Dude wheres my NFTDistributed Infrastructures for Digital Art

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Dude, where’s my NFT?

Distributed Infrastructures for Digital Art

Leonhard Balduf

leonhard.balduf@tu-darmstadt.de

Technical University of Darmstadt

Darmstadt, Germany

Martin Florian

martin.florian@hu-berlin.de

Weizenbaum Institute &

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Berlin, Germany

Björn Scheuermann

scheuermann@kom.tu-darmstadt.de

Technical University of Darmstadt

Darmstadt, Germany

ABSTRACT

We explore issues relating to the storage of digital art, based on an

empirical investigation into the storage of audiovisual data refer-

enced by non-fungible tokens (

NFT

s). We identify current trends

NFT

data storage and highlight problems with implemented

solutions. We particularly focus our investigation on the use of

the Interplanetary Filesystem (

IPFS

), which emerges as a popular

and versatile distributed storage solution for

NFT

s. Based on the

analysis of discovered data storage techniques, we propose a set

of best practices to ensure long-term storage survivability of

NFT

data. While helpful for forming the

NFT

art market into a legitimate

long-term environment for digital art, our recommendations are

also directly applicable for improving the availability and integrity

of non-NFT digital art.

CCS CONCEPTS

•Information systems →Information storage systems

;

In-

formation systems applications

;

•Applied computing →Me-

dia arts.

KEYWORDS

non-fungible tokens, storage systems, ipfs, blockchain

ACM Reference Format:

Leonhard Balduf, Martin Florian, and Björn Scheuermann. 2022. Dude,

where’s my NFT? Distributed Infrastructures for Digital Art. In 3rd Interna-

tional Workshop on Distributed Infrastructure for the Common Good (DICG

’22), November 7, 2022, Quebec, QC, Canada. ACM, New York, NY, USA,

6pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3565383.3566106

1 INTRODUCTION

Ensuring the availability and integrity of digital art is an inherent

challenge [5], as is its monetization. Non-fungible tokens (

NFT

promise to solve these issues. This most modern form of digital art

packaging attempts to create digital scarcity and immutability by

securing the “ownership” and metadata of digital art copies on a

blockchain. And it allegedly leverages distributed infrastructures

for guaranteeing the long-term storage and availability of the actual

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or

classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed

for prot or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation

on the rst page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM

must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish,

to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specic permission and/or a

fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org.

DICG ’22, November 7, 2022, Quebec, QC, Canada

ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-9928-9/22/11. . . $15.00

https://doi.org/10.1145/3565383.3566106

content. In this paper we focus on the availability and integrity

challenges surrounding digital art, as observable in the context

NFT

s. We investigate how popular

NFT

sactually approach the

storage question, and to what extent the content they reference is

actually immutable. Counter to reasonable consumer expectations,

we nd that many of the most popular

NFT

s store data on classical

centralized platforms and permit changes to both metadata and ac-

tual content. Still, our empirical analysis of 1000 top-ranking

NFT

also reveals multiple prominent

NFT

s that successfully leverage

on-chain storage and distributed storage infrastructures such as

the Interplanetary Filesystem (

IPFS

). For content stored on

IPFS

we additionally take a look at

IPFS

itself, quantifying the extent

to which stored

NFT

pieces are replicated (and hence, available)

within the network. Finally, we formulate a set of recommendations

for

NFT

data storage. The lessons we extract from the innovative

approaches that (some)

NFT

projects take to digital art preservation

are directly transferable to non-tokenized digital art as well. Our

key contributions are threefold: (1) a classication and empirical

study of

NFT

data storage techniques (2) an investigation of replica-

tion of popular content on

IPFS

, and (3) a set of recommendations

for NFTs data storage to enable long-term survivability .

2 NFT STORAGE IN CURRENT PRACTICE

In the following, we present an empirical study into how popular

digital art

NFT

s approach the challenge of storing metadata and

assets. The choice of a storage method has a determining impact

on the long-term availability and (im)mutability properties of

NFT

and the associated digital art.

2.1 NFTs: Denition and Implementation

NFT

s are digital records that cryptographically connect a distin-

guishable digital token to an owner. In practice, each individual

token is identied by an integer referred to as token ID. They are

usually stored on a blockchain (the “chain”) and thus generally

perceived as permanent. This perception may extend to not only

the digital token, but the assets referenced by it. A highly promi-

nent use case for

NFT

s is to encapsulate ownership of digital art

and audiovisual content more generally. Other use cases include

gaming (e. g., Mirandus

) and virtual reality — or Metaverse — (e. g.,

Decentraland2).

Most commonly, Ethereum [11] serves as the blockchain on

top of which

NFT

s are built

NFT

implementations on Ethereum

are typically governed by either the

ERC721

[9] or

ERC1155

[10]

1https://mirandus.game/

2https://decentraland.org/

3According to https://dappradar.com/nft

arXiv:2210.11166v1 [cs.NI] 20 Oct 2022

DICG ’22, November 7, 2022, ebec, QC, Canada Leonhard Balduf, Martin Florian, and Björn Scheuermann

smart contract interfaces. These interfaces govern identication and

ownership of

NFT

s, including transfer thereof, as well as association

of storage uniform resource identiers (

URI

s) to tokens, via optional

metadata extensions.

