An unofficial effort to preserve the art from fxhash, a viewer for what has been preserved, and an interactive gallery you can walk through.
fxhash appears to be gone indefinitely, and the assumption here is that it is not coming back. The art outlives the platform only if somebody keeps a copy. This repository holds its Tezos catalog: every project, every artist, all 1,802,387 seeds, the artists' own words, and the code for the projects people engaged with most. You can browse all of it and run the original artworks again — no wallet, no minting, no marketplace.
The interactive gallery. The 420 projects whose code is archived here are also hung in a building you can walk through. One corridor runs out along four legs and comes back to where it started, in the order the work was made, with rooms off it for the artists who made the most of it and a portal at each turn of the era. Step up to a painting and the piece runs there, on the wall — the artist's own program, from the seed behind the very picture you walked up to — and the arrow keys page through its minted editions without leaving the frame. It is built from the same files as the rest of this repository and needs nothing else: no chain, no IPFS, no network.
If fxhash does come back, nothing here was wasted.
Tezos only. fxhash also published work on Ethereum and Base, and none of that is here. Its Tezos and EVM sides are served by different backends, and only the Tezos one was reachable while this was built. Everything below is about the Tezos catalog: 27,430 projects and 4,130 artists.
- Browse and search the whole Tezos catalog, by project, tag or artist.
- Run the artwork — not a picture of it. Every piece is the artist's own program, re-run with the seed that produced the edition you are looking at, so what you see is the piece as it was minted.
- Walk the interactive gallery. The 420 archived projects hang in a building you can walk through — the corridor in the order the work was made, rooms for the artists with the most archived work. Step up to a painting and it runs, first as the very iteration the picture on the wall shows, from the seed the artist chose at mint; the arrow keys page through the minted editions, and the bar says who holds the one you are looking at.
- Step through an edition with next/previous, on any project, whether or not its code is stored here.
- Follow a piece to the chain. Each artwork links to its token, its minter and its current owner on tzkt.io — often not the same person who minted it — and to objkt.com for what it has sold for.
The catalog is captured into this repository as plain JSON, so browsing never touches fxhash. Individual artworks are looked up live on TzKT, an independent public Tezos indexer, and the images and artwork code stream from IPFS. None of those need fxhash to be online.
fxhash's own API was used only to build the snapshot, offline. If it disappears tomorrow the site keeps working exactly as it does today — only future refreshes stop. A weekly job tries to refresh the catalog and will start failing loudly the day that API stops answering.
Artwork runs in a locked-down sandbox, since these are arbitrary third-party
programs. That takes away a few things a piece may need — reading its own images,
storing settings, starting a worker — so a small compatibility script puts them
back without ever modifying what the artist wrote. The details, and why each
choice was made, are in scripts/sandbox-shim.mjs;
/sandbox-check.html
reports which of them still work in your browser.
To have your work archived: there is room for more, and most generators are under 1 MB. Open a preservation request.
Artists' own requests are honored regardless of trading volume — the ranking below is just a way to choose when nobody has asked — and regardless of size. Automatic selection skips anything over 10 MB so a few large outliers cannot quietly eat the budget, but a request is a request: Brutal Nature is 29 MB, almost all of it the photographs it collages, and those are the artwork. If space ever runs out, that will be said out loud rather than applied as a silent size limit.
To have your work removed: open an issue and it will be taken out. Removals are recorded so they stick, rather than being undone the next time the archive is rebuilt.
Nothing here is endorsed by fxhash or by any artist. Most artwork is not stored here at all — images and programs stream from IPFS and the Tezos chain as you view them. The exception is the 420 archived generators described below.
Browsing would survive fxhash on its own. These are the parts that would not — each of them held in one place that is going away, and now held in two.
Every seed. All 1,802,387 of them. A seed is what turns a project's generator into one specific artwork. Tezos stores only a pointer to a JSON file on IPFS, and the seed lives inside that file — that is where these were read from, and the only place a seed can simply be looked up.
Most have a second, harder home: an fxhash seed is usually the hash of the operation that minted the piece, so the value does survive on chain — as the name of an operation, not as data inside one. Recovering seeds that way means indexing the chain and joining every token to its mint operation, which is a rebuild rather than a lookup. And it does not cover everything: on the newest gentk contract fxhash stopped deriving seeds from mint operations at token 46,890, and the 162,315 seeds after it, 9% of the archive, exist nowhere else. Those are the ones that go when the pins do.
