Understanding NFTs from EIP Standards

TL;DR

This paper systematically analyzes the technical standards of NFTs on Ethereum through EIPs, revealing foundational and emerging standards, interoperability issues, and security risks associated with increasing complexity.

Contribution

First comprehensive empirical study of NFT standards via EIPs, combining automated parsing, graph modeling, contributor profiling, and community discussion analysis.

Findings

Identified foundational and emerging NFT standards.

Exposed poor cross-version interoperability.

Showed that increasing complexity raises security risks.

Abstract

We argue that the technical foundations of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) remain inadequately understood. Prior research has focused on market dynamics, user behavior, and isolated security incidents, yet systematic analysis of the standards underpinning NFT functionality is largely absent. We present the first study of NFTs through the lens of Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs). We conduct a large-scale empirical analysis of 191 NFT-related EIPs and 10K+ Ethereum Magicians discussions (as of July, 2025). We integrate multi-dimensional analyses including the automated parsing of Solidity interfaces, graph-based modeling of inheritance structures, contributor profiling, and mining of community discussion data. We distinguish foundational from emerging standards, expose poor cross-version interoperability, and show that growing functional complexity heightens security risks.