In 2026, record your movement on the blockchain as a permanent, unoverwritable trace. Free to participate. Daily batch settlement. The canvas seals permanently on January 1, 2027.
What Problem Are We Solving?
How many hours have you spent online? Thousands? Tens of thousands?
What's left of that time? Deleted posts. Expired stories. Feeds buried by algorithms. Most people's digital presence lasts a few months before it's gone. Platforms shut down, accounts get deactivated, servers get decommissioned — and everything you did online might as well have never happened.
Historically, being remembered was a privilege reserved for the few. Kings were carved into stone. Conquerors written into epics. Poets preserved on paper. The rest of us — billions of people — disappeared.
We don't think blockchain "solves" this. Being forgotten is the human default. But we can do one small thing: give people who want to leave a record a way to do it that doesn't depend on any platform staying alive.
What Kind of Experiment Is This?
Proof of Existence is a collective art experiment running through all of 2026.
Participants enter a shared 3D canvas and draw light trails using a mouse or touchscreen. Each trail records your position vectors and millisecond timestamps — not just an image, but a behavioral dataset.
What you draw becomes part of Cosmos: a continuously growing 3D space where everyone's trails coexist. On January 1, 2027, the canvas seals. No new trails after that.
Participation is free. If you want a personal NFT, you can choose a paid Perpetual Proof, but it's not required.
Why Blockchain?
Not for speculation. We use blockchain for what it does best: creating records that can't be altered.
Three technical choices:
- Polygon — fast confirmation, low gas cost. Daily batch settlement compresses everyone's trails into a single Merkle Tree root hash on-chain. One transaction covers all participants that day.
- Arweave — pay once, store permanently. Not subscription-based (stop paying and data is deleted), but endowment-based (investment returns on the principal fund long-term storage).
- Merkle Trees — what makes free participation possible. Pack a day's worth of trails into a tree, and only one root value needs to go on-chain to verify every individual trail.
What this architecture means: if our servers go down someday, data that's already on-chain and on Arweave is unaffected. Your trail doesn't depend on us surviving.
Full technical details in the whitepaper.
How Is This Different from Other NFT Projects?
Most NFT projects follow the same loop: mint → hype → trade → next project. We designed around avoiding that.
Standard Proof is completely free. No FOMO pricing, no allowlists, no rush windows. You can come draw whenever you want, pay nothing, and your trail goes on-chain just the same.
Time26 (the native token) isn't designed for speculation either. Total supply of 48,420,000 maps to every second of 2026 (31,536,000 seconds + ecosystem extension), distributed through Existence Mining — you earn it by spending time drawing, not by investing capital.
We're not sure this counts as a "successful" Web3 project by usual metrics. Maybe by 2027, the canvas holds only a few thousand trails. But those few thousand trails will sit on Arweave as a record that a group of people did this thing together in 2026.
For us, that's enough.
How to Get Started
- Log in with Google or any social account — no crypto wallet needed
- Enter the canvas and draw for 10+ seconds
- Submit a Standard Proof (free)
That's it. Your trail goes on-chain at midnight UTC that day.
FAQ
How long does this project last?
The canvas seals on January 1, 2027 — no new trails after that. But on-chain records and Arweave data are permanent. Physical exhibitions are planned for New York, Tokyo, and London in 2027.
Do I need to spend money?
No. Standard Proof is free; the protocol covers all costs. If you want an instant NFT, Perpetual Proof costs $2–$20.
What is my trail "for"?
It has no utility. It's a record — you were at this point in space, at this point in time, making this gesture. Future people (or AIs) can read it on Arweave, but we can't predict what they'll make of it.
What if I don't understand blockchain?
You don't need to. Log in with Google, and the technical details are handled behind the scenes. All you need to do is draw.
Is my data safe?
Web3Auth uses multi-party computation to create your wallet and never stores your private key. Login goes through standard OAuth. Your social account content is never accessed.