The Totem Project SOL · 2022—

Technical roadmap · August 2026

Preserve the event.
Keep the object alive.

A practical architecture for historical recovery and live auctions—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

Keep the mint canonical

One Solana mint per performance holds ownership. The archive gathers the works around it and never stands in for the chain.

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.

  • Append-only 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
04Long horizon

Unify the provenance graph

Every Totem, original and collaboration, resolves to one shared record: its ground state, each live intervention, the bids that caused them and the current owner. The archive becomes the reference layer for the whole collection, independent of any single marketplace.

  • Global Totem identifier
  • Shared manifest and state timeline
  • Collector provenance view
  • Public archive API

Primary technical references

Metaplex · updating asset metadata Metaplex · token metadata updates Solana · historical transaction RPC Metaplex · DAS API for indexing