SUYE  · digital certificates for physical art

SUYE is an Amsterdam art studio working with physical and digital art. Its artists wanted certificates for editions of prints, canvases and clothing, and a way to sell NFT collections. I built the platform as the sole developer, beginning in June 2023.

The artists did not want to manage cryptocurrency or learn deployment tools. The dashboard creates a contract for each collection and handles the transactions through managed wallets, with the studio funding the costs.

Fit into an artist’s existing website

I built five embeddable JS widgets: a mint button, collection viewer, certificate viewer, certificate wall and token gate. An artist can add them to a site such as a Squarespace shop with a script tag.

The certificate wall presents numbered pieces with their photographs, materials and dimensions. The token gate lets a collector prove ownership and receive the matching voucher code, which one artist used to open a members-only area of their shop.

Recover a publish that takes too long

Publishing crosses several systems: generating metadata, deploying a contract and waiting for confirmation. A timeout could leave a contract deployed but absent from the dashboard.

I added checkpoints before deployment and as soon as the transaction was submitted. The dashboard can then recover the receipt and complete the record after the original request has ended. That avoids making the artist repeat a transaction that may already have succeeded.

Dealing with unreliable IPFS promises

When the original IPFS hosting became unreliable in 2025, I added migration paths to Google Cloud Storage. The artwork files are now hosted under the studio’s control, rather than by their content on IPFS. After having two different IPFS hosting locations becoming unreliable or media even vanished, we realized that the promise of IPFS is too good to be true. The blockchain certificate and the storage of its associated image are separate responsibilities.