded
- 2021: CryptoPunks' artwork migrates to fully onchain storage, marking the beginning of many maximally onchain art projects like DEAFBEEF's FIRST, Nouns, Anonymice, and Terraforms