NFT Blockchain jumping: Mints and Metadata
One of the key drivers for the use of a blockchain is the concept of non-repudiation or immutability. Non repudiation is the assurance that what happened happened and neither party can claim otherwise.
The ideal is a trackable record in perpetuity. Most blockchains have an explorer where you can track back much of the required information without much technical understanding.
In essence, blockchain jumping is when an NFT (one or many) jumps from one blockchain to another.
As with all the articles on this blog this is an article of opinion. Hopefully well thought out opinion but opinion nevertheless.
With the maturation of the NFT space means the potential consolidation of Blockchains. This can then lead to a difficulty and loss of data for each NFT.
We have yet to seen entire popular NFT chains consolidate but I expect to see this in the next few years.
What we have seen so far is that projects have re-minted their NFTs on new chains with or without the consent of the owners.
Blockchain jumping is done because of the following reasons:
Choice of Blockchain or movement by the consumer
Platforms may allows the customers to choose the chain they wish to mint onto either now or in the future. That is, they provide a bridge to move their NFTs from their original minted chain to another chain.
Movement of whole collections by a project
A few major projects have re-minted their collections onto different chains with or without the consent of owners. They may claim this is to do with more efficiency such as the use of polygon and cheaper gas fees but scratch the surface and you may find the real reason is to bake in royalty fees.
Consolidation/shutdown of entire chains
In the future whole chains will most likely merge. This will probably happen in the next few years. Most likely in the layer 2 ethereum space. This will mean that all NFTs need to bridged in a planned way.
Ok, so what is the big deal in moving chains you may ask. I still have my NFT.
The potential issue with blockchain jumping is:
The potential for loss of data, dates and the order of minting
If whomever is doing the movement of the NFTs is not careful there is a good chance in the loss of data or mint order integrity. A re-mint will take planning and additional metadata to be retained.
Reliance on metadata that can be changed by the project (potentially)
If a project is not careful or just rely on the original NFT metadata detail is lost.
Harder or possibly impossible tracking of history if older chains are shutdown
The beauty of blockchain is that all the records are visible. Over time this consolidation will mess with this immutability or verification. If a blockchain is shutdown post a merge there will be no way to track whether the metadata is accurate to say, when the original mint happened. Examples have already emerged where the original date in project provided metadata has been disputed.
A worked example:
An NFT is minted on Blockchain X.
The project moves their NFTs to Blockchain Y
You are reliant on the project to:
- Minting in the same order
- Retaining pertinent information in metadata in addition to whatever the project stores, such as minting time, original owners.
- Not changing any further details in the metadata or altering smart contracts in negative ways.
Now you may be thinking that a bridge may handle all the retention of this information and that would be taken out of the hands of a project.
While this may be the case, often projects need to re-mint collectibles so you are the whim of the project and the time they wish to allocate to this level of accuracy.
In an upcoming article, minting order, token ids and editions all being accurate isn’t on the agenda of near anyone in the licensed NFT space.
So where does that leave us:
Metadata and not the blockchain record itself will become the most important factor to provide full life immutability to our NFTs.
In the long term you are at the whim of the metadata. There is little to be gained from being first in a collection if your metadata does not retain that information when moved.
Ask whomever is moving collections to make sure they mint in the same order in which they were minted originally. It may have not been considered.
Push for the retention of all the pertinent chain metadata as new fields in the new chain retaining the original mint information. Most important will be the original date and time of original mint.
