ascribe for NFT Archaeologists
A slice of early NFT history for art lovers * crypto nerds
1. Introduction
ascribe was a protocol, backend, and app for blockchain-secured digital art (“NFTs”) starting in 2013. It was built on Bitcoin; Ethereum didn’t exist yet. It grew to 13,500 users and 31,900 registered works. Despite the traction, it was too early. It’s been dormant since 2018.
Since the explosion of NFTs in 2021, self-described “NFT archaeologists” and others have been asking me more than ever about ascribe and the related works. To give everyone more thorough answers, this post brings together previously-scattered information to help NFT enthusiasts learn more.
The rest of this post is organized as follows.
- Section 2 has a timeline spanning blockchain pre-history, to ascribe early years and growth, to the 2021 NFT explosion.
- Section 3 highlights ascribe users and features, such as the first museum to add an NFT to its collection.
- Section 4 describes ascribe technology, including the SPOOL ownership protocol overlaying Bitcoin, how users control their own keys, and pointers to open-source frontend & backend open-source on GitHub.
- Section 5 concludes. Section 6 has further data for those wishing to go deeper yet.
For those who prefer audio, check out the recent podcasts with Mat & Holly and with Adam McBride which are complementary to each other. [Update: Jake Gallen podcast.] And, here’s a short twitter thread. What follows is a full-detail version.
2. ascribe Timeline
2.1 Pre-blockchain
ascribe is part of a long lineage of electronic media, art, licensing, and provenance that includes Ted Nelson / Project Xanadu, Tim Berners-Lee / the World Wide Web, and Creative Commons.
The ascribe whitepaper gives a thorough academic treatment of this lineage up to ascribe days. It was my honour to co-author it with David Holtzman, an internet pioneer who architected the Domain Name System (DNS).
2.2 Blockchain pre-ascribe
Bitcoin was the first blockchain application — for digital currency. It was also the first live production blockchain. Not long after Bitcoin was released, enthusiasts started exploring other blockchain use cases including time-stamping, provenance, and collectibles.
In early 2013, Manuel Araoz shipped shipped proofofexistence.com, which time-stamped a claim (statement) to a blockchain. It was used by the Senate of Canada for years, and more. Manuel went on to found OpenZeppelin, Decentraland, and most recently Rewilder.
Also in early 2013, several teams explored the “Colored Coins” concept.
While these teams didn’t focus on digital art per se, they all greatly contributed to the conversation.
2.3 ascribe genesis: the idea (2013)
The genesis of ascribe was at the collision of art * blockchain.
Art. In the early 2010s, as a professional art curator, Masha McConaghy became deeply aware of an “elephant in the room” problem in the art world: digital artists weren’t getting paid. Here’s why: Art is only valuable to the extent you can trust the authenticity of the work; this is usually done by tracking provenance of ownership; trustworthy provenance was exceedingly difficult for digital art.
Blockchain. I’d been in the Bitcoin rabbit hole since 2010. In 2011, I bought my first BTC. In spring 2013, I finally grokked blockchain via amazing conversations at the legendary Room 77 in Berlin.
Art * Blockchain. Masha and I would talk about both these things all the time. One day in spring 2013, neurons from both fired at once (!) and we asked:
“what if you could own digital art the way you can own Bitcoin?”
If this worked, it would benefit both artists and art collectors. We pulled on this thread, and there was more. We kept pulling; there was more yet. (It’s turned out to be a really long thread: it’s now 2021, and we’re still pulling!)
2.3 ascribe genesis: working on the idea (2013)
Shortly after we posed this question, we looped in our friend, and fellow Canadian, Bruce Pon. He’d been building banks for the decade prior. Now we had art * tech * finance.
We shared the idea with digital artist Jonathan Monaghan, who responded enthusiastically and became a key collaborator for early feedback. At this time the project was called “Keidom” (key + house). We kept iterating on it. This was in spring and summer 2013. Then we wrote up the idea and timestamped it via a patent filing [0].
