Before Ethereum, Before NFTs, There Was Bitmark

A farewell to Bitmark and how its vision lives on in Ethereum.

Before we launched Feral File, we built Bitmark.

Bitmark was one of the first blockchains designed for digital property rights. It established a way to ownership of digital assets in 2014, long before NFTs became mainstream.

The Bitmark blockchain has now been shut down, but the original vision lives on in Ethereum, where smart contracts have become the best way to define and transfer digital property rights.

This is the story of Bitmark—why we built it, how it was used, and why we have preserved its history.

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Bitmark and the Future of Digital Property Rights 

In 2014, before NFTs, Ethereum, and the idea of digital ownership became mainstream, we built Bitmark—a blockchain designed to bring property rights into the digital world.

Our goal was simple and ambitious: to make digital ownership real. Markets depend on property rights, yet in the digital age, ownership was fragile—data could be copied, altered, or revoked at any time. Bitmark provided a way to make digital ownership verifiable, transferable, and permanent.

We set out to create a decentralized system for ownership of digital assets, one that didn’t require trust in centralized platforms.

At the time, the only major public blockchains were Bitcoin and Litecoin, but neither of them were designed for recording ownership of digital property. So we built our own blockchain from scratch, rather than copying Bitcoin’s code like many others did.. Unlike other blockchains, Bitmark didn’t invent a new cryptocurrency. Instead, it used Bitcoin for payments, proving that blockchain technology could be decoupled from speculation and still have value.

Over time, we worked with institutions, businesses, and artists to bring real-world assets onto the blockchain—music rights, health data, digital art, and more.

Who Used Bitmark?

Bitmark was not an experiment—it was used in production by companies, institutions, and individuals to secure real digital property rights.

• UC Berkeley & Pfizer – Bitmark used to secure patient health data and enable controlled data sharing for research and clinical trials.

• KKBOX – One of Asia’s largest music streaming services integrated Bitmark into its music distribution platform, recording ownership of over 15,000 songs with 250 million plays, ensuring faster and transparent royalty payments.

• Health2Sync – One of Asia’s largest health platforms, used Bitmark to give their customers  control over their personal health records.

• XCOPY – One of the most influential crypto artists, had multiple artworks registered on the Bitmark blockchain in 2018, making it an early on-chain provenance record of their work.

• ap2 (Artist-to-Peer) – A platform developed with Casey Reas that used Bitmark to register and verify digital artworks before NFTs became mainstream.

• Feral File – Originally launched on the Bitmark blockchain, Feral File used Bitmark to register digital art ownership before introducing an Ethereum and Tezos bridge a year later.

Each of these projects was a real-world implementation of digital property rights.

Why We’re No Longer Running Bitmark

The vision behind Bitmark—secure digital property rights—was correct but the technology we built is no longer necessary. Ethereum is simply better.

When we launched Bitmark, Ethereum was still just an idea, but today Ethereum smart contracts have become the best way to define, enforce, and transfer digital property rights. The concept of a property rights registry now lives on in Ethereum’s NFT standards and smart contract-based ownership models.

If we were to build Bitmark today, we wouldn’t build our own blockchain. It would be a collection of smart contracts on Ethereum.

And in many ways, it already is.

Bitmark’s vision lives on—not in a standalone blockchain, but in Ethereum’s global ecosystem of digital ownership.

Why It Took Time to Shut Down Bitmark

The decision to shut down Bitmark wasn’t immediate. We had been thinking about this since early 2022, but at first, we didn’t fully appreciate just how much energy in the digital art space had moved to Ethereum—or how fast it took off.

Bitmark remained in use for some time, but as Ethereum’s ecosystem matured, it became clear that smart contracts—not standalone blockchains—were the future of digital property rights.

Even once we recognized this shift, there was another challenge: shutting down an entire blockchain is not simple. It’s easy to migrate a few tokens using a bridge, but preserving an entire registry—one built to last—required careful planning.

It took time to develop a way to archive the Bitmark blockchain while keeping its records permanently verifiable. We wanted to do this right.

Preserving the History of Bitmark

Even though we are no longer running the Bitmark blockchain, its history is important. We have preserved the full Bitmark archive, ensuring that past records remain verifiable forever.

We have recorded Bitmark’s history across:

• Ethereum – The Merkle root of the entire blockchain is stored on-chain.

• Bitcoin – A cryptographic timestamp of the archive is recorded in OP_RETURN.

• IPFS – The full blockchain data, including transactions and ownership records, is permanently stored.

Verify past Bitmark records here: Bitmark Archive

Final Thoughts

Bitmark was ahead of its time, but the world caught up. Property rights for digital assets now live on in Ethereum smart contracts, not standalone blockchains. And that’s a good thing.

In the end, it was never about the blockchain—it was always about the rights. And those rights are now stronger than ever.

—Sean

The vision that started with Bitmark now belongs to Ethereum.