The Totem Project SOL · 2022—

Technical roadmap · August 2026

Preserve the event.
Keep the object alive.

A practical architecture for historical recovery, live auctions and chain-native expansion—without making the artwork dependent on one marketplace.

Non-negotiable principles

01

Content-address every state

Arweave transaction IDs or IPFS CIDs make old media independently retrievable. Reusing a mutable HTTP URL destroys the historical guarantee.

02

Separate current state from history

The NFT points to now. An append-only, signed manifest describes everything that came before.

03

Stay chain-native

One native mint per performance. The archive unifies the works; a bridge does not redefine their ownership.

01In progress

Recover the archive

Create a canonical registry for every mint, metadata account, collection and decentralized media URI. For the legacy Token Metadata works, query the metadata PDA’s signatures through an archival Solana RPC, retrieve each transaction and decode Update Metadata instructions. Every historical URI that resolves to content-addressed storage becomes a recoverable state.

  • Mint and metadata-account registry
  • Update-instruction decoder
  • Arweave/IPFS resolver with checksums
  • Human review for ambiguous states
02Protocol design

Publish an append-only manifest

Future performances should not depend on transaction archaeology. Every bid produces an image, metadata JSON and a compact state record. The state is appended to a signed manifest before the current token URI changes. The manifest itself is content-addressed and mirrored by the project indexer.

  • Chain-neutral state schema
  • Artist signature and content hashes
  • Bid/transaction linkage
  • Final manifest freeze policy
03Product phase

Own the live auction room

The website becomes the performance surface. A backend indexer watches auction-program events and sends verified bid updates to the room. The artist console builds and publishes the next state; wallet signing remains non-custodial. Failed uploads or chain updates pause publication visibly rather than hiding inconsistent state.

  • Wallet Standard connection
  • Real-time event stream
  • Artist state publisher
  • Transaction simulation and recovery queue
04Future

Launch chain-native Ethereum Totems

Deploy a dedicated ERC-721 contract rather than relying on a marketplace minting contract. Each token stores a controllable tokenURI; each state change emits ERC-4906 MetadataUpdate. ERC-2981 signals royalties. A role-separated update authority, ideally a Safe multisig plus narrowly-scoped publisher role, controls live updates.

  • Audited ERC-721 / ERC-4906 contract
  • ERC-2981 royalty signaling
  • Role-based metadata publisher
  • Indexer for bids and MetadataUpdate events
05Long horizon

Unify without wrapping

Cross-chain should mean a common archive, not an ambiguous bridged NFT. Each performance has one native asset on its chosen chain. A global Totem ID maps that asset to the shared manifest schema, artist record and state timeline. The gallery can span Solana, Ethereum and future chains without pretending their ownership models are identical.

  • Global Totem identifier
  • Chain adapter interface
  • Unified provenance graph
  • No mandatory bridge or wrapped ownership

Primary technical references

Metaplex · updating asset metadata Solana · historical transaction RPC Ethereum · ERC-721 Ethereum · ERC-4906 metadata updates OpenZeppelin · ERC-721 implementation