deor

NFT Metadata Alternatives

NFTs solved the problem of ownership. But they didn't solve the problem of metadata. Metadata is commonly stored on either a centralized server, or a peer-to-peer network like IPFS. Although this is a step in the right direction, it still leaves the metadata vulnerable to censorship.

I think that the best NFTs are the NFTs where there metadata are frozen inside the contract. Like SVG NFTs, or NFTs that are just a single number. But what about NFTs that have a lot of metadata?

How can we solve this? Contracts have size limits, how can we store images, which are thousands of bytes, in a smart contract for a 10k image NFT collection?

Possible solutions:

  • On-chain image compression
  • Proxy contracts that store the metadata on-chain, so we can avoid the size limit