NFTs (non-fungible tokens) boomed in popularity in the digital art world. But they are sticking around in numerous industries. Rather than another tech hype cycle, NFTs are showing themselves to be a long-term trend.
There are numerous industries ripe for the NFT and web3 revolution. Branding from gaming companies to football clubs is starting to get in on the actions. And with crypto users spending $2.7B minting NFTs in the first half of 2022, who can blame them?
However, an NFT is not necessarily a piece of digital art. They can be anything from in-game weapons to tickets to exclusive events. As such, brands need to give the correct attributes to their NFTs to ensure that smart contracts accurately represent the NFT being traded.
NFTs can have attributes added to them. These attributes expand NFTs’ use cases and make them highly suitable for all sorts of content. Brands and marketers need to know how to add attributes to NFT metadata as it is pivotal when it comes to advancing the next generation of your NFT and web3 strategy.
An NFT attribute is the various visual aspects that profile pictures (PFP) NFTs have. This can represent everything from backgrounds to different facial features and so on.
However, “NFT metadata attributes” are something different.
These are non-visible elements of an NFT. Meta attributes are coded into NFTs metadata. There are many different NFT standards but we’ll use the classic Ethereum ERC-721 token standard for the following NFT discussion.
Aside from adding functionality, NFT meta attributes help you to add additional uniqueness to your NFTs.
NFT metadata often includes the following:
This NFT metadata will be the input of your NFT smart contract which you will deploy on the Ethereum network.
Uploading images to the blockchain is very expensive since they are large in size.
The most common workaround is instead to upload the link of your image to the blockchain and store your image on an Interplanetary File System.
Your NFT references a file that exists online somewhere. Normally this is hosted on the creator's website. The NFT requests the content which returns the content to you. NFTs usually point to an IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) hash or an HTTP URL.
The ERC-721 standard specifies metadata in a standardised JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) format.
It looks like this:
When developers are creating your brand's NFT it is essential that you understand this standard so that you can effectively communicate what attributes need to be added to your NFTs and ensure that they are.
When it comes to NFTs there is tremendous value in looking at things differently. Many NFT creators are not focusing on meta attributes and they are missing out on an opportunity. Focusing on the ownership and tradability of NFTs as the “data” can help bring efficiency to NFT marketplace implementations. Efforts to sort out the tradeoffs in various approaches for minting and trading NFTs will lead to technical scalability.
Developers need to consider NFT metadata as the main event when creating. In some cases, they will need to expand the utility of NFTs to support more use cases and improve security.
Your brand needs to be thinking through the safeguards within your NFT project. You need to ensure that the NFT URI points to what everyone agrees upon when it changes hands.
This will include generating a hash that points to a trusted web address such as your brand's reputable website or an IPFS address with established trust.
An additional layer of provability is to consider not just a hash of the URI but also the content. If the content then changes at the hosted address, all parties involved in the transaction would know.
Want to know more? Contact us to find out how we can help you with your NFT project.
NFT meta attributes are a helpful tool that many brands and creators are not using. When launching your NFT project, you need to ensure that you have a set brief for your developer to include meta attributes for your content as this will improve security and increase utility.
See inspirations here:
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