The Future of Storage Solutions for NFTs with Stratos Decentralized Storage
General concept
NFT (Non-fungible tokens) isthe most popular concept this summer. We saw tens of thousands of NFT projectsgoing on the market in only a few months. The NFT market value tripled in 2020,reaching more than $250 million, and during the first quarter of 2021, NFTsales exceeded $2 billion. Get more information about Stratos
From the very originalconcept of the NFT, a way to prove the ownership of digital assets whichinclude digital arts and collectibles. As the market booms, there are differenttypes of NFTs now. Generally, we can summarize them into three categories:
1. Thisis the original interpretation: An NFT is a digital representation of anydigital asset. The digital asset can be painting, photo, animation, document,or anything that can be digitized.
2. TheNFT itself is a collectible asset. What lies behind the NFT is not thatimportant. For example, Uniswap V3 liquidation is represented by an NFT, oncethe liquidation is removed from the pool, the NFT will still be available inthat ETH account forever.
3. TheNFT is a digital representation of certain privileges. For example, somecelebrities and influencers will issue NFTs to their fans so they can use theNFT to access certain fans-only content.
NFTand storage
No matter which category theNFT falls into, there is always the need to store the NFT related informationwhich includes the NFT itself, the NFT representation, and the digital assetbehind the NFT. Due to the current storage restriction of the blockchain, someof the information will not be available in the blockchain itself.
For any of the off-chainstorage requirements, there are three main concerns: reliability, ownership,and privacy. Ideally, we should store the information in adecentralized way and ensure the owner's concerns have been taken care of. Butin the real blockchain world, it’s not easy to find decentralized storage thatworks with any of the NFT projects.
Stratos
Luckily Stratos is in the space bringing the most innovative storagesolutions to meet all kinds of storage requirements for NFT. Stratos is thenext generation of decentralized data mesh solutions. It is the firstdecentralized data architecture that provides scalable, reliable, self-balancedstorage, database, and computation networks and offers a solid foundation fordata processing.
For each of the NFTcategories, it has different requirements on how to store the NFT itself andits associated digital assets. We will analyze them one by one to see howStratos can help to solve the current problem and ensure none of the concernswe mentioned above will continue to exist for NFT owners.
1. For digital assets
Due to the storagerestriction of any existing blockchain (Ex. Ethereum), most of the digitalassets can not be fit into the chain storage itself. Here the Stratos will showits power. Let's take the simplest example, a digital artist wants to sellhis/her masterpiece, a creative photo, as an NFT.
So the first thing he/shewill do is upload the photo to Stratos network. Stratos network will return ahash code that uniquely identifies the photo to him and also a URI to retrievethe photo using the hash. The URI is permanent and also recorded in Stratosblockchain. In this way, we also ensure the photo itself is not mutable.
Then he can mint the NFT andprovide the Stratos URI as the tokenURI. This will take very small amounts ofstorage in the blockchain where he mints the NFT. Once the NFT is successfullyminted, anyone can use the token URI to locate the Stratos URI and then locatethe photo itself.
Now he can sell the NFT tothe potential buyers who can verify the photo from the NFT's tokenURI. Oncethe NFT is successfully transferred from the original owner to the buyer, theownership of the photo was also transferred to the buyer and the buyer won'tneed to worry about the availability and ownership of the photo since he canalso retrieve and present the photo in his own way.
This is just a verysimplified scenario; the actual Stratos network can also provide morecomplicated and sophisticated solutions to protect the digital asset in thecase that the NFT owners do not want the digital asset to be public.
2. For the NFT as Collectives.
Generally speaking, in thiscase, there's no digital asset associated with the NFT. The issuer embedded themetadata including the image presentation of the NFT in the toke URI field ofthe NFT on the blockchain, which is doable but totally not necessary. The NFTissuer can still store all the NFT metadata in the Stratos network and accessthem as a normal digital asset. For example, currently, the Uniswap V3 NFT'stoken URI takes around 13K. If we store it offline, we can minimize the NFTtoken size significantly. Again, the Stratos network can provide moreprotection on the metadata other than the public data on the blockchain.
3. For NFT as a digital pass
This is similar to the NFT ascollectives but now we can make the digital pass more creative and fancy sincethere's no restriction on the metadata size and also you can add the digitalasset to the pass as you wish.
Other application potentials
Since the size of metadataand digital assets are no longer an issue for the NFT itself, the NFT creators’originalities have no limitation now. Stratos Network will provide all the necessarybandwidth and storage for them to achieve their goal.
