The State of Interactive NFTs on Flow

• iaNFT

  1 2 0.0

  Documentation and tools for the iaNFT pattern on the Flow Blockchain.

Today on Flow, we can already embed meaningful amounts of metadata and assets inside of an NFT. We can design it so that its content can be useful as a building block when taken to another NFT experience. It’s up to the owner of the NFT to allow other NFT experiences to modify the metadata and add assets. In this sense private composability patterns on Flow are just waiting to be crafted by us builders. With iaNFT, I’m creating tools that will allow us to embed Cadence analogs to the common SVG file format inside of the NFT. The Cadence analogs are serializable to SVG and back to Cadence at any time. What this unlocks is the ability to modify the properties of an SVG like changing its colors, shape or animation. We can also composite the artwork on-chain and do so safely across unrelated NFT projects if we choose. From the iaNFT GitHub repo:

• nft-storefront

  1 102 4.8 Cadence

  A general-purpose Cadence contract for trading NFTs on Flow

  

In fact, almost every smart contract leverages composability in some way or another. Composability is like those plants or fungi that scientists find to be the size of a city yet also a single organism with the same DNA from end to end (World's biggest plant, humongous fungus). The Flow team's NFTStorefront contract deployed to mainnet address 0x4eb8a10cb9f87357 illustrates this idea well. Let's say you want to host an NFT marketplace in your app. You don't even need to fork and deploy your own version of NFTStorefront to make that happen. You simply integrate into your app the transaction code that processes the buy/sell orders via NFTStorefront. All of the logic of creating and processing orders is taken care of for you via that contract as opposed to having to create your own marketplace contract. A whole ecosystem of smart contracts can use NFTStorefront in this way.

• InfluxDB

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• flow-nft

  8 465 6.7 Cadence

  The non-fungible token standard on the Flow blockchain

  

This usually refers to code or data that lives on the blockchain. It can be stateful or not. When minting an NFT, for instance, there is usually a variable on the smart contract that is incremented to record the total supply. The incrementing of the variable is happening 'on-chain'. In the case of Flow, we can easily store data in smart contracts or even within digital assets like NFTs. It works kind of like this – all NFTs on Flow implement the Flow Non-Fungible Token standard. The NFT itself is just a block of code that conforms to that standard. In addition to the requirements of the NFT standard you can store other data inside as well. So if the NFT represents something like a ticket to an event, then that block of code is where you have an opportunity to store things like an image of the ticket or other metadata like the event name, performers, and so on. It's up to the developer to implement what else goes there in addition to the Flow NFT standard requirements. Adding these 'extra' things to the NFT or a smart contract – things that are meaningful to the experience you're trying to build – are also part of what we colloquially refer to as 'on-chain'.

• solana

  288 12,361 9.9 Rust

  Web-Scale Blockchain for fast, secure, scalable, decentralized apps and marketplaces.

  

Overall, I think we're going to see continued experimentation with interactive NFTs because that's what more engagement demands, and more engagement and utility is what we want. The problem is that most non-Flow blockchains need to solve some scalability issues before being viable for high-engagement interactive NFT experiences. Some projects like The Sandbox have started to migrate to layer 2 solutions like Polygon so they can meet the demands as users interact and do more with their NFTs. In general, blockchains are working to be faster and better. Solana focuses on speed, claiming to be the fastest blockchain in the world. Layer 2 solutions like Polygon aim to be a fast and cheap decentralized scaling platform for Ethereum. Ethereum itself will see a number of scalability upgrades come to fruition as a change of consensus mechanism coupled with a layer 2 scaling initiative helps reduce gas costs. The data storage needs for interactive NFT experiences on these chains might be provided by solutions like airweave and IPFS as on-chain data storage is quite expensive. I don't see why excited developers won't deliver a lot of interesting projects in this space.

• multihash-serialise

  30 25 0.0 Haskell

  Haskell libraries for interacting with IPFS (by monadic-xyz)

  

With any blockchain, including Flow, there will be data that can or should live outside of the blockchain but still be referenced on the blockchain. Metadata or images for NFTs are sometimes stored on services like IPFS or Arweave, and a reference to where they are stored is added to the NFT itself.

• SaaSHub

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  SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives

  

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