Most NFTs don’t stay on a blockchain indefinitely. And it’s not impossible that NFTs disappear in Metamask of any wallet. The content and metadata associated with an NFT are stored independently from the NFT smart contract. It is up to you, the NFT purchaser, to preserve and store your NFT. Remember when musician 3LAU sold an NFT CD on the Gemini-run portal Nifty Gateway for $11 million? It may seem like an eternity ago, but it was the first week of March. And suddenly it has vanished. To be sure, a replica of it can still be found on Nifty Gateway, but the underlying NFT asset is no longer searchable. It relies solely on a centralized source, a company that, like so many others, could go bankrupt at any time.
Tokens that aren’t fungible? Welcome to the realm of non-fungible tokens, where permanent rights to digital assets can be purchased and sold for millions of dollars, yet the assets themselves are only a few mistakes away from becoming worthless.
To comprehend how an NFT might “vanish,” you must first comprehend what an NFT is—and what it isn’t. When we talk about NFTs, we’re usually referring to tokens built on the Ethereum ERC721 token standard (although other blockchains have since adopted a similar standard). It was a method of constructing smart contracts for what are effectively deeds on the Ethereum network. Physical property, such as houses or artwork, or virtual treasures, such as digital trading cards or a video clip of an NBA highlight, could be represented by such deeds. It’s worth noting that the deed can be performed on a tangible object. As a result, the NFT is usually only the smart contract; the content and metadata are held separately. Mostly because storing anything on the Ethereum blockchain is either too difficult or too large.
In an interview with Decrypt, Sam Williams, the founder of the decentralized storage network Arweave, said, “The contract is a distinct thing than the data.” “That means the contract can continue to exist even if the data vanishes.”
Many people believe Protocol Labs’ InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) offers a silver bullet answer to this problem, but Williams says that’s not the case. “IPFS is just stating that if you have the link and the content ID [CID], you will always be able to find the data if the data is there.”
“IPFS is a framework for addressing data, not for storing data,” he explained. Arweave, according to Williams, specializes in storage. His company promotes itself as a “global, permanent hard drive,” and it’s become even more useful as the need for NFTs has increased. “It’s clearly true that this isn’t—and nothing is—a magic box where your stuff is kept and you never have to bother about it again,” Ian Darrow, operations lead at Protocol Labs’ Filecoin project, told Decrypt.
To comprehend how an NFT might “vanish,” you must first comprehend what an NFT is—and what it isn’t. When we talk about NFTs, we’re usually referring to tokens built on the Ethereum ERC721 token standard (although other blockchains have since adopted a similar standard). It was a method of constructing smart contracts for what are effectively deeds on the Ethereum network. Physical property, such as houses or artwork, or virtual treasures, such as digital trading cards or a video clip of an NBA highlight, could be represented by such deeds. It’s worth noting that the deed can be performed on a tangible object. As a result, the NFT (in most situations) is merely the smart contract; the content and metadata are kept separate from the item. Mostly because storing anything on the Ethereum blockchain is either too difficult or too large.
Darrow of Filecoin advocates “pinning” data to IPFS to get the most out of it. “It’s taking that content hash and saying, ‘I’m going to keep holding this file, I’m going to make sure it’s available, and everyone on the IPFS network who can communicate to me will be able to receive this file from me.'” Pinata and Infura are two services that can help you with this. (The latter is supported by Ethereum studio ConsenSys, which also funds Decrypt, which is editorially independent.)
CheckMyNFT suggests going a step further and using IPFS2Arweave.com, which both pins the NFT and stores the data on Arweave, where users can store data for 200 years in advance for roughly $0.05 per megabyte and then use the interest earned to pay for future storage.
“This establishes a long-term system where you can put massive volumes of data into a blockchain and have it copied for thousands and thousands of years at a least,” Williams said.
However, Arweave and other alternatives aren’t necessarily more long-lasting than NFTs. NFT systems, according to Filecoin’s Darrow, should inform clients about how long assets will be stored and what additional steps they may take to store it themselves. “IPFS has moved away from the ‘permanent everything’ branding because it’s a really difficult guarantee to give.” This is why some find there crypto missing. Cyb3rdroid help to recover lost NFT and other digital asset.