By late summer 2013, we had contracted Yanislav Malahov to build the first prototype [1].
Here’s an NFT transaction from Nov 18, 2013 on one of Jonathan’s pieces. It’s the earliest one I could find in my records; there may be earlier ones.
2.4 ascribe launch (2014)
By early 2014, I was spending all my free hours coding the next iteration of the prototype. This matured into a beta, which we developed with close feedback from Jonathan, and other excellent digital artists, especially Harm van den Dorpel and Constant Dullaart.
By fall 2014, we had renamed to “ascribe” [2], formed a company (ascribe GmbH), raised a modest seed round, and hired additional team members [3].
ascribe shipped publicly in late 2014.
2.5 ascribe growth phase (2015–2017)
ascribe officially launched in January 2015. We focused on growth by improving the product and working with artists, collectors, galleries, and others.
In the years that followed, ascribe grew to 13,500 registered users, 700–1000 weekly active users, 31,900 registered works, and 118,680 registered editions (each work may have one or more editions). Section 3 below highlights some users / use cases and ascribe features.
2.6 ascribe Pause (2018)
Despite the traction and milestones, it was hard to keep ascribe funded meaningfully. ascribe’s numbers from a Web3 perspective were good; however investors still used Web2 numbers as the measuring stick and the idea of owning “unique” digital art was still too radical and innovative.
In January 2018, ERC721 was released, which allowed for new Ethereum-based art platforms. This was a relief to us! Over a six-month period, we worked with artists to transition elsewhere, and wound down ascribe services in 2018. Of course, everything on-chain stayed on-chain; which means on the Bitcoin blockchain there’s a lot of amazing work by amazing artists.
2.7 Related Work in Ocean (2017-ongoing)
ascribe had a strong vision about getting artists paid, and more generally leveling the playing field for creators of intellectual property (IP). Myself and ascribe co-founders continue to pursue the ascribe vision more broadly in Ocean Protocol, which focuses on IP in the data vertical.
The following recent articles describe various blockchain approaches to managing IP: pure ERC721, pure ERC20, and ERC721+ ERC20 which combines the best of both.
2.7 NFTs Explosion
It’s been heartwarming to watch NFTs blow up in 2021. In ascribe, we’d aimed for artists to get paid. Now they are, and then some!
3. ascribe Highlights
This section describes some fun ascribe milestones, and interesting ascribe features.
3.1 Highlight: First Museum to own an NFT
MAK Vienna is the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art. It was founded on March 7, 1863 by the Austrian Emperor, Franz Joseph Rudolf von Eitelberger. On April 23, 2015, MAK Vienna announced its purchase of the ascribe NFT “Event Listeners” by Harm van den Dorpel. Here’s their press release:
In fact, of the 100 editions of the piece, MAK Vienna bought 20 editions so that they could loan out many editions at once without worry. This May 2016 case study features Harm, including more MAK details.
3.2 Highlight: Digital Art Marketplaces
The ascribe backend powered ascribe.io and could power others’ marketplaces too. Here are some examples for digital art.
Cointemporary.com was founded by artist Valentin Ruhry. It initially sold physical art with Bitcoin as payment. In 2015, it integrated ascribe to enable selling of digital art.
left.gallery is a digital marketplace by Harm van den Dorpel for artists selling their works as “downloadable objects”, launched in 2015. It started out powered by ascribe. It’s still going strong, now using ERC721.
In 2017, the The Lumen Prize launched ascribe-powered art platform lumenus.co.
3.3 Highlight: ascribe * Creative Commons
Creative Commons (CC) licenses are an easy-to-use way for creators to let others use their work for free, with some conditions (e.g. requiring attribution). However, CC licenses on their own didn’t have a secure way to record attribution.
To address this, we worked with Creative Commons France / Primavera de Filippi to launch cc.ascribe.io, where creators could verifiably time-stamp attribution and a Creative Commons license.
