Art Blocks NFT Project Takes ‘Major Leap Forward’ on Ethereum

Art Blocks, the popular platform and collective for on-chain artwork, announced on Wednesday that it has achieved a longstanding goal: ensuring that the vast majority of its projects can now be accessed and viewed solely by navigating the Ethereum blockchain.

While all Art Blocks projects have been created on Ethereum since the collective launched in 2020, those pieces have always required a back-end generator provided by the company to be viewable online.

Now, however, even the mechanisms needed to view and enjoy some 90% of all Art Blocks pieces have been configured on-chain.

That means that as long as the Ethereum blockchain exists, those artworks will be viewable online, regardless of whether Art Blocks as a company continues to operate and host those works.

The vast majority of Art Blocks pieces that can now be viewed purely on-chain were initially created with one of two commonly used programming tools: p5js and threejs. The remaining 10% of pieces, which still require a third party’s assistance to be viewed, relied on other tools. 

In a blog post today, on Art Blocks’ fourth anniversary, company founder Erick Calderon called the achievement a “major leap forward.”

“You’re no longer dependent on Art Blocks or any other platform,” Calderon said. “These works represent a fundamental shift in how art can be created, collected, and preserved.”

Art Blocks says it will continue to rely on a centralized generator as the primary means to visualize its pieces online. But it maintains that enabling full on-chain accessibility for these works is crucial to the company’s long-term mission of creating infrastructure for “a new chapter in art history.”