Where’s your NFT metadata?

Dear Bankless Nation,

Some popular NFT platforms from the 2017-2018 era, like Ascribe, Digital Objects, and Editional, eventually went under.

These projects stored their metadata on their own servers, so when they went bust, their tokens’ visuals were lost to time.

Lost NFTs are nothing new, then. But these early losses later spurred lots of advances around decentralized storage networks as well as totally on-chain NFTs, whose metadata are forever retrievable from the blockchain.

Not everyone pays attention to the lessons of crypto history, though. For example, consider Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX notoriety. This is what his first NFT minted on FTX looked like circa September 2021:

No Picasso, right? Certainly not, but at least it had visuals and metadata then. Fast forward to today and in the wake of FTX’s collapse that same NFT, plus all the other NFTs minted at FTX, now have broken metadata:

Why? Because SBF and FTX relied on a centralized server system and it’s not running those servers anymore. This system was “good enough” before, but it’s nonexistent now!

As such, this episode’s the latest big reminder that decentralizing metadata — whether that be through nodes on decentralized storage networks like Arweave and IPFS or on-chain through Ethereum nodes — is part of the magic of NFTs.

All that said, backup what NFTs you can when you can. In the meantime let’s catch you up on all the latest headlines in the space, have a great weekend everyone ✌️

-WMP

📣 General NFT News

• Bankless held its third Bankless Collectibles drop ft. Li Jin:

• Blur commenced claims for its second airdrop.
• CoinLedger introduced the NFT Tax Loss Harvestooor:
• GigaMart, a new general NFT marketplace, launched.
• Ledger introduced the Ledger Stax, a new crypto hardware wallet that’s capable of displaying NFTs:

• Mirror introduced improved NFT embeds.
• Rarible added Polygon support to its community marketplace generator.
• Starbucks Odyssey, a membership rewards program in collaboration with Polygon, kicked off.
• Variant, an early-stage web3 fund, acquired multiple Nouns.

🏆 Digital Collectibles

• Finiliar launched oracle connectivity, meaning finiliars now respond with emotional animations to their native cryptos’ prices:

• Pudgy Penguins reached a 4Ξ floor for the first time this year.
• Reddit Avatar mints and holders stats continue to boom.

🎨 Cryptoart

• Dmitri Cherniak’s Light Years selections began, a project he collaborated on with the estate of artist László Moholy-Nagy:

• Manifold added a Token Activity dashboard, for tracking recent payments and royalties, to Manifold Studio.
• sansa, a new marketplace for generative art, has arrived:

🎮 Decentralized Gaming

• Axie Infinity introduced Axie Core, a new series of expanded gameplay mechanics.
• BLKHVND, a decentralized esports team, entered into a partnership with ParagonsDAO.
• Pirate Nation introduced code that allows projects to receive royalties from both Blur and OpenSea.

💽 Music NFTs

• Sound celebrated its first birthday:

🌐 Virtual Worlds

• Aave Companies, the parent entity of Aave, acquired mobile metaverse Sonar with plans to integrate web3 social infra Lens Protocol into the platform.
• Decentraland added support for LAND rentals to its marketplace.

💎 DeFi x NFTs

• NFTfi borrowers can now mint, transfer, or sell their loan obligations.
• Tessera, a protocol for collective ownership of NFTs, launched.