3.4 Highlight: Other ascribe Users / Use Cases
- Berlin Art Prize (berlinartprize.com) used ascribe as an authenticated submissions platform for hundreds of artists.
- IkonoTV (ikono.og), the first art television channel, used ascribe to ensure their artists are properly attributed and with clear legals.
- Video Art Channel (videoartchannel.com) provided streaming ascribed video art to marquee hotels.
- Tom and Gary of Decentralized Dance Party (DDP) ascribed their tour posters and their party manual on ascribe.io onto the blockchain [video].
- Andy Tudhope and Toby Downton secured their respective novels with ascribe.
- Professional photographer James C. Lee ascribed his works to the blockchain.
- Titanium Comics ascribed comics to the blockchain.
- The Gray Foundation held a “Deep Dreams” art exhibition with every work registered on ascribe.
3.5 Feature: Certificates of Authenticity (COAs)
ascribe created digitally-signed Certificates of Authenticity (COAs) to augment galleries’ existing workflows for more trustworthy COAs.
3.6 Feature: WhereOnTheNet
WhereOnTheNet (www.whereonthe.net) was a tool to show the provenance of copies of an image across the whole web, complementary to ascribe.io for provenance of ownership.
WOTN turned “right-click save” from a problem to a solution. Instead of artists fretting about copies of their work being spread online, it gave artists visibility into the spread of copies, to actually see who their audience is. Provenance of copies are inevitable in the digital world; rather than fight them, WOTN celebrates the copies, knowing that ownership rights are a different thing.
Under the hood, WOTN used large-scale web crawling, followed by a scalable image matching. Here’s an example for everyone’s favorite dog(e).
3.7 Highlight: Eating our own dogfood
For a landing page image we wanted to use the works “Coacts” and “Shatter” from photographer Ella Frost. Then we asked ourselves how we might license it; and we realized we could use ascribe! “Eating your own dog food” is a rite of passage for any startup that is able to do so. So we happily did this. It became a popular story on HackerNews.
3.8 Highlight: Brainwave Marketplace
In a 2015 hackathon, Greg McMullen and I built n3uro.com, “a marketplace for thoughts. We capture brainwaves of people thinking about things, and sell the recordings of those brainwaves as limited digital editions.”
n3uro.com included such illustrious works as “Greg Eating a Pretzel” and “Trent Dreaming of Electric Sheep” :P
4. ascribe Technology
4.1 ascribe Tech Stack
The image below shows the ascribe tech stack. The ascribe service is consumed by either marketplaces (top left) to bring benefits to their users; or directly by users on the ascribe web app. Marketplaces (e.g. Cointemporary) and the ascribe web app both consume the ascribe REST API. Ascribe ownership servers implement the functionality exposed by the API.
- The bottom right vertical shows how the blockchain is used to make the ownership transactions securely time-stamped. We built ascribe on the bitcoin network; Ethereum didn’t exist yet. Specifically, the ascribe servers construct bitcoin transactions according to the dialect of the ascribe ownership bitcoin overlay, called SPOOL protocol
- On the bottom middle is the ascribe Terms of Service to handle the legals.
- On the bottom left, the “where” to auto-discover bidirectional links is by ascribe crawl data and similarity search against content (WhereOnTheNet).
4.2 ascribe interfaces
The figure below illustrates the three ways that users or developers can interact with the ascribe service.
The three interfaces to ascribe are:
- The web app (left) is for individual creators (artists, graphic designers, photographers, writers, ..) who want to register, consign, and archive their work directly. It’s also for individual galleries, and for collectors.
- The REST API (center) is typically for marketplaces of digital goods (art,
photography, 3D, …), archives, and other businesses to answer “where’s my stuff” for their users, and themselves. - The SPOOL protocol (right) is for adventurous Bitcoin hackers, or for other businesses looking to develop their own ownership services.
4.3 SPOOL Protocol
SPOOL is a thin protocol that overlays the bitcoin protocol to register ownership (“mint a token” these days), transfer ownership (“send” these days), and more. The two main ownership transactions are registering a piece of work (minting) and transferring ownership. Provenance of ownership emerges. The image below illustrates these.
