Byzant is a series from Neo News Today that provides access to insider perspectives from knowledgeable individuals in the Neo ecosystem and the broader blockchain industry. The following week after a guest shares their findings, they will be invited to join the discussion on the Neo subreddit by answering relevant questions from the community.
In this week’s reporting, we spoke to Vincent Geneste about the recent surge in popularity of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and the different forms they take on different platforms.
Vincent is a longtime member of the neo community and contributor. He founded Neo Economy and recently founded GhostMarket, a cross-chain NFT marketplace, explorer and foundry.
Vincent has more than 10 years of professional experience as a network architect. He recently worked as a full-time blockchain developer, managing a variety of different projects across multiple blockchain ecosystems, including Neo, Ethereum, Switcheo, and Phantasma.
Readers interested in learning more about NFTs and their applicability are invited to join the conversation and speak to Vincent in the following thread:
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NNT: Non-fungible tokens have become increasingly popular recently. From your experience working on GhostMarket, what were your key observations about the status of NFTs and their applicability in the blockchain space?
Vincent Geneste::
We have been working on our fully equipped cross-chain NFT marketplace for several months. While our first and foremost function is to enable NFT trading, and as this is still in its infancy, to attract and attract new people to the wonderful world of collectibles / NFTs, we recently started a “Mint your own NFT “integrate” feature. This forced us to delve deeply into all current and future blockchain NFT standards and their advantages and disadvantages, which enabled us to notice several overarching trends.
While NFT is not a new technology with the first iteration done a few years ago, it has recently emerged as one of the “hottest” topics when it comes to blockchain. As with cryptocurrencies and blockchain, the whole concept of “owning your assets” makes a lot more sense when you find that in the digital world you don’t actually own anything … unless it’s an NFT!
What we found during our research is that there are already many, many different “NFT projects” out there, but there are more NFT subdomains. Between NFT artwork which is best for collectors, NFT games where you can resell your game / assets after playing, and NFT insurance type which acts as evidence of your own contract insurance e.g. B. in DeFi projects. The blockchain space is literally exploding with all kinds of new use cases.
Our main observation while researching and developing our solution was the wide range of different NFT standards, particularly those related to NFT metadata. Ownership of the NFT itself can be cryptographically proven by the fact that it is recorded in a public ledger. Then what about the NFT metadata (including information like name, description, attributes, or even a picture)?
Here it differs greatly between different projects or blockchains. In some projects, only the token itself is in the chain, while any metadata or images are stored out of the chain, often on private servers. This allows these projects to update the metadata in the event of a problem on their servers or, for example, when they want to update some images of in-game assets. For most “art-related” NFT projects, the solution is a hybrid in the sense that the metadata is mostly out of the chain while the image itself is usually stored in the chain, for example in IPFS, to prove it has never been the case was changed. This is a perfect compromise as long as you trust IPFS to stay active forever, which it likely will be.
Eventually, some, if very few, projects have chosen to make everything in the chain available, both the metadata and the images, and to make the solution the “perfect NFT” in the sense that it can never be disturbed. This proves that it is “totally real” with the same downside. You can never optimize it! This is the solution we’re going to implement for some of the chains we’re going to add to GhostMarket. This can vary depending on the chain we have integrated. For example, a complete on-chain function is not possible with Ethereum, while with Neo it is a bit more realistic with the new standard.
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For more information and the latest news on GhostMarket, see the links below:
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