A quick glance at NFT’s
I spent about 10 hours studying NFT’s and minting a few basic ones.
I created a very basic and simple site where you can simply click a button and mint a random one. A proof of concept nothing too big. check it out at this link. To view the minted NFT just visit either of these sites. OpenSea | Ribble.
You need a metamask wallet to run the application. You can get metamask here
The project runs on the ethereum rinkeby network so you would have to change the network to rinkeby.
You also need $ETH to mint one but don’t worry it's a testnet so you can get fake $ETH from any of these faucets. Buildspace really quickly worked for me
You have a few faucets to choose from:
| MyCrypto | Buildspace | Ethily | Official Rinkeby |
I hope to write a more detailed post on blockchains, DEX, Tokens, NFTs, Pools and more blockchain concepts and applications in the future.
Who knows even tutorials. If you would like that simply leave a comment and I’ll consider it with intense motivation. For now, this unedited little piece below would do.
NFT’s are simply JSON objects with URLs to an underlying asset that can be owned. It's nothing different from say a document giving you ownership to some company stock, real estate or even a school degree.
What makes it so interesting is the fact that creating such documents in the digital world and for digital assets has been very difficult since digital objects can so easily be duplicated with the duplicates being indistinguishable from the originals.
As we all know value comes from uniqueness and limited supply. Now comes a blockchain that is immutable, keeps a complete history of past activities, gives unique ids to all transactions and most importantly contains the same data across all nodes(participants). With this and from the above-stated properties it is easy to see why it is possible to keep track of originals. If we know the originals then we don’t need to worry about duplicates and fakes. That’s not all, what about the ability to transfer an asset just like how these documents can be transferred in the real world. Well, that’s where smart contracts come it.
Rules are repeatable logic that allows for the data on the blockchain to be mutated.
Another advantage is these rules can also mutate the blockchain by adding a new document i.e NFT. THAT IS WHAT MINTING IS. Yes very exciting.
During my learning though I realized some things myself. Some problems could arise.
Unlike say a piece of real estate that is fixed in location (Nope earthquakes don’t count =)) ), digital assets can change location, or easily get destroyed if the location of the storage fails or goes offline. Then we have a document (NFT) that says you own something THAT DOESN’T EXIST!!
A way people get around this is to store the digital asset on the blockchain as data referred to as on-chain storage. How can this be done? Well simple, encode the assets data as bytes and bits (usually text) that can be stored on the blockchain (look up base64 encodings
).
So you can store the asset within the document that says you own that asset. Don’t worry you don’t have to tear the document to get the asset out. After all, it's digital. If you think about it, you’d realize NFT’s (digital documents of ownership) should not be limited to just ownership of digital assets even real-world assets can be referred to by NFT’s, what about assets that are too large to store on a blockchain (Side Note blockchains aren’t really good or even designed to store large amounts of data
), even if you could it would be really expensive to do so, what about assets that can not be encoded into bits and bytes that can live in the blockchain. Any data that is dynamic, i.e change with time or in a random way.
That’s where it gets tricky since we can’t keep them on-chain and keeping them off-chain we risk losing them. One technology that helps with this is called IPFS, think of it as a blockchain for data, or AWS but with the servers being run by many independent individuals with no single individual in control of any other (sounds like a blockchain huh..).
This technology drastically reduces the chances our data gets lost.
I won’t go into details of how it works since it's both as interesting and broad as blockchains or NFT’s as well.
Think of multiple copies of the data being stored on multiple computers but when we ask for the data or point to it. It is always going to refer to one. We can store all kinds of data, dynamic, static on IPFS.
Well, that solves our problem, doesn’t it? There are other issues such as faking NFT’s themselves, it is not quite the same as the problem of duplication which we started with but more of pretending.
Another is creating simpler ways to interact with this technology. That’s where meaningful UI’s/UX for frontend designs come in. Also integrating with old technology and processes is an issue. Since disruptions and migration takes time.Keeping certain data private, since the blockchain is completely public to all participants.
Also and I believe most important is the cost to mint, or run transactions on the blockchain (cost to mutate a blockchain). For the Ethereum blockchain it is crazy expensive (hopefully that changes with version 2.0 or layer2 technologies — more of that later). Others like Solana are relatively cheaper though.
I’ll stop there for now before this gets way too long.
