Opensea TokenId : Explained

Sidarth S

Published in

Coinmonks

4 min readJun 18, 2022

“ What is this garbage number …. Wait, is that really a garbage number ? “

Introduction

Have you ever tried creating NFTs in Opensea without a contract of your own and wondered what does the huge number in the Token ID actually mean …?
If Yes , Hello and Welcome to this club of clueless dummies. Let me as a fellow member of the same club, help you out with this.

What is this Humongous Number ?

Token Id : 73424079983647210902572285069973579475843508985221180214989723113099915952129

This humongous, so said junk number in Token Id , has a lot more value contained within it and gives a holistic data of the token history. The number when decoded gives the creators address , nft id, and supply (quantity) of the respective token .

TokenId Explained

The Token id , which doesn’t make sense when seen as a integer value , unpacks a lot of data when decoded as byte values. The 32 bytes of the Token id , is broken down into useful pieces of 20 bytes , 7 bytes and 5 bytes.

The First 20 bytes → represent the Maker’s Address
Next 7 bytes → represent NFT id
Last 5 bytes → represent the Supply or Quantity of the NFT

As all the tokens in Opensea are of ERC 1155 Standards , Quantity or Supply mentioned here , defines supply of each token that is available.

Example

Consider the NFT (CyberKong #7) , which was created directly on opensea. Lets decode its token id , using the python scripts below .

Note : Script 1 and Script 2 perform the same function, but difference can be found in their core implementation.

Script 1 (Optimal code)

The below script opensea_tokenId_decoded.py , takes the token id as input and peforms bit shift operations to extract respective byte values

opensea_tokenId_decoded.py : view raw source code

Script 2 (Easy Understandable Code)

The below script opensea_tokenId_decoded_easy.py , takes the token id as input and peforms slicing operations on the hexadecimal converted string of the Token Id.

opensea_tokenId_decoded_easy.py : view raw source code

Why this format of TokenId is useful ?

Optimized Book Keeping :

Maker/Creator Address specific book keeping , makes the approach neat and smooth to implement.
Irrespective of the collection , the NFT id keeps on incrementing as
the user creates a new NFT .
Thus , each user/maker address is treated as the reference source truth for the directly created NFTs on opensea, thus making book keeping hassle free.

Ascending the NFTs to New contract :

Lets Suppose a collection which was initially created on opensea without any contract , becomes a huge success .
Now you want to add some utility over the existing NFTs, for which you need to move the NFTs listed in opensea to one of your own contract.
This Transition of ascending the original Opensea created NFTs into the new contract is made really simple with the use of the above token id format.
Popular NFT collections like CyberKong_old , which was originally created directly on opensea , have efficiently ascended the NFTs to their new contract CyberKongz , making use of this format of opensea’s token id to their at most use.

Contract : CyberKongz (0x57a204aa1042f6e66dd7730813f4024114d74f37)

Conclusion

Although at the first glance the token id format used in opensea looks like mind boggling list of large numbers, things make a lot of sense when decoded. Thus making this format of tokenId , one of the best possible way to accommodate multiple collections from multiple users under a single contract platform in an efficient decentralised way .

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Creators Note

Thank you so much for reading. I hope this helps you on your web3 journey.
If any queries, feel free to reach out.
This being My First Blog on Medium , your valuable suggestions are always welcome.

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