{"id":15800,"date":"2022-12-05T13:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-12-05T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hederav2stg.wpenginepowered.com\/blog\/nft-storage-why-it-matters\/"},"modified":"2026-02-03T12:53:43","modified_gmt":"2026-02-03T17:53:43","slug":"nft-storage-why-it-matters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hedera.com\/blog\/nft-storage-why-it-matters\/","title":{"rendered":"NFT storage: How NFT artwork can literally “disappear” if you’re not careful"},"content":{"rendered":"
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We all know \u2013 or think we know \u2013 that an NFT represents an indivisible and programmable piece of digital property. Over the past few years, the NFT market has progressed from zero to a 40 billion-dollar-a-year industry.<\/p>\n

Eventually, we believe that NFTs will transform the world by allowing blockchain transactions to be associated with digital or real-world assets. But for now, the NFT market is dominated by the acquisition and trading of digital art and collectibles. Even in the current “crypto winter”, NFT sales exceed 100 million dollars per day, and individual NFTs regularly sell for more than a million dollars. <\/p>\n

How an NFT connects to digital assets<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Newcomers to the NFT space are often surprised to find that not all of an NFT resides on the distributed ledger. In fact, the ledger entry that represents a specific NFT will usually have a “pointer” to a metadata document that resides somewhere else on the internet. For example, consider this NFT issued by the Hedera team and celebrating Christian Hasker, CMO at Hedera:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n \"Figure
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Figure 1 A Hedera NFT on the HashAxis exchange<\/em><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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On the marketplace, we see the digital artwork, a description of the NFT and maybe other attributes denoting rarity and value. But if we look at this NFT on the Hedera ledger, we don’t see any of these things.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n \"Figure
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Figure 2 Hedera NFT on the ledger<\/em><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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All we really have is the name and symbol of the NFT and this weird “Metadata” field. What on earth is bafkreiepyxh6uxzhg2aqwmtes2rwbuikb7zyrzdcmbd5lcijuvx2eyocfi<\/strong><\/em>?<\/p>\n

How it works is that this Metadata address (called a Content Identifier or “CID”) references a document on the InterPlanetary FileSystem (IPFS). Documents in IPFS are referenced by a hash value of their contents, which means that the contents can never change (because if the contents change, so does the hash and, therefore, the link). If we want to look at the contents of the Metadata for this token, we, therefore, need to look at it on IPFS. <\/p>\n

Let’s look at the Metadata at
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\n https:\/\/ipfs.io\/ipfs\/bafkreiepyxh6uxzhg2aqwmtes2rwbuikb7zyrzdcmbd5lcijuvx2eyocfi
\n <\/a>:\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n \"Figure
\n

Figure 3 The NFT metadata on IPFS<\/em><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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This “metadata” includes the long English description of the token and some other details. Most significantly, it includes the “CID” of the image, which is also stored on IPFS. So if we now follow that link
\n
\n https:\/\/bafybeifrn4dvlybxg4oyzz63ohtqkdjdbx6hi2pubvty5v4fb7irfbvota.ipfs.dweb.link\/
\n <\/a>:\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n \"Figure
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Figure 4 The NFT image on IPFS<\/em><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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Voila! We have found the image. As you can see, an NFT is not a single entry on a blockchain or ledger \u2013 it’s actually composed of three distinct elements.<\/p>\n

An NFT is made up of three elements<\/strong><\/h4>\n

So it turns out that an NFT is comprised of three separate items: the NFT entry itself stored on the ledger, the metadata file usually stored on IPFS and the image file, also held on IPFS. The following diagram illustrates these components:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n \"Figure
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Figure 5 The three components of an NFT<\/em><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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Why you should care about NFT storage<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Hedera Token Service and IFPS together provide a strong foundation for NFTs, so why should you care about how it works under the hood?<\/p>\n

It’s important to understand that although data on IPFS is immutable (it cannot be changed), files on IPFS are not necessarily permanent. Files stored on IPFS can and often do disappear. Files put into IPFS will eventually “age out” of the system over time unless they are either frequently accessed or “pinned” permanently into one or more IPFS servers. If the person who creates the IPFS server fails to pin the data to a public 24×7 server, then eventually, your Metadata and artwork will disappear.<\/p>\n

In a recent scan of more than 400,000 NFTs, we found that
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\n in almost 20% of cases, the Metadata and artwork could not be found
\n <\/a>.
\n Hedera NFTs may be less error-prone than those built on blockchains, but we’re still seeing errors in about 7.6% of the Hedera NFTs we’ve scanned to date.\n <\/p>\n

Let’s look at an example of such an NFT failure. Let\u2019s say I, as an NFT creator, create a new collection called \u201cAlien Birds\u201d. Each of the tokens has a unique AI-generated alien bird. For each token, I first load the image into IPFS, getting a \u201cCID\u201d that identifies my immutable image:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\n
\n \"code\n <\/p>\n

\n
<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
> ipfs add image1.jpg\nadded QmT4G9WJsXmRkXRBnUf4h1Nptdr46tXx8aNaqe8sekWWeX image1.jpg\n16.43 KiB \/ 16.43 KiB<\/code><\/pre>\n