The goal of this article is to summarize my thoughts on the generative art landscape from a platforms point of view. Mainly trying to answer the question, where as a platform we can do better for artists & collectors. These observations come through my experiences as an artist, collector and founder of a generative art platform. The key topics we will be covering are as follows:
We will compare the above in general and also specifically for multiple generative art platforms, more specifically: ArtBlocks, FxHash, GmStudio, Gen.Art and 256ART.
Other platforms won’t be covered as most (all?) of them use ArtBlocks engine under the hood.
As the founder of 256ART, I will try to set aside my bias towards my own platform when looking at each of the above topics, reflecting on how platforms can do better, and in doing so challenging the status quo.
Storing generative art on the blockchain is done in four ways. It can be:
ArtBlocks, GmStudio, Gen.Art and 256ART all put the art scripts on-chain. They also all provide generated off-chain assets for images and traits and rely on off-chain libraries (p5js, threejs). Some of these libraries now have certain versions available on-chain, but this isn't directly being leveraged by any of the platforms at the moment. FxHash is the odd one out here, where the art is not stored on-chain at all, and instead stored on IPFS exclusively.
For ArtBlocks, GmStudio and Gen.Art, you cannot render your artwork directly from chain and instead have to re-construct it with the data available yourself. With 256ART you can render your artwork from chain, but if a library (e.g.: p5js is used) is used, it still depends on the CDN for that library remaining available. With FxHash, as the art is not on-chain, so there is no way to reconstruct your art from chain, instead they leverage IPFS (but the pointer seems to go to their specific gateway at the moment, meaning if their gateway goes down, the IPFS url won’t work).