[1] Let's chat about levels of "on-chain" art. It's important to define these clearly. The nuances behind digital art permanence and authenticity are confusing, so I figure this is a worthwhile reminder of what many already know, so we're all on the same page going into 2021.

[2] In my mind, there are four levels to digital art permanence:

1. Fully on-chain
2. Reproducibly on-chain
3. Decentralized
4. Centralized

[3] 1. Fully on-chain means the art, in its intended "as-is" form, is stored completely on the Ethereum blockchain. The first instance of this type of art was Autoglyphs.

[4] It was a clever way of writing a single generator script to the chain once that could produce generative art using immutable block data as a source of entropy. These will persist as long as the Ethereum network itself is alive without any additional maintenance cost.

[5] 2. Reproducibly on-chain means the artwork can be effectively reproduced given what is on-chain. A groundbreaking implementation of this is ArtBlocks, which stores generative scripts on-chain for a variety of creative coding projects.

[6] The difference is ArtBlocks scripts still require the JavaScript codebase and external libraries, while Autoglyphs are literally generated on-chain byte by byte.

[7] However these libraries are as decentralized as Ethereum itself, it is a very clever and efficient way to achieve permanence of on-chain digital art, in a practical way. In other words, this is probably as good as it's going to get unless someone stores JavaScript on-chain.

[8] 3. Decentralized digital art is really the majority of crypto art. Digital artworks are assigned an index in an Ethereum contract which can be owned and transferred. It's more of a public authenticity certificate.

[9] These contracts point to external resources which store the associated media (images, videos, sounds). This type of data is simply too expensive to store on-chain, thus we must resort to alternative means.

[10] The best practice is to store media on a decentralized network (IPFS) and assign a CID hash, ensuring its authenticity in the future. IPFS is decentralized, meaning there isn't a single point of failure where the media could be lost.

[11] However IPFS isn't free, meaning permanence will require someone (artist, collector, or marketplaces) to pay for its safeguarding on the network (likely ~$0.1-0.15/GB/month).

[12] These levels are all important for certain use cases and it'll be important to make sure we're all on the same page moving forward. It might be ugly if someone thinks their 50mb GIF they bought for 100 ETH is immutably stored on the Ethereum blockchain.