A small chip on the stretcher bar and a record that only ever grows. Tap it to see who made the work, where it has been and who holds it now. At a sale, the buyer taps and the history passes to them. Artists get a good site for all this without building or hosting anything.
Marit Oslander is fictional, and this painting was generated by code. The chip is simulated, but the check it goes through is real.
One way to use it
A made-up scene, to show the idea.
Everything below runs on this site today, on two fictional sites, with simulated chips. It uses the signature scheme from NXP's NTAG 424 DNA, and our check passes NXP's published example.
Each tap writes a new number and signature into the link, so a photographed or forwarded link fails once it's been used.
Each entry seals the one before it and says who vouches for it. An artist's claim doesn't read the same as a confirmed handover.
The seller taps to start a handover, then the buyer enters the code and taps too. The old holder's key stops working at that moment.
Those two sites are one program with no hosting of their own. An artist's address, images and records go on a shared platform, and the look comes from a shared design system.
Real cases, and our own honest read on each. Some of them argue against this idea.
A chip wouldn't have stopped it
More than 60 fakes by one painter in Queens passed through two respected galleries, which paid about $33 million and resold them for over $80 million. The story was an invented collector. Knoedler closed in 2011.
A chip on a fake just records the fake. The hope is further out: if living artists register work as it's made, "no record" starts to raise questions.
US Attorney's Office, Southern District of New YorkThe warning
He invented whole collections, stuck fake gallery labels on the backs of canvases and staged period photographs. Materials science, not paperwork, exposed him: titanium white in a painting dated 1914.
That fake label was the object-bound record of its day, and buyers trusted it. So who issues a record matters more than the chip it sits on.
Wikipedia: Wolfgang BeltracchiWhere append-only helps
Drewe slipped photographs of forgeries into gallery records at the Tate Archive and altered library catalogues, giving about 200 fakes a past they never had.
A log that's timestamped as it's written makes back-dating visible. The catch is that it can't protect anything from before the log began.
The Art Newspaper, 1999The closest match
The art was real, and the ownership was the lie. He sold more than 100% of some works and pledged them as collateral, an $86 million fraud that brought a seven-year sentence in 2022.
A shared record of shares and pledges would expose this, but only if lenders and co-owners actually had to check it.
HyperallergicWhen we checked in November 2026, codexprotocol.com, once an art title registry, redirected to a review page for an unrelated site. provenance.art pointed to a domain that didn't resolve. A record held at one company's address can vanish with that address.
So every site here can download its whole archive as one file. It opens with no server and checks its own signatures. Download Marit's and open it offline.
Others already sell chips and certificates, including Verisart, Startbahn and Tagsmart. The open question is whether a site you don't build, plus an exit, is what's missing.
We don't know yet who this is really for. Your answer decides what gets built, or whether anything does.
