Status

What a published work is

A work published on Feral File is not a file in one place. It is a chain of references: a token on a blockchain points to a smart contract, the contract points to metadata, the metadata points to the files of the artwork, and those files run in a browser or on an Art Computer. Some works also read data from their contract while they run. A work is alive when every link in that chain answers.

Each link has a keeper. The blockchain keeps the token, the contract, and anything stored on chain. Content-addressed files can be kept by anyone who cares to pin them, including collectors. Whatever remains depends on Feral File’s own servers. The fewer links that need us, the more permanent the work — and that is what this page watches: how many works still need us, and for which links.

One honest limit is worth stating, because it is widely misunderstood: putting a file on IPFS does not copy it anywhere. A work stays available only while someone, somewhere, keeps a copy. What content addressing adds is that every copy is equal and verifiable — a copy on a collector’s computer counts exactly as much as one on ours, and none can be altered without detection. So when this page publishes a work’s content address, keeping that work alive becomes something any collector, museum, or archive can do with one command, without asking our permission. That is the invitation.

Every exhibition

The whole catalog, oldest first: every published exhibition, how many works it holds, and what each work’s media depends on today. The same three states as the tiles above.

Works that depend entirely on us

Feral File’s first 18 exhibitions were minted on the Bitmark blockchain, which we built in 2014 and retired in 2025. The chain itself was preserved as a verifiable archive — its data on IPFS, its Merkle root on Ethereum, a timestamp on Bitcoin (the Bitmark Archive; the story) — so the ownership records of these works are already safe. What remained exposed was the artwork files themselves. Works later collected on Ethereum or Tezos were migrated and carry content-addressed copies; the 4,959 works never migrated — across 215 series in 17 exhibitions — have their only media copy on our content delivery network (cdn.feralfileassets.com). Those files were last verified reachable on 2026-08-03: 215 of 215 series resolved (one probe per series; editions of a series share files).

The census also surfaced a larger set: 17,255 works on Ethereum and Tezos — discovered 20260803 — whose media likewise lives only on our CDN, and 6 whose media lives on a third-party platform — a different dependency with a different owner, listed separately in the data. Works migrated from Bitmark share their series’ files with the copies being pinned now; the rest follow the same path: content-addressed copy, byte-verified, published here.

A single copy behind our servers is not what we promise. Remediation is in progress and targeted within 2–3 months: every work gets a content-addressed copy that resolves independently of our infrastructure, or a dated exception with an owner and a migration path.

The first step is done. As of 2026-08-04, every one of the 215 Bitmark-era series has a content-addressed copy — 398 GB added to IPFS and verified byte-for-byte against the original files. The addresses are published in the manifest, so anyone can hold a copy of any work. The works’ own references still point at our CDN, so they remain counted as depending on us until those references change — the copies exist; the links come next.

Look up a work

Paste a token ID — the number in your wallet or on the work’s page — and see exactly what that work’s media depends on, file by file, from the same data as everything above. (Search by wallet address is not built yet; token ID only.)

What we check, and what we don’t yet

Two different promises hide inside “it still works.” A work resolves when every reference in its chain can be fetched from public infrastructure. These checks currently measure the artwork files: every file of every edition is requested over the public gateways wallets and browsers use (ipfs.io, dweb.link, ipfs.feralfile.com), with ordinary headers and redirects. A file counts as resolving only when a public gateway serves it — our own infrastructure answering is not enough.

Known gap, found 2026-08-03: HLS video is followed only to its master playlist; the stream files it references are not yet traversed, and for the works flagged above they are not on IPFS at all.

Not yet measured: the metadata link — whether each token’s on-chain reference is itself content-addressed — and whether a work plays, meaning what resolves also renders the way the artist intended. What is stored on chain is not probed: it survives with the chain itself. Bitmark-era works are enumerated from the public Feral File API by each work’s on-chain location. This page is regenerated from the raw data on every update; no number on it is typed by hand.

Data

Everything above, machine-readable. Agents welcome: start at llms.txt. Data files are served with open CORS.

• status.json — summary of every number on this page
• status.md — this page as plain Markdown
• bitmark_exhibitions_2026-08-03.json
• bitmark_chain_enumeration_2026-08-03.csv
• bitmark_series_media_2026-08-03.csv
• pin_manifest_2026-08-04.csv
• exhibitions_2026-08-03.json
• census/token_census_20260803T182523Z.csv.gz
• feed.xml — RSS, one entry per update

Updates