Permanent Storage

When you publish on Rising Tide, the record of that work - what it is, who made it, who owns each numbered edition, and how every payment split - is written on-chain at the moment of publication. That record is permanent. It cannot be altered or deleted by anyone, including the Rising Tide team, and it does not depend on any app or server to keep existing.

What is permanent from the moment you publish

• The work itself, as a product - its contract lives on-chain, under your publishing identity rather than a platform account
• Every numbered edition - who collected it, when, and every transfer since
• The economics - the revenue splits you set, executed and recorded with each collect

All of this is retrievable from the public chain without going through Rising Tide.

Where the artwork lives day to day

The rendered artwork and content you see in the apps are served from protocol storage - the fast, current view that powers browsing, collecting, and sharing. This is the everyday serving path, and for an edition you have not archived, it is where wallets and apps read from.

Archiving a piece into permanent storage

Permanent storage is a decentralized network designed to keep data readable forever. Rising Tide uses it for the strongest form of permanence there is: archiving an edition.

Archiving writes the edition's artwork and public record into permanent storage and then points the edition's on-chain record at that copy. After that:

• The copy is permanent - once written, it can never be deleted or altered by anyone. As the owner you can re-save whenever you want, which makes a fresh permanent copy and points your edition at it - each copy written along the way stays readable forever
• It does not need us - the piece is retrievable directly from any public gateway, with no login and no intermediary
• It is checked before it is pinned - the protocol verifies the archived document is complete and readable by any wallet before anything is written on-chain. An archive that would be broken forever is refused, and you simply try again

Only the public record is archived. Anything the protocol treats as private - a private note attached to a mint, for example - never leaves protocol storage.

Finding your archived work

The Hub's Arweave section lists each of your archived items with its transaction ID, live confirmation status, and a copy button. That ID is all anyone needs to retrieve the piece from any public gateway, today or decades from now.

That one section is named for the storage network the protocol uses today, because the ID it shows you is only meaningful on that network. Everywhere else these pages say permanent storage, because which network holds the copy is the protocol's problem, not yours.

The three records, plainly

• The chain - the permanent record of what exists, who owns it, and what was paid. Written at publication, never changeable
• Protocol storage - the operational copy that powers the apps: fast, current, always reflecting the latest state
• The archive - the frozen copy of an archived edition: permanent, independent, and readable even in a world where Rising Tide is gone

Publishing puts you on the first two. Archiving adds the third - and the system is built as a smooth transition between them: your work is served live for the everyday experience, and flows toward permanent storage underneath. Editions held in wallets the protocol manages are queued for archival automatically as their artwork renders, and can also be archived - or re-saved, refreshing the permanent copy - by hand from the Hub whenever you want. The Hub shows each edition's honest archival state as it moves: saving, saved, or needs another try.

Fully automatic archival for every edition, and archiving for connected external wallets, are both coming. For accounts the protocol manages, the Archive action is yours today.