Listing 1 shows an excerpt of the commonly used

ERC721Metadata

extension interface. The interface is used to attach a

URI

for de-

scriptive metadata to tokens. The standard recommends that the

metadata is a

JSON

document with a name, a description, and an

image. Commonly, the per-token metadata

URI

is constructed on-

the-y from a base

URI

and the numerical token ID, in order to save

on-chain storage. Audiovisual content, if any, is referenced via a

URI

within the metadata document. EIP721 provides no guidelines

on how or where to store referenced content. We investigate plausi-

ble techniques and the approaches that popular

NFT

s projects take

in the upcoming Sec. 2.

i n t e r f a c e ERC721Metadata {

...

f u n c t i o n t oken URI ( u i n t 2 5 6 _ t o k e n I d )

[ . . . ] r e t u r n s ( s t r i n g ) ;

}

Listing 1: The ERC721Metadata Interface.

The more recent

ERC1155

interface allows tracking multiple

distinct fungible and non-fungible tokens in one contract. For

NFT

this behaves exactly like

ERC721

by using multiple tokens that each

have a total supply of one. An extension to assign metadata exists

for

ERC1155

as well:

ERC1155Metadata_URI

. Here, the metadata

must be a

JSON

document with a predened set of required keys.

An example is given in Listing 2.

{

" name " : " A s s e t Name " ,

" d e s c r i p t i o n " : " Lorem ipsum . . . " ,

" image " : " h t t p : / / examp le . com / { i d } . png " ,

" p r o p e r t i e s " : { . . . }

}

Listing 2: An example EIP1155 Metadata File.

It is noteworthy that a single contract, regardless of whether it

implements

ERC721

ERC1155

, or both, can track multiple collections

NFT

s. The notion of grouping multiple tokens into a collection

can exist on a contract-level, but is usually tracked on a higher level,

i. e., on NFT marketplaces.

2.2 Discovering Popular Digital Art NFTs

We obtained a list of the top 1000 most popular

NFT

s on the

OpenSea marketplace. We used “last sale price” as a proxy for

popularity and extracted the ranking from OpenSea on August 1st

2022. OpenSea is the most popular

4NFT

marketplace and thus

well-suited for our initial sample collection.

From our initial list of popular

NFT

s, we proceeded to extract

all

NFT

s associated with digital art. In a classication approach

inspired by previous works such as [7], we label each

NFT

as digital

4by trading volume, according to DAppRadar, see https://dappradar.com

that art that has the primary purpose of referencing one or more

audiovisual assets. We explicitly exclude gaming and metaverse

NFT

s from this class, as well as utility tokens more generally. 786

NFT

s from our sample t this classication

. They are managed

by a total of 51 smart contracts, many of which represent

NFT

collections with multiple representatives within our sample. The

subsequent discussion is based on these 786 NFTs.

2.3 Metadata and Asset Storage

We proceed to classify digital art

NFT

s in our sample based on

the storage system they use for storing metadata and assets. We

collected data stored in the

NFT

smart contracts, e. g., data exposed

through the EIP721 or EIP1155 standards, and manually inspected

custom contract implementations for data stored on-chain.

Motivated by the goal of digital art preservation, we rst identify

what data is necessary to reconstruct the artwork. For example,

generative art projects may choose to store source code on-chain,

and provide a pre-rendered version of the artwork on cloud storage

for convenience. We classify this case as being stored on-chain,

since reconstruction from on-chain data is possible. It is potentially

necessary to also preserve a runtime environment for this data, but

this falls outside the scope of this work.

We dierentiate between three main storage approaches: cloud

storage, on-chain storage, and decentralized storage systems —

IPFS

and Arweave. Their properties with regards to integrity and

availability vary greatly:

•Cloud storage

oers no hard guarantees — stored data can

be mutated or (re)moved at any time.

•On-chain storage

guarantees result directly from the secu-

rity properties of the underlying blockchain system. Data

availability and data integrity are among the core features

of permissionless blockchain systems and it is a reasonable

assumption that popular systems like Ethereum will remain

intact — and eective at providing availability and integrity

for stored data — for many years to come.

•Decentralized storage systems

can have varying prop-

erties with regards to integrity and availability. The sys-

tems used by the digital art

NFT

s in our sample rely on

cryptographically-generated content identiers: links into

these storage systems correspond to cryptographic hashes

of the stored content. In eect, changes to the original con-

tent can be detected as long as the integrity of the

URI

the asset is maintained. The availability of content stored

in decentralized data storage systems is highly dependent

on system particularities and the popularity of the stored

content. In the upcoming Sec. 4, we report on a deeper in-

vestigation into how the

NFT

s in our sample are inserted

into the popular IPFS network, and to what extent they are

replicated there.

The results of our classication are shown in Table 1. To our

surprise, the metadata and assets of more than half of our sampled

digital art

NFT

s are already stored on-chain. This is partly due

to our manual inspection of contracts, which reveals that various

generative art projects store their source code on-chain in addition

In addition, we classify

179 NFT

s as metaverse-related,

as game-related,

collectibles, and 8as utility tokens.

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Dude,where’smyNFT?DistributedInfrastructuresforDigitalArtLeonhardBaldufleonhard.balduf@tu-darmstadt.deTechnicalUniversityofDarmstadtDarmstadt,GermanyMartinFlorianmartin.florian@hu-berlin.deWeizenbaumInstitute&Humboldt-UniversitätzuBerlinBerlin,GermanyBjörnScheuermannscheuermann@kom.tu-darmstadt.deTe...

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