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NFT Metadata Preservation via IPFS

  • Updated

The NFTs we mint are designed to survive right up until the heat death of the universe (hopefully longer). Every NFT minted on Nifty Gateway Studio (NGS) is pinned to IPFS, and has the IPFS hash written in to the token on-chain. The changes below are in place as of March 2023:

  1. Both the tokenURI and baseURI fields reference an IPFS link instead of the https://api.niftygateway.com/ field.
  2. This change will eliminate concerns collectors have expressed around NFT metadata if the api.niftygateway.com field isn't accessible.
  3. We also create and pin an IPFS file for each NFT containing all the asset metadata.
These changes ensure that a NGS minted NFT has all required metadata hosted on a trusted distributed storage solution, Interplanetary File System (IPFS), removing all previous dependencies on NGS hosted services.
 
Why are we using IPFS? IPFS is an industry-standard solution to future proof NFT metadata for the following reasons:
  • The nature of its distributed model ensures data replication and availability
  • It is a well known and widely used storage solution in the Web3 and NFT space specifically.

To view the IPFS hash for an NFT on NGS, view the Smart Contract for the NFT on Etherscan, go to “Read Contract”, and read the tokenIPFSHash field on the contract. This will show the IPFS hash for a given tokenId. This IPFS hash is written directly on chain, is permanently immutable, and can’t be changed. If you go to https://niftygateway.mypinata.cloud/ipfs/{hash} you can view the image for a given hash.

For more information how to query your IPFS hash on Etherscan, see our article here

 

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