Non-fungible token (NFT) technology has taken the world by storm, gaining global attention from crypto natives and newcomers alike. Its soaring popularity has propelled innovative means for exhibiting digital art and assets. It’s still early days however: developers are building and experimenting with new types of applications throughout the space, taking advantage of the technology’s potential.
For most use cases, NFT developers must quickly retrieve all the needed information from a specific blockchain for a given set of NFTs. Here are a couple of examples using existing applications:
Wallet applications typically query a user’s public address, to obtain a list of their owned NFTs and associated metadata, which is then beautifully displayed.
Marketplaces and aggregators have similar NFT retrieval needs.
In addition to wallets and marketplaces, some lesser-known use cases include identity and deed verification, ticketing, and authentication of physical goods - developers are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.
However, as the space is nascent, it’s not necessarily easy for developers to ingest NFT data into their apps. And there are some important differences between developing for web2 to web3 applications to consider.
To simplify, in most web2 applications, a physical address, most commonly a URL, usually points to a resource on a remote location or website. The familiar Internet file system is sometimes referred to as location-based addressing; for example, an image on abc123.com could be addressed as:
However, if the server that stores image.jpeg goes offline, you cannot access the file anymore. Thus, whoever controls the location controls the content.
****In Web3, distributed storage systems (e.g., IPFS or Arweave) are often used to overcome this issue, sometimes called content-based addressing. Instead of identifying content using its location, we use its cryptographic hash, which never changes. This decentralized storage method increases the durability, the integrity and the security of stored data. It only takes the presence of node(s) on a given network for its content to be universally available.
