The Weight of Forever: File Optimization for Onchain Digital Art

Forever is sold by the byte. On ETCH'D the artwork itself is written into Ethereum as contract code: no server, no IPFS pin, no thumbnail standing in for the real thing. The chain charges by the byte, once. This guide covers what that costs, what real artworks weigh, and how to make your file lighter without compromising on quality.

The meter

Ethereum prices permanent storage at roughly 220 gas per byte: twice the bytes, twice the cost. Every figure in this piece is priced live from the chain, the same way the press quotes, safety buffer included. Ignore quotes taken on a test network; testnet gas prices mean nothing.

bytes x ~220 gas = the cost of forever

at the gas measured 13 Aug 2026:
  100 KB on Ethereum   0.0022 ETH · $4
    1 MB on Ethereum   0.022 ETH · $42

Two practical notes. A bigger file means more wallet signatures: the file etches in batches of about 24 KB, so under 60 KB is a handful of clicks, megabytes take dozens. And editions do not multiply storage: one inscription covers the whole run, so 100 editions cost the chain no more than a 1/1.

What XCOPY's work weighs, and where it lives

XCOPY documents every token at xcopy.art, CC0, so we can weigh the real thing. Every size below was verified at the source the token points to: onchain pieces read back from the Ethereum contract itself, Arweave and IPFS pieces measured at the addresses in their metadata.

The table is a timeline. The 2018 to 2020 1/1s point at IPFS, where the art survives as long as someone keeps pinning it. The DAMAGE CONTROL editions moved to Arweave. FRESH HELL, the current series, is fully onchain: the SVG lives inside the Ethereum token itself, and any node hands it back forever. The works that made it all the way to the chain weigh 21 to 105 KB.

If the work is vector, ship it as vector

SVG stores instructions, not pixels, and instructions are small. Flat colour, hard edges, type, geometric motion: nearly free as SVG, expensive as frames. If your source is Illustrator, Figma, or code, export SVG and keep it SVG.

Run it through SVGO: it strips editor metadata and collapses paths, often a 30 to 70 percent cut with no visual change. Animate with SMIL or CSS inside the file. Keep it self contained, no external fonts, images, or scripts: the press only admits work that renders from its own bytes.

One trap: an SVG with a raster image embedded inside it is a raster, at raster prices.

Taming the GIF

A GIF has three dials: canvas, palette, frame count. Halving the canvas quarters the bytes, most work reads identically at 64 colours as at 256, and gifsicle routinely takes half the weight out without touching a frame you would miss.

The bigger lever is video. The press takes MP4 and WebM, and the same motion is commonly five to ten times smaller than GIF at better quality: a 4 MB GIF is often a 500 KB MP4.

Stills, pixels, and honest dimensions

Flat colour and pixel art: indexed PNG (pngquant, then oxipng), exported at native resolution, never upscaled; the renderer scales it crisp either way. Photographic work: JPEG around quality 80. Strip metadata everywhere, EXIF blocks are bytes the chain will charge you for.

And remember the lightest medium of all: code. A generative work shipped as a self contained HTML file is often smaller than its own screenshot.

The one megabyte line

Under 100 KB, etch anywhere without thinking. Up to a megabyte, mainnet is a serious choice. Over a megabyte, if cost is a concern, choose Shape.

Shape is an Ethereum L2: the same press, the same immutable artist owned contracts, the same bytes as contract code, at L2 gas. Priced live as you read this (measured 13 Aug 2026: 0.067 gwei on Ethereum, 0.011 gwei on Shape, ETH $1,875):

Two things hold whatever gas does. The same bytes on Shape cost a fraction of mainnet, and the gap widens under load, when mainnet gas spikes ten to a hundred fold and L2 gas barely moves. The chain selector is one toggle in the deploy step; the work is fully onchain either way.

Before you drop the file

None of this is about making art smaller than it wants to be. FRESH HELL is proof the strongest work already fits the medium. Weigh the file like it matters, because for the first time in digital art, it does.

// ETCH'D is the onchain marketplace, a CypherPunks product. The press quotes the live cost of forever before you sign.

// XCOPY's work is CC0 and documented at xcopy.art. Every size and storage claim was verified at the token's own source on 13 August 2026.