Dude, where's my NFT? Distributed Infrastructures for Digital Art

TL;DR

This paper investigates the storage methods for digital art referenced by NFTs, focusing on IPFS, and proposes best practices to enhance long-term data survivability and integrity.

Contribution

It provides an empirical analysis of NFT data storage techniques and introduces best practices for ensuring long-term availability and integrity of digital art stored via distributed systems.

Findings

IPFS is a popular storage solution for NFTs

Current storage methods have notable survivability issues

Proposed best practices improve long-term data preservation

Abstract

We explore issues relating to the storage of digital art, based on an empirical investigation into the storage of audiovisual data referenced by non-fungible tokens (NFTs). We identify current trends in NFT data storage and highlight problems with implemented solutions. We particularly focus our investigation on the use of the Interplanetary Filesystem (IPFS), which emerges as a popular and versatile distributed storage solution for NFTs. Based on the analysis of discovered data storage techniques, we propose a set of best practices to ensure long-term storage survivability of NFT data. While helpful for forming the NFT art market into a legitimate long-term environment for digital art, our recommendations are also directly applicable for improving the availability and integrity of non-NFT digital art.