NFTs are a game-changing technology, providing ownership for digital assets and serving as certificates for holders or access keys for the underlying content, which could be music, movies, art, real estate, and a lot of other stuff. However, what makes nonfungible tokens (NFTs) useful in real terms is metadata. It may not be a buzzword exactly but it ensures the user is able to make out what the NFT is all about.
Metadata is information about the content that an NFT represents. As large files cannot be stored on the blockchain for the simple reason that they become too expensive, NFTs, most of the time, just point to the files stored outside the blockchain. That said, only a few NFT artworks are stored on-chain.
This article explains NFT metadata, what makes putting up content on blockchain impractical, and how to find NFT metadata on Opensea and Rarible. Let’s start with understanding what NFT metadata actually is.
What is nonfungible token (NFT) metadata?
An NFT refers to a specific digital asset that could be in the form of a JPEG, GIF or an MP4 file. Though the token itself is hosted on the blockchain, the file underneath is stored off-chain. NFT metadata points out specifications regarding that stored data. It might include information such as the NFT’s name, description of the NFT, transactional history, link to the hosted image, traits and more.
As for the advantages of NFT metadata, it helps solution architects to set aside the technical issues when hosting large files on a chain. The preferred practice is to upload the link of the content to the blockchain while storing content on an HTTP URL on the current Internet or the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS).
IPFS is a file-sharing peer-to-peer (P2P) network for storing and sharing data in a distributed file. The metadata serves as the input of the NFT smart contract one needs to deploy on the blockchain network.
Metadata is specified in a standardized JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format. Inside the smart contract, though, the information is stored as a Universal Resource Identifier (URI) as storing as a JSON is too demanding on resources. However, users can download NFT metadata at will.
Why is metadata for off-chain data needed?
The large size of images, audio and video content makes uploading it to the blockchain very expensive. For instance, if someone wanted to store one gigabyte of data on the Ethereum blockchain, it would cost an approximate equivalent of $35 million. If a movie of 160…
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