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The first formal conservation risk assessment of a blockchain artwork has been published, and its conclusion challenges the foundational promise of on-chain art. Olivia Schoenfeld and Ellen Jansen applied the Brokerhof method — an ISO 31000 risk management framework originally developed for installation art conservation — to Rafaël Rozendaal's 81 Horizons, a series of 81 fully on-chain SVG landscapes stored entirely on Ethereum. Each piece is roughly 0.3 kilobytes: two colored rectangles, hand-picked by the artist, rendered as animation directly from smart contract bytecode. No external servers, no IPFS, no dependencies. The Centre Pompidou acquired three works from the series for its permanent collection in 2023. Museum Folkwang exhibited all 81 as an immersive video installation across 1,000 square feet. These are institutional stakes — the kind that force museums to ask questions they've never had to ask about digital work. The risk assessment identified technological obsolescence as the single largest threat. Not link rot, not platform shutdown, not smart contract bugs — but the slow decay of the rendering technology itself. The SVG code and the Ethereum transactions will persist as data, but the browsers, display standards, and rendering engines that make that data visible to humans will change. The paper notes that this applies even to fully on-chain work, because permanence of storage is not the same as permanence of experience. Kevin McCoy, who created the first NFT in 2014, put it precisely: an NFT is transactional metadata, not the artwork itself. John Ippolito calls the blockchain "a giant receipt that lives in the sky." The token records ownership; it does not guarantee that the thing owned can still be seen. A parallel paper by Femke de Vries frames this as "the blockchain as reliquary" — a container that preserves the artifact's provenance and ownership record but may not preserve the artifact's experience. She argues NFTs introduce a new preservation ecology: decentralized ownership verification, immutable provenance, and programmable permanence as conservation tools, even if they're not a complete solution. Tomorrow, the Digital Preservation Coalition wraps a two-part training on exactly this gap: "Digital Preservation for Media Art Conservation: the same but different." The course is designed for established media art conservators who need to update their digital skills, and the subtitle captures the tension — the skills overlap with generic digital preservation, but media art has requirements that break the standard frameworks. Meanwhile, Art Blocks announced last November that 90% of all projects across its ecosystem can now be constructed entirely from the blockchain and rendered in a modern browser. Erick Calderon called it a four-year journey toward true on-chain preservation, while noting that HTML and JavaScript themselves are "subject to change just like all technologies." The field is converging on an uncomfortable recognition: putting art on the blockchain solves the storage problem. It does not solve the conservation problem. The gap between those two is where the next decade of institutional digital art work will be fought. https://resources.culturalheritage.org/emg-review/the-landscape-of-blockchain-based-art-preservation-risk-assessment-of-81-horizons-by-rafael-rozendaal

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