There's something that happens to a digital object when it gets recorded on a decentralised blockchain. Something changes in what that thing is, not just in how it's stored. Before that moment, digital objects are essentially weightless copied infinitely, deleted without a trace, alive only as long as some server decides to keep them. They have no history that belongs to them. They float. But once something is inscribed on-chain, it suddenly has roots. It acquires a past that can't be undone, a trail of relations, who made it, when, what happened to it, woven permanently into a shared record. The object doesn't just exist anymore. It has existed, and that history is now part of what it is. This is perhaps most visible in digital art. For decades, digital artists made work that was ontologically homeless. A JPEG could be on a million screens simultaneously, saved by anyone, stripped of its context, detached from its maker. You could encounter a digital artwork with no way of knowing, no way even in principle, whether what you were looking at was the "original" or a copy. The distinction barely made sense. NFTs didn't solve this by making images uncopyable. The image remains as reproducible as ever. What changed is that a particular instance was anchored to a verifiable point of origin, a timestamp, a creator, a chain of ownership that travels with it permanently and that no one can quietly rewrite. The artwork acquired a biography. Walter Benjamin wrote that what makes an original artwork irreplaceable isn't its visual content but its aura, its rootedness in one place, one time, with a traceable history. Mechanical reproduction destroys that aura because copies carry none of it. Digital art, for most of its existence, had no aura at all. It was born already infinitely reproducible, already unrooted. Blockchain synthetically restores something aura-like to the digital. Not by making copies impossible, but by anchoring an instance to an unforgeable origin a history it carries wherever it goes. The philosopher Yuk Hui argues that what gives any object its reality isn't just its material substance but the web of relations it holds to time, to other objects, to the people and processes that produced it. Most digital objects have been ontologically thin. Blockchain makes them thicker. It gives them relational depth, a before-and-after, a place in a story that existed before you encountered them and will continue after. For digital artists, this isn't a minor technical footnote. It's a transformation in what their work is. A piece minted on-chain enters the world differently than a file shared on the internet. It has weight. It has a history. It is, for the first time, genuinely somewhere.