Impermanent Comics? A Call to Non-Comical Permanent Action

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Impermanent Comics? A Call to Non-Comical Permanent Action
Art and Article by Joe Chiappetta, 2026

This comic is a tech statement of where the NFT Web3 roadshow needs to radically mature into if it wants to survive beyond our transient niche audience. Currently most rare digital art marketplaces to mint, buy, and sell NFTs are places where the art is only "kind-of" on the blockchain--but not really. If trends of the past few years continue, at risk are more marketplaces going out of business and eventually, even whole blockchains running out of founders tokens to sell and also going under as well.

At hand are serious issues of digital art marketplace trust and permanence. The first rare digital art platform to solve the issue of online artwork permanence with actual on-chain storage will be a clear winner of the elusive war for trust in our long attacked and tarnished industry. I can't be the only OG creator and collector dreaming of an NFT marketplace that actually puts the art and the token on-chain... particularly on a solid network that has an enduring future. Instead of marketplaces competing for their short season of fame and hip founder pats on the back, what is so needed is builders coming up with workable solutions to the right problem.

In the NFT art space, the problem is that trust has been painstakingly eroded and there is a growing skepticism over which NFT marketplaces and which blockchains will still be around a few months from now. As a longtime collector, I cannot help but be more hesitant to spend valuable cryptocurrency on an NFT if I think the marketplace may go out of business, the website disappears, and the digital artwork that comes with the NFT becomes harder to find and trade with the token in the future. Similarly, as an artist, I also wonder; why am I spending effort to tokenize and describe this carefully crafted art if my beloved marketplace and metadata disappears... leaving my collectors coming back to me with equal frustration to fix it.

These matters are brought up not as a complaint, but rather as an opportunity for all existing NFT marketplaces. Lean into this. If you really want to establish trust, build trustless solutions into your platform, much like CryptoSketches did in 2018. That platform put the vectors to the sketches made directly onto their art drawing marketplace on the Ethereum blockchain, and that data is still there 8 years later!

Taking a cue from such pioneering platforms, more marketplaces would do well to imitate them outright or at least imitate that spirit of innovation and come up with new permanence solutions. This calls for long-term image file storage that is not dependent on just one company paying to keep it online. It also calls for more on-chain artwork storage solutions, and even artists and collectors contributing to stabilize these networks through staked tokens, traditional shareholder routes, simpler ways from non-tech stakeholders to run network nodes, or something entirely new to bring endurance to this fledgling yet fantastic industry.

If we face the future together with actionable solutions, we are more likely to enjoy that future together.