Ordinals NFT, BRC20 craze is on the rise. In March 2023, a developer named Domodata first proposed the theory of the BRC20 standard. He proposed using the Ordinals protocol to create a standard for non-fungible tokens on the Bitcoin blockchain. Currently, BRC20 has been used to mint more than 10,000 different coins, most of which are MEME coins. Strong narratives, community-driven, and creative marketing are all considered as reasons for the spread of this craze, and NFT has once again ignited the enthusiasm of the market.

According to the latest data from NFTScan, as of the end of May, more than 2 million NFT projects have been deployed on the mainstream blockchain network, 810 million NFT assets have been minted, 2 billion on-chain records have been generated, and there are currently 110 million wallet addresses holding NFT assets.

But looking back at the development of NFT, secure storage is still an urgent problem to be solved. NFT security incidents occur frequently. Last year, Jay Chou posted that NFT worth 3 million yuan was stolen, Free Mint scams frequently occurred, and BAYC official account was hacked...

Many project parties and NFT users can’t help but ask, how to safely store and hold NFT?

How to store NFTs

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

On-chain storage allows users to verify all aspects of NFTs, but few NFT projects choose this storage method because JPEG images contain a lot of data in a large number of NFT collections. Therefore, most NFT projects choose 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 a decentralized storage solution

In the case of off-chain storage, the NFT's smart contract contains information pointing to an off-chain location where the actual NFT JPEG image is stored. Typically, the NFT image and its metadata are stored in a hash. This hash is used to point to a centralized or decentralized storage service provider. Examples of centralized storage services include Amazon and Google. The risk of centralized storage services is that there is a risk that the server will fail or be shut down for some reason, causing the owner to lose the NFT. In some cases, all the owner is left with is a simple hash that exists in a smart contract. This also explains why many projects choose to use decentralized solutions to store their NFTs.

Choose CESS, why is NFT safer?

As the first blockchain network that supports large-scale commercial storage, CESS is also a secure, efficient, open-source, and scalable decentralized storage network. CESS provides the best solution for the storage and retrieval of high-frequency dynamic data in Web3. Its technical advantages provide more advanced and secure storage services for traditional static NFTs and dynamic NFTs (dNFTs), with the following outstanding advantages:

- Decentralized and censorship-resistant

Because CESS uses a decentralized storage method, no single entity has the power to shut it down, so the storage and transmission of NFTs cannot be reviewed and interfered with.

- Distributed storage to avoid single point of failure

CESS decentralized cloud storage, due to its natural distributed architecture, protects NFT storage from single point failures. Even if a node fails, other nodes can still provide NFT access services, ensuring the security and availability of NFTs.

- Efficient, flexible and comparable to centralized storage performance

CESS introduces a decentralized CDN layer to provide scientific and effective incentives to cache miners and retrieval miners, achieving millisecond-level data retrieval and return. While providing efficient NFT access speeds, users can quickly browse, retrieve, and trade NFTs.

- Copyright protected, creator friendly

The series of NFT tool projects that will be deployed based on the CESS network will allow creators to mint, produce and store NFTs without users having to build and maintain servers themselves. CESS innovatively uses a multi-type data confirmation mechanism (MDRC) to allow users to truly master NFT ownership through data traceability, data graphs and data similarity algorithms.

CESS provides a practical paradigm for NFT decentralized storage

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

Taking DeShare as an example, users use DeShare to upload data and store the data on the CESS network. There are several key operations:

File Hash is used for content addressing. After a user uploads any file format (pictures, videos, audio, and text) using DeShare, a URL is generated. The link contains the File Hash of the data. File Hash is a unique fingerprint of the data and a universal address that can be used to reference content, regardless of how and where it is stored. Since File Hash is generated from the content itself, using File Hash to retrieve NFT data can prevent problems such as fragile links.

Flexible retrieval. Data stored through DeShare can be retrieved and queried using File Hash in the CESS testnet blockchain browser, or obtained in the browser through any public CESS-Gateway.

Provable and recoverable storage. DeShare uses the CESS network for decentralized data storage, supporting the storage and retrieval of NFT data. The innovative multi-copy recoverable storage proof mechanism (PoDR²) introduced by CESS generates three data copies by default and supports the recovery of damaged/lost data segments, thereby ensuring the security and integrity of the data and improving the network's disaster recovery capabilities.

The proof of replication confirms the preservation of independent backups, and the proof of space-time confirms the continuous storage of the user's data over time. Compared with the single-copy proof of replication used by Filecoin (proving that a given storage provider is storing the only copy of the customer's original data), the multi-copy recoverable storage proof adopted by CESS combines the challenges of proof of space-time, and helps users store their NFT data securely and flexibly through products such as DeShare, providing best practices for NFT storage.