Registration (Figure, left). Here’s an example for a work with editions 1/3, 2/3, and 3/3. A bitcoin transaction has ≥1 inputs, and ≥1 outputs. The transactions have special choices for inputs and outputs. The input address is a public ascribe address. There are six outputs.
- The first output is a hash of information defining the work: the file containing the work, the artist name, the title, and the year.
- The second, third, and fourth outputs are the addresses “owning” edition 1/3, 2/3, and 3/3 respectively. By definition of the TOS, whoever has the private key to one of those addresses is the owner of that work.
- The fifth output is the verb of the transaction; we use the bitcoin OP_RETURN to embed the word “register”.
- The final output is change. (It’s a quirk of bitcoin: you have to send all your money from the ascribe address and then get most of it back. So be it.)
Transfer ownership (Figure, middle) of an edition. The basic idea is that the first time any bitcoin leaves the existing owner’s wallet, then ownership is transferred to the output wallet (new owner). It also includes an OP_RETURN to embed the verb “transfer”. The final output is change.
Provenance (Figure, right). If there are gaps in the ownership history of an art work, car, or house then the value of the work is diminished. Traditionally, there was no way to track the ownership history of a digital edition. SPOOL enables this trivially, as the figure shows If you know the address of any of th owning addresses, then you can find (e.g. with a blockchain explorer) all the other addresses that have owned the address.
For further details, here’s the SPOOL protocol definition, implementation, and slides.
4.4 ascribe Codebase
All the ascribe code is open-source on Github. The ascribe webapp had a backend in Python / Django, and frontend in JS / React [4].
4.5 Private Key Handling
We wanted to make it low friction to onboard; to ensure that artists and collectors had sovereign control of their keys; to make key management easy; and for each edition to have its own Bitcoin address (part of SPOOL). This posed an interesting challenge, especially because the tech was so immature circa 2013–2014. The solution was:
- A user signs into their account with email and password. ascribe verifies the password hash against the stored hash. (Any site with good security never stores passwords, just hashes).
- The root private key is computed on-the-fly as a function of the hash of email and password. A Bitcoin address is computed as a function of the key.
- Sub-keys are derived using Bitcoin hierarchical deterministic (HD) wallet spec, via pycoin library. Bitcoin sub-addresses are computed as a function of each key.
This allowed users to have the “feel” of Web2 email/login without ascribe having custody of any passwords or private keys [5].
4.6 Transactions
To keep friction low for users, when a user registered a piece, ascribe paid the transaction fee and transferred the resulting ownership to the registrant. For transfer transactions the user would enter their password, from which the private key would be computed to create the actual tx.
An easy way to identify ascribe txs on chain is to see the ascribe BTC addresses that do the registration transactions. From that, all sub-transactions can be found, and interpreted according to SPOOL protocol. Here are the addresses used for most of ascribe’s days.
- 12udvE3zmbQLhtSGZUqqAvGWSKDUCpbgoq (2,300 txs)
- 1AScRhqdXMrJyxNmjEapMZi1PLFsqmLquG (50,000 txs)
The second address spent 18 BTC on transactions, for a current market value of $1.15M USD.
4.7 ascribe FAQ
When running ascribe, many questions popped up from lay users, artists, collectors, galleries, blockchain enthusiasts, and more. So we wrote the ascribe FAQ to answer these questions. It remains browsable on the Wayback Machine. It could prove useful to enthusiasts with similar questions now; enjoy:)
4.8 Data that Now Remains
When ascribe was built, there were no viable options for decentralized storage of metadata or data.
- So, the metadata for each work was stored in a centralized SQL database; on the advice of lawyers for GDPR reasons, that database was not kept after the 2018 wind-down.
- The files for the works themselves were stored in an AWS S3 bucket; for GDPR and for cost reasons that data was not kept either. ascribe had a six-month wind-down period in 2018 during which users could make copies of what they owned.
