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. Anything neither on chain nor content-addressed depends on whichever server hosts it — for most works here ours, for six a third-party platform. The fewer links that require our servers, the less a work’s availability depends on Feral File.

One honest limit is worth stating, because it is widely misunderstood: publishing a file on IPFS does not ensure anyone else holds a copy. A work stays available only while someone, somewhere, keeps one. 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, holding a byte-identical copy of its tested media becomes something any collector, museum, or archive can do without asking our permission. The command is one line: ipfs pin add <address>. That preserves the files this page tested — not yet the metadata path or the work’s rendering, which are the next layers of this work.

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 states as the tiles above, plus the third-party class. Counting note: this table counts the works the census measured (the indexer's view) plus never-migrated Bitmark-era works; the Bitmark-era table below counts works enumerated from the public API. The two sources diverge by exactly one work (Field Guide: one migrated token absent from the census). Unsupervised here merges its three MoMA burn-mint records; the table below lists the original exhibition entity alone. Source: data/census/….csv + bitmark enumeration files, all published under Data.

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 the 17 of 18 Bitmark-era exhibitions with at least one unmigrated work — have published media references that point only to our content delivery network (cdn.feralfileassets.com). Those references last answered a probe on 2026-08-05: 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 published reference that only our servers can answer is not what we promise. Remediation runs in two phases. The archival-copy phase completed 2026-08-04: every series has a byte-verified content-addressed copy. The reference phase — making each work’s own published reference resolve independently of our infrastructure — is open, target 2026-11-01; any exception will name the work, the reason, a responsible person at Feral File, and a review date.

Archival-copy phase, completed 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 origin files (source: pin_manifest_2026-08-04.csv). The works’ own published references still point at our CDN, so they remain counted as depending on us until the reference phase completes.

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, as HTTP HEAD probes: content-addressed references through named public gateways (ipfs.io, dweb.link, ipfs.feralfile.com), and CDN or third-party references directly from their stated hosts. A content-addressed file counts as resolving only when a public gateway answers for it — our own infrastructure answering is not enough. Bitmark-era media was probed once per series entry file (editions of a series share files); Ethereum and Tezos works were probed per enumerated file reference.

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 on every update by the open build in feral-file/status from the data files published below; no number on it is typed by hand.

The Feral File Archive

The archival copies above are indexed by the Feral File Archive manifest, whose current IPFS CID is recorded on Ethereum in the FeralFileArchiveRegistry at 0x9aF574cafe2C14161DEC1eAC11F7F2c281fCa34e (source verified on Etherscan), owned by Feral File’s 2-of-3 custody Safe 0xA741D850B8B4e684c6F78e9615BD5b33B37AcFcF. The owner can only append new manifest versions; every prior version stays readable from contract storage, and the contract has no upgrade or destruction path. Current manifest: bafkreichag5umurwbrldem6estvstngdxfcyja5w4jnk7k65thxlteceky (version 1, published 2026-08-05). What this guarantees: Ethereum records which manifest is current; the manifest and the copies stay available only while pinned, like everything on this page. The works’ own token references do not yet point at these copies — that is the open reference phase above.

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_2026-08-05.json
• bitmark_chain_enumeration_2026-08-03.csv
• bitmark_series_media_2026-08-05.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

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