NFT Journey Part 1- Does NFT slice my image into chunks to store it in Blockchain?
NFT, and it ain’t “No Further Text.”
NFT is the acronym for “non-fungible token.” A term that sounds so esoteric that it often puts many at bay. A google search for NFT will return:
· NFT is associated with the Ethereum blockchain
· NFT is a digital asset
· NFT is non-exchangeable
· NFT is unique
All these explanations did not exactly tell you what an NFT is? How did it turn digital items such as digital art, image, music, domain name, and even concert ticket into digital assets? More importantly, does turning an image into NFT mean that the image will be sliced into pieces to fit into a blockchain transaction block size? Stay with me as I hope to address these questions one by one.
How do we protect a physical artwork?
Have you heard of the term “provenance”? You better be familiar with that term before spending a fortune on a piece of artwork. Provenance is a document that records the art pieces’ origin and ownerships history. Provenance also provides the potential buyer with an assurance that the art pieces are authentic and that the artists are credited for their works.
Still, provenance is not as foolproof as you may want it to be. First, documenting provenance isn’t always consistent. It can consist of sale receipts, a seal of authenticity by an appraisal expert, and even an exhibition catalog. Besides taking many forms, provenance can be falsified, thus making art appraisal extremely challenging. Despite its drawbacks, having a provenance still beats having nothing on hand.
Stepping into the 21st century, art is no longer bound by paints and paper on a canvas. Art has taken a new form in the digital world, and digital artists are being recognized and accoladed. However, with the convenience of living in a digital world came the consequence of image appropriation and image theft. And at times, users do not know that a simple act of “right-click and save image as…” is a copyright infringement.
How do we protect digital art such as an image on the internet?
There are numerous ways to safeguard an image against unintended use. Actions such as watermarking the image, reducing an image resolution, compressing an image to reduce the image quality, and adding copyright info in the image metadata act as a deterrence to unintended image use. Yet, at the end of the day, images are still downloadable from the internet, not to mention that watermarking, reducing image resolution, and compressing an image bring distortion to the original image.
As for the embedded copyright info in the image metadata, all it takes is a little bit of extra work for its metadata to be altered or removed. We were at a loss regarding digital art protection for over a decade until NFT came along and took the world by storm.
What is NFT under the hood?
An NFT can be viewed as a digital representation of a provenance that tracks the originality and the ownerships history of the digital arts in a blockchain. A typical creation (minting) of NFT needs:
Token Standard
· A set of rules to be used by a smart contract.
Smart Contract Address
· A smart contract is a computer program that runs in a blockchain. It is typically triggered when a condition is met. For example, the need for a creation of a unique token id, a sale transaction, or a transfer of ownership. A smart contract address is the location of the computer program in the blockchain.
Blockchain
· Such as the Ethereum. Used for the recording of a transaction. For example, “ token id 123 is created by user A”, “ token id 123 is sold for 0.1 ETH by user A to user B”, etc.
Digital Art / Image
· An item that needed proof of ownership.
Unique token id
· uint256 (non-negative integers). Generated by a smart contract to represent the digital artwork. For example, “110075082525157842416853083599221197420544368141821670921609398072808468119553”
Owner
· The original creator of the digital art
Essentially, an NFT is created when a unique token id (aka token id) that represents the digital art is generated and assigned to an owner through the execution of the smart contract in the blockchain.
By tagging the digital art with a token id and pairing it with an owner, we have transformed a digital art into a digital asset whereby its ownership and sale history can be tracked and traced through NFT. Applying the token standard minimizes inconsistency in the NFT creation and sales execution. Using a blockchain will prevent the falsifying of NFT transactions since blockchain is known to be tamper-proof. In essence, an NFT done right is a seal of authenticity with proof of ownership.
Where is my NFT image?
Common misconceptions about NFT I often came across are:
“Blockchain stores the transaction history of an NFT plus its digital art,” or the “the image is stored within the NFT.”
Contrary to this belief, the digital image is nowhere in the blockchain or even within the NFT itself. In reality, NFT transactions only involved the trading of token id between users. And if the image is not in the blockchain, where exactly is the image, and how can we obtain it? To cut to the chase, the clue lies in the token id. Refer to the following diagram for the summarization.
Note: URI- Uniform Resource Identifier
Thus, an NFT art is stored outside the blockchain in a decentralized or centralized server. In the case of the diagram, the NFT image is stored in decentralized file storage known as IPFS (interplanetary File System).
Who owns the right to an NFT?
This is the most controversial topic surrounding an NFT. In a typical NFT setting, the buyer owns the original digital artwork, plus the bragging rights of owning an NFT, while the creator retains all the copyright and the reproduction right of the underlying artwork. In addition, royalties can be paid to the creator whenever a reselling of an NFT occurs.
Is NFT for digital art/image only?
Anything that can be digitized and needs proof of ownership can be minted as an NFT, including art, photo, music, domain name, concert ticket, Metaverse land, etc. However, NFT is a new kid on the block that few understand, let alone the legality of the NFT has yet to be acknowledged by authoritative entities such as a government agency if a dispute occurs. The question such as “does owning a digitized car deed as an NFT equate to owning the physical car?” remains unanswered. Despite many gray and rocky areas concerning the NFT, I still believe NFT has the potential for mass adoption and can’t wait for the day when everyone owns an NFT.
Please let me know if you have any questions or if there is anything you would like me to write in general; leave a comment below. Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoyed the article.
