In the week of March 7 to 13, the term “NFT” reached a historic record in terms of popular search queries according to Google Trends (GT). The highest score is 100, and this week the GT shows that interest has dropped to 97. Meanwhile, while the NFT hype affects the cryptocurrency and blockchain community, not everyone is enthusiastic about this technology. Some critics feel that NFT technology needs to be more robust for collectible items to last more than a decade without disappearing.
The gap between NFT Hype and NFT Criticism
In the past few weeks, the NFT craze has jumped to new levels, as people have sold artworks for millions of dollars, fart-exclusive audio recordings have been tokenized and even supported on blockchain. exclusive dance steps are NFTs. And, of course, now everyone has heard of Beeple, the digital artist who sold an NFT through auction house Christie for an incredible $ 69 million. This sale propelled the NFT craze to new heights, and the Christie’s auction invoked Sotheby’s to partner with an artist named Pak.
The mysterious digital artist Pak was selling an NFT at Makersplace called “Metarift”. An NFT art collector named “888” bid on Metarift for $ 888,888 on March 19. The next day, the bid was raised to $ 904,413 by a bidder named “Danny”. The auction ended at Pak’s last sale of NFT art on Saturday at 12:30 pm (PST) with Danny’s winning bid.
Although all mega-auctions and celebrities participate in the fun, non-fungible token (NFT) assets have been the target of much criticism. The Bitcoin.com newsdesk discussed the topic of NFT immutability, which has been the industry’s biggest weakness so far. In this editorial, tokenized NFT tweets were deleted and the art was replaced by other images.
On March 17, Twitter user Jonty Wareing said its 6,932 followers show how non-fungible tokens refer to the media that people are buying today. His first tweet went viral with more than 27,000 likes and about 10,000 retweets.
Out of curiosity, I found out how the NFT actually references the media you’re “buying” and my eyebrows are now orbiting the moon
– Jonty Wareing (@jonty) March 17, 2021
The file disappears from the host ‘Your token now has no value’
He discussed the sale of an original Beeple sold on the Nifty Gateway and detailed how the JSON Beeple file was hosted on the Nifty Gateway servers. Wareing then explained how NFT is also hosted on Cloudinary. “So if Nifty goes bankrupt, your token will be worthless,” said Wareing. “It doesn’t refer to anything. This cannot be changed ”, he added. Next, Wareing also talked about files that are using the Interplanetary File System (IPFS). In that tweet, he specifically discussed the Beeple sold by Christie’s that is connected to IPFS.
“Very well for referring to IPFS – it references the specific file instead of a URL that can break,” Wareing continued and showed the metadata link to an IPFS gateway run by Makersplace. But if something happens to Makersplace, again, the link may become useless over time. “You can say, ‘Just refer to the IPFS hash in both places,'” added Wareing. But he disdained even more that “IPFS only serves files as long as a node on the IPFS network intentionally keeps hosting them.”
Wareing also said:
What it means when the startup [that] sold you that the NFT went bankrupt, the files are likely to disappear from IPFS as well.
Dubbed Twitter account Check My NFT discovers current NFT flaws in nature
In addition, he also tweeted about an example of problem happening today and said “NFTs are built on an absolute house of cards built by the people who sell them.” He says the technology will be “broken” within a decade. The Twitter account called “Check My NFT” (@checkmynft) also tweeted about a lot of lack of art, and inaccessible NFT assets.
In our latest report, Check My NFT explained that metadata, URLs and image files “must be supported by a permanent, immutable storage provider”. One way to do this is to take advantage of IPFS2Arweave.com, which uses a project called Arweave.
The IPFS + Arweave solution aims to solve the permanence problem using Arweave for storage and fixing the NFT data in the interplanetary file system.
“IPFS is a popular P2P network for sharing data in a decentralized way, but one feature is missing: Permanence. The contents of the IPFS network may disappear. If no one hosts the data, it can be lost forever ”, details the Arweave website. “The Arweave blockchain can now store and pin files on IPFS and keep them available permanently. This simple API takes an IPFS Hash, stores the data in Arweave and fixes it in IPFS. “
It will be interesting to see if NFT projects take the recent scrutiny seriously and take advantage of immutable and permanent storage, as recommended by Check My NFT and Arweave. Future projects can work towards building stronger permanence models. Projects that have already minted multi-million dollar NFT works may want to make sure that non-fungible token assets are actually considered to be immutable.
Meanwhile, other blockchain NFT solutions believe that their distributed reason protocol alone is reliable enough to preserve an NFT for centuries. Much of this NFT debate will still require testing of time or exposure to vulnerabilities.
What do you think about the NFT permanence problem? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.
Image credits: Shutterstock, Pixabay, Wiki Commons, Twitter, @checkmynft, Arweave, IPFS + Arweave, Pak, Metarift, Makersplace,
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