What Is Immutable Metadata and Why Is It Important?

NFTs have a wide range of applications including: - personal IDs - collectibles - … Right now, collectibles and art are the main applications of NFTs. In every category, NFTs represent ownership of an item. In the case of CryptoPunks, this item is a JPEG. For ENS, this is the .eth address and for Axie, this can be a game character.

The recipe for an NFT

All of these tokens follow the same blueprint, part of those is ERC721 standard. This standard helps us distinguish between a fungible and a non-fungible assetYou might have heard of the ERC1155 standard. It is an extension of an NFT. For our purposes, we can view both as tokenized digital goods.

Every NFT has a unique Id that points to its metadata, and it’s like a fingerprint for a digital asset. This metadata can consist of an image and attributes etc.

The anatomy of metadata

So…what do we see when first looking at an NFT?

The name of the NFT is in the title.

This is the name that the project chooses for an NFT, after that, There’s the NFT’s unique ID marked with a “#”. This ID is the NFT’s fingerprint. Under the hood, in the smart contract a link is generated from this ID that points to some metadata about the NFT. We collect the metadata of every NFT from the blockchain and present it to our users.

If you want to see the program that websites like us read from to collect this metadata, you can see it here:

I will go over how you can find this raw data yourself. If you’re interested in that, stay tuned!

Where is the metadata stored?

A common misconception that people might have is that their NFT’s metadata is stored on the blockchain. This is true for some NFTs like CryptoPunks but it’s not best practice. On-chain metadata is highly gas-intensive and can cause even hundreds of dollars. In this article, we will cover the difference between on-chain and off-chain metadata and compare them.

We now know that most NFT projects don’t store data on the blockchain, so how do we make sure that our NFT’s data is immutable?

Immutability

When we say something is immutable it means that it can’t change. The $ETH you have in your wallet is stored on the Ethereum blockchain. Therefore, it is by nature immutable and no one can change it. This is a powerful phenomena that powers blockchain technology.

However, we are not at the point where we can store all the data for an NFT on-chain just like we store our transactions. Achieving immutability is a challenging topic in the NFT development ecosystem. we ask two questions to see if an NFT’s metadata is immutable or not:

• Is the metadata stored on a decentralized file storage?

• Can the NFT’s metadata change?

The problem with mutability

Some projects take the road of storing their NFT’s metadata on a centralized database. This means that the owners of the database can change the metadata. There are other risks like:

• Hacks and cyber attacks

• Server problems causing the whole dataset to go down

Investors should be aware of these risks and realize that when an NFT’s data is mutable, it questions whether they truly own the NFT. Some projects have no choice but to store the data in a centralized way, we will go more in-depth about that in a future article.

Key takeaways

In this article, you learned a ton about NFTs and hopefully, the concept of self-custody makes more sense to you. You also saw how we has made it so easy for you to see if the NFT’s metadata is immutable or not. You also learned what’s going on behind the scenes. There are a few takeaways that I want to leave you with:

Blockchains are open and transparent platforms and by leveraging the data from the blockchain, you can ensure the safety of your assets. However, it is inconvenient to use the blockchain directly every time. we bridges the gap between daily users and the blockchain. This is all made for you to have a safe NFT purchase experience.

Note: The above information is for informational purposes only. Investing in digital assets such as NFTs and cryptocurrency brings with it a high degree of risk. Please consult with a financial advisor before making any investment decisions. weo do not provide financial advice and is not responsible for any losses incurred as a result of investing in digital assets.