Find which parts of a description depend on the chain and which depend on another service.
LET’S PICTURE IT
A museum can engrave a label beside an exhibit or keep the description in a separate online catalog.
SEE IT FOR YOURSELF
A valid counter call, step by stepStep 1 / 4
This example begins with count zero and a request to call increment(). No real contract is deployed.
This example begins with count zero and a request to call increment(). No real contract is deployed.Execution follows the code’s input and permission rules. A website button is not the access-control mechanism.The function reads zero, calculates zero plus one, and writes one to persistent storage.The accepted state contains count one. Later reads can inspect it. Events are emitted only if the code implements them.
Animated local teaching model. No wallet, RPC or live blockchain data. Some labels and hashes are abbreviated for readability.
Onchain data has a protocol context
Data stored or generated by contract execution can be checked with the relevant chain state and code. It comes with resource costs and still needs a display format to be useful to a person.
Offchain references add dependencies
An external metadata URL can depend on a server, storage network or publishing policy. It may be fast and flexible while introducing availability or control assumptions.
Mixed systems are common
A token can store a reference onchain while the referenced document stores media links elsewhere. Saying “the URL is onchain” does not mean every byte of the media is stored in Ethereum state.
Draw the retrieval path
Trace contract to metadata document to image bytes. At each step, ask who can change it and how someone can retrieve it. This is more informative than treating onchain and offchain as universal quality ratings.
QUICK CHECK · NO PRESSURE
If a contract stores a web URL, are the image bytes automatically stored onchain too?
A stored pointer and the bytes it points to are different data.