Cultural objects capture moments and paradigms, communities and heritage, and they ought to be preserved in order to be discovered for generations to come. As such, NFTs will need infrastructure that can preserve and document them and create permanence. 

In web3, users have the power to choose the infrastructure that’s able to preserve their culture and its objects, and at the same time, such infrastructure is built around core tenets and values that should be upheld. True web3 projects are meant to be open, unstoppable, decentralized, and permanent. These are the values that glue us all together and that at JPG we work together to reflect in what we build. 

Today, we’re excited to share more of that work with you as we have a very important announcement about JPG’s product and mission: all exhibitions will be recorded on Arweave, ensuring a permanent history of curatorial provenance.

JPG believes people have to be able to engage with NFTs outside of ownership and financialization. While owning and trading NFTs is definitely fun, there are important reasons to prioritize and facilitate signaling beyond these factors, including:

• People want to join cultural conversations and get involved in the NFT space, and curating is an accessible and free way to do that — buying NFTs can oftentimes be capital-intensive
• Curation as second-order creation: the possibility of creating spaces where NFTs can be placed in dialogue with one another, in turn creating new cultural relationships and narratives

Ultimately, being able to interact with NFTs beyond trading and ownership opens up new data relationships, new monetization opportunities, new communities to dive into, and new narratives to discover. This data, the relationships, and the people behind them should not stay stuck inside walled gardens. That’s why JPG’s mission is to create an open network of curatorial provenance. 

Choosing to display an NFT is one of the most powerful signals as to how you actually feel or think about an NFT. Too often the financial transactions around NFTs take center stage and simply result from what a buyer thinks other people will like and buy. Curation projects like JPG, Gallery, OnCyber, Hyype, MOCA and Deca will help stem that tide and become some of the most important infrastructure this ecosystem has in the years to come. Yet in many cases we’ve seen such cultural resources live off-chain, which misses the richness of being able to establish provenance and relationships in on-chain ways. 

Our commitment towards creating an open cultural network

By putting the curatorial and other exhibition data on Arweave, JPG is leading the charge to create an open cultural network for NFTs that can live on forever as powered by on-chain provenance. We’re happy to join other infrastructure projects that are also leading this charge on creating open, decentralized, and durable technologies for ensuring the permanence of web3’s cultural objects, and we look forward to continuing to work and think together across the field.

While, for at least some more weeks, JPG will remain in its beta state (where you need to be allowlisted to curate)  - we are inviting curators to join us on Discord and request access, which will be granted to everyone wanting to help us test the newfound “on-chainness” and the curator tooling.

Adding a layer of cultural data to the ecosystem is only the first step for JPG, however. In the near future, we will also be working with our community to generate contextual data for NFTs to allow for better search and research efforts. Examples of these registries created by curators could be CC0 collection databases, Nouns derivatives, dynamic NFTs, portrait photography, or any other category the community views as valuable to create. As curators contribute to these crowdsourced lists, their reputation and power within the ecosystem will grow.

Additional General Updates

• Improvements to Collection pages, trait filtering, and search
• Multi-wallet support
• Improved script and video handling
• “Most Popular” sorting on Exhibition page
• Bugfixes and UX improvements

Coming up, we’ll be making further improvements to JPG’s curator tooling, that will inplace get the protocol to the next stage: open access.