Independent developer has released Oncave, claiming to have archived eight early NFT series on the Ethereum mainnet, totaling 64,856 records. The storage and rendering system took over a year to complete, with the developer covering the costs of preservation and gas fees.

The eight series include mfers, CryptoDickbutts, Nakamigos, Chimpers, Bored Ape Yacht Club, Quirkies, Curio Cards, and Pudgy Penguins, featuring layered avatars, pixel art, 1/1s, and animations, with scales ranging from 31 Curio Cards to 20,000 Nakamigos.

The system writes materials, traits, recipes, metadata, and rendering rules onto Ethereum, allowing for restoration from the chain even if the website disappears; the original NFT contracts, ownership, and identities remain unchanged. A demo page allows input of Pudgy Penguins numbers, with images and metadata read from the on-chain renderer.

The eight archives contain a total of 27,534 visual materials, with approximately 92.13MB of SSTORE2 data after deduplication; shared backgrounds, bodies, and accessories are stored only once, while retaining the recipes and differences for each token. Restored images can be pixel-verified against the original on-chain records; five official mfers original images have yet to be recovered, marked as unverified.

Each token can be downloaded as an independent HTML protected file, containing materials, reconstruction code, metadata, sources, and verification records, which can be opened offline after download. The mfers protection log has also been recorded on-chain. The developer states that a single series typically requires two to three weeks plus gas, with three on-chain collaboration slots set for each launch station, each costing 1 ETH, with the address written into the series' on-chain archive and receiving a non-transferable certificate.

Mechanically, buyers are collectors and original project members who hope the works will last as long as Ethereum, while sellers are independent archivists covering their own gas fees. The event is driven by the risk of off-chain image hosting failures, with funds flowing from collaboration slots into gas and labor for the next archival station; beneficiaries are holders whose images can be reconstructed from the mainnet, while the burden falls on project teams that still store layers, scripts, and export settings on potentially disappearing servers.

Public information does not list the gas and total costs incurred by each series, nor does it clarify the ownership dispute conclusions regarding the five unrecovered mfers original images.

Source: Public Information