Method

How the Registry reads a wallet

The card and the report are made this way. Nothing on this page needs an account, a signature, or a fee.

Two kinds of pointer

Every token points at a file. The pointer is one of two kinds, and the two fail in different ways.

A hash starts with Qm or bafy. It is a fingerprint of the file. Any machine holding the file can serve it, and the fingerprint proves it served the right one. If everyone serving it walks away, the owner can hold the file, and the pointer keeps working. Nobody's permission is involved.

A web address looks like https://api.someplatform.io/token/4417. It works while that company runs that server at that path. The owner can download the image and keep it on three drives, and the token will go on pointing at the platform's copy.

Hash-addressed art can be rescued by the person who owns it. Web-addressed art mostly cannot, because repairing the pointer needs the platform, and a backup is evidence of what was owned rather than a repair.

Which kind a collection is made of is the first thing to know about it.

What a survey does

The Registry walks a wallet one token at a time. It reads the pointer on the chain, fetches the metadata behind it, then fetches the media the metadata names. Three hops. Any of them can be a hash or an address, and a work is only as safe as its weakest one. Metadata on IPFS with the image on a company server is a server-hosted work.

It fetches slowly, on purpose. A server hit too hard answers with errors, and a survey run fast will count live machines as dead. A wrong count in either direction is worse than none.

Every work lands in one of four classes.

On chain.

The media lives in the contract. Nothing to store.

Arweave.

Paid for once and held by a network built to keep it.

IPFS.

Hash-addressed. Kept as long as somebody pins it.

Server.

A web address on a machine somebody else pays for.

And in one of three conditions.

Loads.

The bytes came back.

Failing.

The host is up and answering with an error. A live machine saying something is wrong, which from outside looks the same as abandonment and usually isn't.

Gone.

Nothing at the address. No record, no route, nobody to ask.

IPFS gets one more distinction, because it matters more than the others. A hash can be valid and unserved at the same time: the fingerprint is fine and nobody happens to be holding the file. The Registry asks the public gateways and reports those hashes on their own, because they are the works an owner can still save tonight.

The card puts the four classes in one bar, with failing and gone as counts, at the block and date it was read. The report goes through the collection work by work, and comes with the pin list.

The platforms

None of the works moved. The buildings around them did.

Three closures are worth reading closely.

KnownOrigin is the only platform that has put a date on it. When it announced its closure in July 2024, an artist asked in public who would pay the IPFS bill and for how long. The answer was two years, and the FAQ now names the day: 31 January 2027. After that, the FAQ says, preserving the tokens is the collector's job. Everything on KnownOrigin still loads. That is four months away.

Nifty Gateway closed in February 2026 and its servers still answer. Four days after the closure notice, it published a plan to move metadata and media to Arweave and to host the early pieces that are wired to its servers in perpetuity. More than most did, and still a plan. Tokens checked this month resolve to Nifty's own servers. Until the move lands, the Registry classes them as server-hosted, because they are.

Async Art is the one to learn from. It closed in 2023 and most of the work survived anyway, which nobody would have bet on for pieces made of layers that changed over time. The metadata and the layer images are IPFS hashes. The lever positions can be read off the contract. Some control settings lived only in the company's database and were exported into a fallback file before the lights went out. Pictures and state on chain, and part of the instructions saved because someone remembered to export a file. For a closed platform, that is as good as it gets.

Twenty minutes

If the work is hash-addressed, the fix is free.

1. Install IPFS Desktop from ipfs.tech. It runs a node on the machine it is installed on. Leave it running.
2. Collect the hashes. For every token: the tokenURI, the metadata behind it, and every Qm and bafy string in both. Metadata hash and media hash, one per line, in a text file. The report ships this file.
3. Pin them, then count.

while read cid; do ipfs pin add --timeout=45s "$cid"; done < pin_list.txt
ipfs pin ls --type=recursive | wc -l

Run it twice. The first pass times out on some, because the node has not found enough peers yet. The second pass skips what is already pinned and catches most of the rest. If the count stops moving on a third pass, nobody is serving those files right now, and that is worth knowing too.

The layers

Pinning on a laptop means the art lasts as long as the laptop. In order of how much is being trusted to somebody else:

1. Your machine. Free, immediate, dies with the machine.
2. A second drive, kept offline. The files themselves, each one hashed with SHA-256, the list kept with them. That is proof a file is the file, which matters the first time ownership is argued with a marketplace. Digital art is small. A serious collection fits on a thumb drive.
3. A pinning service. Somebody else's machines for a monthly fee. It is the arrangement every closed platform had with its own hosting, except the bill is now in the collector's name, so the collector will at least know when it stops.
4. A decentralised network. Arweave or Sia. The files sit across many hosts instead of one company, and the collector funds the storage rather than trusting a firm. The Registry's operator holds both tokens. See the disclosure.

The first two take an evening and cover most of what goes wrong. The Engagement tier does the fourth.

What can't be fixed

None of the above repairs a token that points at a URL. The file can be archived, hashed and kept for a century, and the token will still point at a server its owner does not control.

What remains is unsatisfying and worth doing. Keep the file and its hash. Write down what the token pointed at and the date it last worked. Ask the artist whether they kept a copy; a surprising number did. If the platform still exists, ask it to move the metadata to a hash while there is someone to ask.

And before buying, look at the pointer. Ten seconds, and it says something the price does not.

Why the Registry exists

The Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2025 asked 3,100 collectors in ten markets. They hold 20% of their wealth in art, up from 15% a year earlier. Around 80% plan to pass their collections to a partner or their children.

Four in five expect to hand this on. What an heir receives today is a token and somebody else's hosting arrangement, with no document explaining the difference and nobody left to ask once the platform is gone. That is a succession question, and the paperwork for it does not exist yet. The report is that paperwork.