The Sensible Path: Why Traditional Artists Should Treat NFTs as a Certificate, Not a Career

In my last post I went back through what the NFT space actually became after the noise of 2021 died down. I said I wanted to lay out what I think the most reasonable approach looks like for a traditional artist today — someone whose work lives first as a painting, a print, a sculpture, a photograph. Something physical. Something you can hang on a wall.

This is that post.

My argument is simple: for most traditional artists, the right way to use the blockchain in 2026 is physical-first, with the NFT as a certificate of authenticity riding alongside the work. Not the other way around. The artwork is the artwork. The token is the receipt — and a useful one, but only if you put it in its proper place.

Here’s why, and here’s how.

The frame: what the blockchain is actually good at

A blockchain is a public ledger that nobody can quietly edit. That’s the entire feature set. Everything else people promised in 2021 — fame, residual income, protection from theft, a new global art market — those were aspirations layered on top of that one capability.

If you strip away the layers, the question becomes: Do you, as a traditional artist, have a use for an unalterable public record attached to your work?

The answer is yes. You have several uses for it.

You want a buyer to be able to verify, decades from now, that the painting they’re looking at really came out of your studio. You want a record of every owner the work has had. You want resale royalties, when you can get them. You want the ability for an estate, a foundation, or a museum to look at a work and confirm it’s authentic without playing detective. Provenance is one of the oldest concerns in the art world. The blockchain is genuinely a better tool for it than a paper certificate in a manila folder.

What you DON”T need is to mint a JPEG, list it on a marketplace you don’t understand, and hope a stranger pays you in a cryptocurrency you don’t want to hold. That model is a job. It’s a different job than being an artist.

The hybrid model in practice

The hybrid approach treats the physical work as primary and uses an NFT as its tamper-proof identity card.

Here’s roughly what it looks like in practice.

You finish a piece. Before you sell it, you mint an NFT that contains the work’s title, dimensions, medium, year, a high-resolution image, and any narrative or studio notes you want to attach. The NFT IS the certificate of authenticity. When the work sells, the NFT transfers to the buyer’s wallet along with the physical piece. If the work changes hands later, the NFT changes hands too — and the chain of custody is preserved automatically.

The collector gets something more durable than a signed paper COA, which can be lost, faked, or separated from the work. You get a record of every resale (and, depending on how you set it up, a royalty cut on each one). The institution that eventually receives the work in a donation or bequest gets a complete provenance trail without having to call you to verify anything.

Two services have built specifically around this idea and are worth knowing about.

Verisart issues blockchain-based certificates of authenticity that are designed for physical artwork. Their certificates can be created and managed without the artist or collector having to deal directly with crypto wallets in any meaningful way. They integrate with Shopify, which makes them practical for artists already selling prints or originals through their own storefronts.[1]

Transient Labs‘ T.R.A.C.E. system goes a step further by physically embedding a tamper-evident chip into the artwork itself. The chip is paired with a digital certificate on chain that records sales, ownership transfers, exhibition history, and any updates to the work over time. MakersPlace partnered with Transient Labs in 2024 to bring this to physical art specifically.[2] If you make objects that travel — sculpture, mixed media, anything that gets shipped and exhibited — that physical-digital pairing is meaningful.

Neither of these requires you to think of yourself as a “crypto artist.” You’re an artist. You’re using a better filing system.

Where this approach leaves royalties

I want to be honest about royalties because I oversold them in the original post.

If you mint a certificate-style NFT and the physical work resells privately — say, a collector sells your painting to another collector and they don’t bother to transfer the NFT — your royalty mechanism does not fire. The blockchain only knows what happens on chain. If the certificate transfers along with the work, the royalty can fire. If it doesn’t, it can’t.

This is fixable but only with effort. You can write the terms of sale into your contract: the NFT must transfer with the work. You can choose marketplaces and standards (like ERC-721C) that enforce royalties at the contract level when the certificate does change hands.[3] You can set up the workflow so that transferring the certificate is the easiest path, not the hardest. But you should not assume the technology will handle this for you. It won’t. Treat any royalty income from this as upside, not as a plan.

The provenance benefit, on the other hand, holds up regardless of whether the certificate gets transferred or not. The original record still exists. The first sale is still verifiable. The work’s origin is still on chain. That’s the part you can count on.

What about pure digital work?

Some artists make work that is digital from the start — animations, generative pieces, AI-assisted work, video, sound. For that work the calculus is different and the NFT-as-medium model still has some life in it, particularly on curated platforms or generative-art-specific platforms like fxhash and Art Blocks.

But that’s a different conversation than the one I’m having here. If you make physical objects and you’re trying to figure out whether and how the blockchain is useful to you, the answer in 2026 is: yes, narrowly, as provenance infrastructure. Not as a marketplace. Not as a discovery tool. Not as a substitute for galleries, studio visits, mailing lists, or the long, slow work of building collectors who care about what you do.

A practical starting point

If you want to try this without committing your whole practice to it, here’s the smallest useful version.

Pick one body of work — a series, a recent show, a print edition. Use Verisart or a comparable service to issue blockchain-based certificates for those pieces. Build the certificate transfer into your bill of sale so it travels with the work. Tell your collectors what it is and why it’s there. Watch what happens over a year.

You’ll learn whether the friction is acceptable, whether your collectors find it useful, and whether the royalty mechanism actually triggers when work resells. You’ll find out whether your particular market cares about on-chain provenance. And you’ll do all of that without changing what you make, who you make it for, or how you sell it.

That’s the point. The blockchain should serve the artwork, not the other way around. If the certificate makes your work easier to authenticate, easier to track, and easier to pass on intact to whoever owns it next, it’s earning its place. If it doesn’t, you can walk away from it without having reorganized your studio around a marketplace.

That’s the path I’d recommend to a traditional artist asking me about all this in 2026. Use the technology where it’s actually useful. Ignore the rest. Keep painting.

 

[1]: “Verisart – Create & sell NFTs in minutes. Tokengates & Certificates (COAs),” Shopify App Store. https://apps.shopify.com/verisart; see also “How do blockchain certificates work,” Verisart Help Center. https://help.verisart.com/en/articles/5050610-how-do-blockchain-certificates-work

[2]: “MakersPlace & Transient Labs Debut Digital Provenance Tech for Physical Art,” NFT Now. https://nftnow.com/art/makersplace-transient-labs-debut-digital-provenance-tech-for-physical-art/

[3]: “OpenSea Integrates ERC-721C Standard for NFT Royalties,” *NFT Plazas*. https://nftplazas.com/opensea-erc-721c-standard/