The Cryptoart Community Is Salvaging Foundation's Art

Foundation, once among the most popular NFT minting platforms on Ethereum, shuttered this month after a planned acquisition by Blackdove collapsed rather messily.

This wind-down created two pressure points for past Foundation users. The official frontend is offline for good (making workarounds necessary for asset management), and the platform is pinning its NFT metadata on IPFS through April 2027 (bringing into question longterm availability).

Neither of these are impassable problems though, and in fact they've already largely been solved for by various parallel efforts in the cryptoart community. And it's worth underlining that these "fixes" are possible because of Foundation's open design.

The centralized frontend is gone, but the underlying smart contracts will continue humming along onchain forever. And the Foundation team is pinning metadata for just one year, but it's easy to achieve redundancy with IPFS. All it takes is other people joining in to pin this data and it can remain available indefinitely.

Us crypto natives might take user-centric assurances like these for granted now, as they're not uncommon in our space. Consider how Martian these niceties are elsewhere, though. Take hobbyists who try to revive dead games in the mainstream. Sometimes game devs publish some of their files upon walking away from a game, making revivals easier. Yet oftentimes codebases stay totally private, so reverse engineering can be tough or in some cases impossible.

With onchain infra + open assets like Foundation has, keeping a project alive (or at the very least usable) after its company has moved on is just a matter of creating alternative frontends around the base contracts and continued community-led metadata pinning. And like I said earlier, we're already seeing these sorts of efforts coalescing around Foundation. A few examples:

• The trio of jalil.eth, ygg, and Jack Butcher have successfully pinned +99.99% of all Foundation content and plan to do so indefinitely, and some Foundation features (like delisting NFTs) are coming to networked.art.
• The artist ripe opensourced PND, a frontend that supports delisting and bulk migration of works from Foundation plus artist-owned auction contracts (forked from Zora's old auctions protocol).
• The Transient team just rolled out support for importing Foundation 1/1 creator contracts, offering artists a way to view and sell their works without needing the old Foundation frontend.

All that said, I see Foundation's shutdown as just the latest case study for how open infra can continue working even when its original operators are under pressure or no longer around. Platforms are temporary, but protocols are permanent. When we build like this, we can get permanent guarantees.

And the north star here is that this openness can lead to better results for users. Instead of Foundation's official end becoming a cataclysm of lost media, the underlying protocol is being bridged to and expanded upon in various ways. Artists' historic works will live on, and they can continue managing them practically as if nothing has changed.

This outcome is incredible when you think about it, and ultimately it's all possible because of the sovereignty afforded by tech like Ethereum and IPFS. Now, things are in the hands of the community regarding Foundation, and that's the best outcome we could've gotten.