Diversity is great, but there must be something to unite. The problem with many promising technologies is that their developers don’t collaborate on standards.
Remember the early 2000s, when every phone maker offered their type of connector? You probably had dozens of different chargers and plugs at home. The most advanced users got the “universal” charger looking like Frankenstein, but it still wasn’t convenient. Eventually, an agreement was reached (well, almost), micro usb and then type-c connectors appeared. But Apple still stands apart.
So, history teaches that blockchains should be able to “communicate” with each other too. So what is the problem with NFT? In essence, non-interchangeable tokens are quite similar to regular tokens: they cannot be split or reissued, and their metadata can contain almost any information, from the name to an image link. The inconsistency of this data is the difficulty: one network may not “read” metadata written according to the rules of another network.
Ethereum is leading today in the field of NFT metadata unification (as in the case of the ERC-20 standard). Not surprisingly, the bulk of NFT operates on this blockchain. And one of the most common metadata formats is JSON, this kind of file weighs little and uses popular JavaScript.
To avoid confusion, here are the recommendations about metadata from the largest and most popular NFT-marketplace OpenSea.
Although the market is moving towards integration, not all projects or chains know how to “build bridges” without special extensions. Take the example of the famous network Waves and the two largest projects on its blockchain: the collectible game Waves Ducks and the marketplace Sign Art.
So, Waves Ducks tokens have their own special “genotype” required for NFT crossing. It can be found in the “description” field of metadata: {“genotype”: “DUCK-HHGGHHFF-NR”, “crossbreeding”: true}. Each letter in the “genetic code” means a specific part of a duck token, they combine like a constructor to create a new duck. Sign Art uses a different type of metadata, which is more massive. It looks like this:
Creator: 3PGvAEEmpx7enFqs6FJT6mKhEWQPCEfbC, ArtID: HGjBCNWejz3GtmqT2Nhfbjonod5hU1JVDytKYLGcqYj4, SignID: 78nEy6yVTySepXzoVRTnrtqbVn5wrWV1mmG3Bi5u4fAX, Artwork name: Tokenized Future by WavesPunks. 1 Billion for BTC. Issue: 1/1
As you can see, the formats are completely different. Because of this, it’s impossible to place on Sign Art the units created outside of the marketplace itself, even on the same blockchain. This fact rudely limits the possibilities both for other projects or the marketplace itself and affects the potential of the whole blockchain industry.
We have yet to talk about NFT metadata based on #MetaHash. But be sure, the project will be developed with maximum attention to further development and expansion — our crosschain bridges are witnesses.
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