NFT enthusiasts wishing to recover works will need to search around online, or query ascribe artists or collectors for those files. That’s just a starting point; there is likely more to it than that, and beyond the scope of this article.
Q: Are the works irretrievable?
A: No. But they won’t be easy to retrieve. To retrieve, one needs (a) the original image & metadata (b) their original password. Then one needs to get the old software running, and loop to find the time-stamp that gives the target hash & private key. Loops may take a while since you have to go millisecond-by-millisecond. No one’s seriously tried this yet [6].
5. Conclusion
This article described ascribe in a framing to best serve NFT archaeologists. ascribe was an NFT platform started in 2013 built on Bitcoin, which grew to 13,500 users and 31,900 registered works. It’s been dormant since 2018. This article described ascribe’s timeline, ascribe’s milestones and features, and ascribe’s technology.
Finally, I would like to give a big “thank you!!” to everyone who joined us on the ascribe journey — all the employees who poured their hearts into ascribe, investors who believed in us in this nascent space, cheerleaders who prodded us on, and everyone else. You all know who you are:) Again, thank you. 🙏
6. Appendix: More Sources
This section has more sources of information, for NFT archaeologists to dig further yet.
6.1 Recent Podcasts (2021-now)
I was recently on a couple podcasts, sharing some history of ascribe in a complementary fashion.
Interdependence, Oct 2021. This podcast with Mat & Holly focuses on the big picture, from ascribe to BigchainDB to Ocean Protocol days. It has a special emphasis on people involved, and Ocean tech for digital art.
- “Slaying Moloch, starting the first crypto art registry, Bowie Bonds, Data markets and data unions with Ocean Protocol’s Trent McConaghy”, Interviewed by Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon, [twitter][interdependence.fm][Patreon / donation opportunity], published Oct 5, 2021.
Adam McBride, Oct 2021. This podcast focuses on the nuts and bolts of the ascribe tech, and how ascribe-era art pieces might be resurrected for the now.
- “Ascribe Early Bitcoin NFT Platform”, Interviewed by Adam McBride, [twitter][Apple podcasts][Spotify podcasts], published Oct 25, 2021.
Jake Gallen, Mar 2023. “255 | How Ascribe Pioneered the NFT Revolution in 2013 | Trent McConaghy” [link]. Starts with ascribe history, and how the team evolved into work on Ocean Protocol, a privacy-preserve data sharing platform. Interesting side thread on intellectual properties.
6.2 Early Podcast (2015)
Here’s a podcast from much earlier by the consistently excellent Epicenter folks.
- “Ascribe And The Internet Of Ownership”, Epicenter Bitcoin podcast, EB78, interviewed by Brian Fabian Crain and Sebastian Couture, May 11, 2015 [link].
6.3 Representative Articles (2015–2016)
Here are some media articles, with art, blockchain, and mainstream perspectives respectively.
- This article covers ascribe from an art-world perspective, and highlights many artists: Interview with Masha McConaghy, Independent Collectors organization, Nov 25, 2015 [link]
- This Cointelegraph article covers ascribe / digital art use cases from a blockchain perspective. Four of the five projects reported are powered by ascribe. L. Smiley, “Blockchain and Arts: TOP-5 Projects Applying Blockchain in 2015”, Cointelegraph, Jan 3, 2016 [link]
- This Forbes article describes blockchain use cases including ascribe for digital art: B. Marr, “How Blockchain Technology Could Change the World”, May 27, 2016 [link]
6.4 Representative Talks (2015–2017)
- This talk covers both ascribe and WhereOnTheNet, and pays homage to pre-WWW Project Xanadu: T. McConaghy, “Blockchains and Big Data”, invited talk, Data Natives 2015, Berlin, Germany, Nov 20, 2015 [slides].
- An early talk, for a blockchain audience: T. McConaghy, “Copyright, the Internet, and the Blockchain”, Bitcoin Startups Berlin, Mar 24, 2015, Berlin [slides].
