I wrote that smart contract as concept art! ( https://cryptologie.net/article/542/project-memento-an-nft-a... ). Nice to see this on the front page :)

A few years ago, deploying a smart contract only cost a few dollars. It raised questions like “wouldn’t anyone then spam the blockchain and increase its size in non-scalable way?” I guess pricing “solved” that issue.

We considered Avalanche as an alternative, as it supports the same VM for smart contracts, but integrations with tools (metamask, etherjs) and services (infura, opensea) is not there yet, and or course everybody is on Ethereum anyway so there’s an egg and chicken issue at play.