Generator code for 420 projects. A generator plus a seed is everything needed to recreate a piece, so those projects work with no IPFS, no Tezos, and no internet at all — a copy of this repository is enough. The full catalog would run to 80–150 GB, so the selection is ranked by how much collectors engaged with each project: those 420 are about 1.5% of the catalog and account for 71.9% of everything ever spent on the platform. One small preview per archived project is stored alongside, so the grid still shows something when IPFS is unreachable.
What the artists said about it. The description of every project — 27,422 of the 27,430 have one — plus the text fxhash showed on each individual iteration. 382 bytes on average and, for most of this art, the only prose anyone ever wrote about it. It survived in two places, neither of them a safe bet: fxhash's own API, which still answered when this was captured, and the metadata on IPFS, behind exactly the pins this archive exists to outlive.
Who made the work. 553 projects were minted through fxhash's shared collaboration contracts, which meant the catalog recorded a KT1 address as the artist and no name at all. Each of those contracts names its members in its own on-chain storage, so all 427 were read out: 553 projects, 717 artists. Names came from fxhash's on-chain user registry, all 18,855 of them, which is also the only surviving source for anyone who collaborated without ever releasing work of their own. 41 addresses have no name recorded anywhere and are shown as addresses.
- This is a frozen archive, not a mirror. The catalog was captured at a point in time and won't grow. Nothing new is being minted.
- The real long-term risk is IPFS, not fxhash. The blockchain records who owns what, but the artwork itself lives on IPFS. If nobody keeps those files pinned, the chain will still say a piece exists while the artwork becomes unretrievable. Every seed is now held here, and 420 projects have their code here too; 372 more store their code on-chain and cannot be lost. The remaining ~26,600 projects still depend on IPFS staying alive.
- 370 on-chain projects still need an fxhash service to run. Their code is
stored on chain via
onchfs://rather than IPFS, so nothing can be lost, but reading it back currently goes through a resolver on fxhash's own infrastructure, which there is no reason to expect will outlast the rest of it. Any of them can be archived locally on request. - Public IPFS gateways are getting harder to use. Several large ones now answer
browsers with a challenge page that cannot be framed, so artwork silently stopped
running through them. The site has moved to three that still work, and there is a
check (
npm run check:gateways) that probes them the way a browser does. - Moderation is honored. 2,692 projects (about 10%) were flagged by fxhash for plagiarism or abuse and are hidden, with no way to reveal them, and their code is not archived either. One gap: a hand-crafted URL to an individual artwork of a flagged project can still reach it. Nothing in the site links there, and it still runs sandboxed.
- Browsing all 27,430 projects is a heavy page load (~16 MB), because search covers the whole catalog at once. The front page is not — it ships the few dozen cards it needs, about 200 KB.
npm install npm run dev # dev server npm test # tests npm run build # production build npm run gallery # rebuild public/data/gallery.json and its atlases after an archive change npm run archive:previews # fetch true-aspect previews from IPFS for archived projects (once) npm run snapshot:previews # capture what fxhash ran every project's preview with (the gallery's #0)
Pushing to master builds and publishes to GitHub Pages automatically.
npm run summary and npm run gallery both read the archived set off disk, so
both go stale when a generator is added or withdrawn; rerun them together.
The interesting parts are documented where they live rather than here:
scripts/ holds the capture and archiving tools, each explaining what it captures
and why that source is the one that matters; scripts/sandbox-shim.mjs covers
running untrusted art safely; and data/preserve.json records which projects are
archived, which are excluded, and the reason for each.
MIT for the code — see LICENSE.
That doesn't extend to anything under public/data/, which is two different
things:
- Record data — ids, titles, tags, addresses, seeds, content hashes, market totals. Captured from public APIs and the Tezos chain, not authored here.
- Archived generator code —
public/data/generators/holds the actual programs written by the artists behind 420 projects, copied from IPFS and from Tezos so they survive both. These are their work, under whatever terms they published it. They are kept here to preserve it, not to relicense it, and any artist can have their generator removed by opening an issue.
Rights to all of the artwork remain with the artists who made it.