NFTs are supposed to last forever. They are minted on the blockchain, decentralized, and protected by cryptography. What can go wrong? Let us tell you how NFTs can be corrupted, and why Metapunks is the first genuinely eternal NFT collection.
The Fragile Web
We use the web every day, and it feels like we can rely on it. However, 98.4% of stored information is lost in 20 years. Have you ever been in a situation where you absolutely need to get some piece of data, but it is not available anymore? We have been there for sure!
But we are swiftly moving towards web 3.0, where everything is decentralized and safe? Well, kind of.
Most web 3.0 projects use the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) for their storage needs. It is well distributed and easy to use. Best of all, it’s free. However, there is a catch…
IPFS is great, but it does not provide strong persistence guarantees. You can pin your files on a node run on your local machine or a node on AWS or whatever. It can help, but it defies the whole purpose: we do not Metapunks depend on us. What if we decide to become monks and never use anything with a microprocessor? What if we become evil? NFTs depending on Amazon or some other hosting provider are even worse.
Permaweb
Thankfully, many smart people have thought about persistent file storage. We have researched this field and found a solution. It is called Arweave.
Arweave is somewhat similar to Bitcoin. It uses a proof-of-storage model: unlike proof-of-work, miners are incentivized not for calculating hashes but for storing data.
Data is decentralized and widely replicated: there are hundreds of copies of every file on the network. It not only guarantees permanent storage but facilitates fast global access, including locations with restricted internet.
Additionally, the Arweave model is “pay once, store forever.” It completely removes the “insufficient funds” issue. This model may sound unfeasible at first glance, but we dived into tokenomics, and it checks out!
The protocol lives in the permaweb: A global, permanent web of pages and applications.
Forever is not forever unless you store in the permaweb.
Don’t Fork on Me
It may sound like a weird question, but seriously: NFTs are supposed to last forever.
Suppose you are minting on Ethereum. What will happen if a hard fork happens? NFT will be duplicated, and there will be no way to determine which one is original and which is a mere copy. You may think that unlikely, but Ethereum Classic already forked away in the past, and who knows what can happen in the next ten years?
Thankfully, Algorand is a forkless blockchain that is ideally suited for NFTs.
Forever is not forever unless you mint on Algorand.
Are We Done?
Now the token is safely stored, as well as the files attached to it. However, there is one more thing: some NFT collections, especially generated ones, contain metadata. It is used mainly for calculating ranks and other rarity stats.
Some NFT collections store metadata in a mutable format. It means that creators can change or delete it whenever they want.
We will use the ARC-3 standard, which is immutable and uses cryptography to verify storage data. It adds an additional layer of security and nicely completes the puzzle.
The only downside of ARC-3 is that is not currently wide adopted. But we may have an idea how to solve this.
UPD: We discussed ARC-69 with its creator and decided to use it instead. It is arguably even more secure because all metadata is stored on-chain (and can be immutable too). We aimed to use ARC-3 at first because the Algorand Foundation officially approves it. However, we believe that ARC-69 will also become an official standard at some point.
We love technology. And we are going to leverage it to help collectors be sure that their NFTs will stay with them forever.
Don’t miss your chance to buy the first eternal NFTs.
Our whitelist is still open 😉
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