Title
SEDA Nodes: Community Stewardship of Decentralised Infrastructure for Evolving Crypto-Art Preservation
Post-doctoral research
SEDA Nodes
Community stewardship of decentralised infrastructure for evolving crypto-art preservation.
This post-doctoral project studies how volunteer-run peer-to-peer infrastructure can support the preservation, verification, and long-term accessibility of networked crypto-art.
A 2026 post-doctoral research project at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Porto.
Project record
Project Details
Researcher
Daniel Filipe Farinha
Supervisor
Paulo Faustino
Institutional context
Department of Communication and Information Sciences / CC, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Porto.
Research focus
From ARKIVO to Community Nodes
The project is centred on ARKIVO.ART, a preservation platform developed through Daniel Filipe Farinha's doctoral research. ARKIVO provides the immediate case study because it already has a defined preservation mission and a working technical base.
The post-doc investigates how SEDA nodes could extend this preservation work beyond a primarily centralised platform. Candidate node roles include pinning artefacts, mirroring snapshots, verifying metadata, preserving dependencies, and documenting operator policies for cultural-preservation infrastructure.
The broader research question is social as well as technical: how can decentralised cultural infrastructure remain sustainable, trustworthy, and useful for artists, collectors, researchers, and institutions?
The work also aims to act as a case study for the decentralisation of the Teia platform on Tezos, using ARKIVO as a bounded preservation testbed from which transferable infrastructure patterns can be studied.
Themes
What the Project Studies
Preservation beyond the chain
Blockchain records alone do not preserve rendering environments, APIs, IPFS availability, metadata, gateways, or artist-maintained code.
Volunteer infrastructure
Community nodes turn preservation into shared stewardship, while raising questions about reliability, verification, accountability, and operator burden.
Teia Platform
ARKIVO is the bounded testbed. The project asks which practices could inform decentralised infrastructure for Teia.
Source
Public Record
The project appears on the University of Porto Faculty of Arts and Humanities post-doctoral projects page.