Hundreds of millions of NFTs have been minted; how is secure storage ensured?

Ordinals NFT and BRC20 are gaining momentum. In March 2023, a developer named Domodata first proposed the theoretical BRC20 standard. He suggested using the Ordinals protocol to create a standard for non-fungible tokens on the Bitcoin blockchain. Currently, BRC20 has been used to mint over 10,000 different Coins, most of which are MEME Coins. Powerful narratives, community-driven initiatives, and creative marketing have all been considered as reasons for the spread of this trend, reigniting market enthusiasm for NFTs.

According to the latest data from NFTScan, by the end of May, over 2 million NFT projects have been deployed across mainstream blockchain networks, minting 810 million NFT assets and generating 2 billion on-chain records. Currently, there are 110 million wallet addresses holding NFT assets.

However, looking back at the development of NFTs, secure storage remains a pressing issue. NFT security incidents are frequent; last year, Jay Chou reported that an NFT worth 3 million yuan was stolen, Free Mint scams have emerged, and the official BAYC account was hacked…

Many project teams and NFT users can't help but ask, how can NFTs be stored and held securely?

Storage Methods for NFTs

NFT storage can be divided into on-chain and off-chain. On-chain storage means that the entire NFT (including images and all metadata) exists on the blockchain. Off-chain storage means that the NFT content itself is not on-chain, with only the NFT metadata being on-chain.

On-chain storage allows users to verify all aspects of the NFT, but very few NFT projects choose this storage method because JPEG images contain a large amount of data among numerous NFT collections. Therefore, most NFT projects opt to store the actual images off-chain. Many well-known NFT projects, such as CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club, choose off-chain storage.

Choosing Decentralized Storage Solutions

In the case of off-chain storage, the NFT's smart contract contains information pointing to a specific off-chain location where the actual NFT JPEG image is stored. Typically, NFT images and their metadata are stored in a hash. This hash is used to point to centralized or decentralized storage service providers. Examples of centralized storage services include Amazon and Google. The risk of centralized storage services lies in the potential loss of the owner's NFT due to server failures or shutdowns for various reasons. In some cases, all that remains for the owner is a simple hash existing in the smart contract. This also explains why many projects choose to use decentralized solutions to store their NFTs.

Why is CESS a Safer Choice for NFT Storage?

CESS, as the first blockchain network supporting large-scale commercial storage, is also a secure, efficient, open-source, and scalable decentralized storage network. CESS provides the best solution for storing and retrieving high-frequency dynamic data in Web3, with its technological advantages offering more advanced and secure storage services for traditional static NFTs and dynamic NFTs (dNFTs), featuring several outstanding benefits:

- Decentralized and censorship-resistant

Since CESS adopts a decentralized storage approach, no single entity has the authority to shut it down, making it impossible to censor or interfere with the storage and transmission of NFTs.

- Distributed storage to avoid single points of failure

CESS's decentralized cloud storage, due to its inherently distributed architecture, protects NFT storage from single points of failure. Even if one node fails, other nodes can still provide access to the NFT, ensuring the security and availability of the NFTs.

- Efficient, flexible, and performance on par with centralized storage

CESS introduces a decentralized CDN layer, scientifically and effectively incentivizing caching miners and retrieval miners to achieve millisecond-level data retrieval and return. While providing efficient NFT access speeds, users can quickly browse, retrieve, and trade NFTs.

- Copyright protection and creator-friendly

The upcoming series of NFT tool projects deployed on the CESS network will allow creators to mint, produce, and store NFTs without needing to set up and maintain their own servers. The innovative multi-type data rights confirmation mechanism (MDRC) used by CESS enables users to truly grasp NFT ownership through data traceability, data mapping, and data similarity algorithms.

CESS Provides a Practical Paradigm for Decentralized NFT Storage

Currently, CESS is in the testnet version v0.5.3, and the launched DeShare product and the decentralized streaming platform VIDEOWN within the ecosystem show us the practical paradigm of decentralized NFT storage.

Taking DeShare as an example, users upload data using DeShare, storing it on the CESS network, with the following key operations:

File Hash for content addressing. After users upload any file format (images, videos, audio, and text) using DeShare, a URL is generated. This link contains the File Hash of the data. The File Hash is the unique fingerprint of the data and serves as a universal address for referencing content, regardless of its storage method and location. Since the File Hash is generated from the content itself, using the File Hash to retrieve NFT data can prevent issues like fragile links.

Elastic retrieval. Data stored through DeShare can be retrieved and queried in the CESS testnet blockchain explorer using the File Hash, and can also be accessed through any public CESS-Gateway (CESS gateway) in a browser.

Provable and recoverable storage. DeShare uses the CESS network for decentralized data storage, supporting the storage and retrieval of NFT data. The innovative multi-replica recoverable storage proof mechanism (PoDR²) automatically generates three data replicas and supports the recovery of damaged/lost data segments, ensuring data security and integrity while enhancing the network's disaster recovery capabilities.

Replication proof confirms the preservation of independent backups, while temporal proof confirms that the user's data is continuously stored over time. Compared to the single-replica proof of replication used by Filecoin (which proves that a given storage provider is storing the customer's original data as a unique copy), CESS's multi-replica recoverable storage proof combines temporal proof challenges, helping users securely and flexibly store their NFT data through products like DeShare, providing best practices for NFT storage.