- An early talk, for a data science audience: T. McConaghy, “Rewiring the Internet for Ownership with Big Data and Blockchains”, keynote, PyData Berlin, May 30, 2015 [slides].
- A later talk, as ascribe got more traction, our talks became more refined: T. McConaghy, “The Web & Intellectual Property,” invited talk, Blockchain Tech Lab, hosted by Coinsilium, Apr 13, 2016 [slides].
- For more talks yet, see my personal site, “talks” section from 2015–2017 at http://trent.st/talks.
6.5 Evolution of ascribe.io website (2014 onwards)
With Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, here, you can see the evolution of the ascribe.io website, starting from 2014 [7].
6.6 Books Referencing ascribe
Here are some books that reference ascribe. There are likely more.
In early 2015, O’Reilly Media published Melanie Swan’s book on the possible use cases for blockchain. It highlighted use cases that had already emerged, including ascribe for digital art. This book is remarkable for its breadth and depth, especially given how early it was published.
- Melanie Swan, “Blockchain: blueprint for a new economy”, O’Reilly Press, Feb 2015 [link].
2016 saw Henning Diedrich’s book the history and promise of Ethereum published. It has a brief mention of Keidom / ascribe.
- Henning Diedrich, “Ethereum: blockchains, digital assets, smart contracts, DAOs”, Wildfire Press, 2016 [link].
6.7 More Data Yet
For the NFT archaeologists who want to learn more yet, besides all the information (and links) above, there are other ways to learn more yet.
- Google search “ascribe” and “blockchain”, and combinations of many names and terms used above.
- Look at Twitter accounts in 2013–2018 timeframe for ascribe, Trent McConaghy, Bruce Pon, Harm van den Dorpel, Constant Dullaart, Cointemporary, and many more from the names above.
Notes
[0] The “timestamp” was an Aug 21, 2013 patent filing to the United States Patent & Trademark Office database. The title was: “Method to securely establish, affirm, and transfer ownership of artworks”. We let the filing lapse a few years later, as we realized how counterproductive a patent could be for an open platform, and for the blockchain space in general. (If the link above doesn’t work, go to https://ppubs.uspto.gov/pubwebapp/static/pages/landing.html and search for terms “ascribe” AND “mcconaghy”).
[1] Fun fact. Yanislav brought in Vitalik Buterin to help. They went on to found Aeternity and Ethereum, respectively.
[2] Fun fact. In renaming, “Trezor”, which means “vault”, was also one of our leading candidate names. While still deciding, we secured the domain name www.trezor.io. In 2016 we sold the domain to Satoshi Labs for $1000, the makers of Trezor hardware wallet.
[3] ascribe team members over the years, alphabetically: Abigail Toll, Alberto Granzotto, Andreas Müller, Brett Sun, Carly Sheridan, Carolyn Stransky, Cevahir Demirkiran, Dimitri de Jonghe, Estere Kajima, Greg McMullen, Jazmina Figueroa, Kasia Kazimierczak, Matthias Kretschmann, Mike Klein, Paloma Rodríguez, Rodolphe Marques, Ryan Henderson, Sylvain Bellemare, Tim Daubenschütz, Troy McConaghy, Wojciech Hupert.
[4] Fun fact: ascribe was super early in using the React framework. From my email records, we first learned of React in July 2014 from a Facebook engineer friend.
[5] It felt so much like Web2, that sometimes users would reach out to us saying they’d lost their password, asking for a password reset.
[6] No one’s seriously tried recovering ascribe NFTs yet. Several people would have this data (a)(b) for certain works. I have it myself for several ascribe-registered works.
[7] Fun facts. Wayback Machine technical lead Gordon Mohr was also part of some of our inspiring blockchain conversations at Room 77 in spring 2013. Brewster Kahle and Wendy Hanamura and the Internet Archive community have been wonderful advocates and collaborators, such as connecting us (and other Web3 folks) with internet/web pioneers at the 2016 Decentralized Web Summit.
