Are Your NFTs Safe? (Protecting NFT Data Through IPFS/CIDs) - Matt Ober

hey everybody uh my name is matt ober i am the cto and co-founder of a company called pinata pinata is basically an nft media storage and a service platform so on the subject of nfts let's go back to the original nfts of the world we have physical art so in the physical art world when a piece of art is bought that ownership transfer is very explicit the person that is selling the art to the person that is buying the art uh knows that the person that is buying the art is going to be in charge of keeping track of that data and that art piece for the rest of its existence so this is why we have pieces like the mona lisa that are still with us here today is because when that art changes hands it's very explicit the new owner keeps it alive and existing for as long as it is deemed important so nfts um not quite the same thing so in the nft world when an nft is sold the blockchain ownership of that nft is transferred but the media content for that nft is not so what does this mean we have two parts to an nft we have the on-chain portion of it and we have the off-chain portion of it so the on-chain portion of an nft is basically the nft ownership history think uh what is the nft who owns it and then most importantly a link to the media that that nft represents and then correspondingly we have the off chain component of it we have the nft media this is going to be your image your video your music you know this is kind of the the big large file that is associated with your nft so when that gets transferred uh the data gets transferred when an nft is bought but the media itself is often not being transferred so where does this leave nft owners and purchasers when you're buying an nft if that nft data is moving to your wallet but the media is not uh that presents a little bit of a hard situation for you so i liken this to imagine you've just bought yourself a car uh and you now own that car you have the title for it the records for it but that car is now still sitting at the dealership you're never going to drive it you're never going to use it the dealership is still kind of in control of the thing that you've just bought even though you technically own it this is kind of what's happening with nfts right now so i want to go through a few examples here of nft ownership and transferring and how to do things the right way so this is my co-worker ashley ashley does a lot of great artistic things at pinata so we're going to use the example of ashley creating her own nfts let's say ashley creates these and she starts to sell them to people that are interested so in the first scenario ashley has created her nft and she has put her content on like a platform like let's say dropbox uh so when you access content through dropbox you're gonna get a link so dropbox.com ashley's nfts and the the id for that nft this is a web 2 url that you are probably pretty familiar with in today's world let's do scenario two so scenario two is ashley is going to put her art onto ipfs and she does it with pinata because she works at pinata and we love pinata instead of a url when ashley does this her art is going to be retrievable from what's known as an ipfs cid it's a little kind of sequence of letters and numbers um but that id is what represents the content itself so okay in both of these scenarios let's say after ashley sells these nfts ashley gets abducted by aliens it's it's a very sad scenario uh you know we don't want it to happen but right the worst has happened which of these two scenarios do you think the nft owners that have purchased ashley's nfts are best protected i'll give you a hint it's the ipf aspect nft uh so why is this the case well let's start with the dropbox scenario so in the dropbox scenario ashley has been abducted and she is no longer paying her bills in this scenario dropbox is going to shut down ashley's account because ashley is no longer paying dropbox to keep her content alive so in this scenario the nft is now pointing to a dead link so if you've ever gone to a web page and it just says you know this does not exist that's what's going to happen now when people are trying to view these these dropbox-based nfts so how does ipfs change this to start with i want to go briefly high-level uh kind of technical we're going to take a very high level when you upload content to ipfs your media your image it goes through this cryptography magic and it spits out what's called a content identifier this is the id for your content and then when you want it back you ask this ipfs network hey does anybody have the content for this content identifier and if somebody has it you're guaranteed to get it back again high level there's a lot of cryptography magic that goes on behind the scenes here but what you need to know is that you can provably retrieve this content as long as it's still being hosted so i just said as long as somebody is still hosting it this is really important so similarly to you know the web 2 world that we're working in ipfs still requires somebody to be hosting this content ipfs is not a magic network where it's just storing infinite amounts of data for free somebody has to pay for the data storage in the blockchain world you know things exist forever but the reason that can happen is because it's working with very very tiny amounts of data so the economics are kind of built into the blockchain system itself when we start to deal with higher size content like images and video we can't do that we can't replicate that on tens of thousands of machines because it would be absurdly expensive so coming back to it with ipfs somebody still needs to host the content uh and if nobody's hosting that nft content the nft is still going to go offline however there's a there's a silver lining here unlike traditional web 2 hosting such as like say dropbox or aws s3 for the developers out there with ipfs users can then take control of their data and protect it from going offline so it doesn't matter who's hosting it as long as somebody is it's always going to be retrievable via that same link so let's go to the following scenario remember our good friend ashley okay ashley got abducted by aliens it was it was very sad but let's say that ashley she uploaded her content to ipfs using pinata in this scenario ashley's hosting the content herself and then she's also got an offline or sorry an always online backup of that content that she's hosting with pinata in this scenario there's two people hosting this content now so if ashley's node goes offline once she has been abducted by aliens the content is still online pinata is still serving that content it doesn't have to be pinata it can be you know multiple nodes that you host it can be your friend you can even just store it locally if you want to for safe keeping without hosting it online but the important thing is if you bring it online at any point as long as somebody's hosting this content the link is never going to die your nft is never going to die so in this scenario again the content lives uh somebody was hosting the content even though it's no longer ashley you as the nft buyer that have purchased ashley's content when you bought that content let's say you replicated it pinata your local node now you are the owner of that content and you're keeping it online even though ashley is no longer doing that for you okay let's let's talk through a real life scenario here about how this played out in practice uh last year there was a very large prominent nft platform that was luckily hosted on ipfs uh this platform one day decided that it was going to shut down there were millions of nfts on this platform and this was this instigated quite a crisis for a lot of the people that were using this platform uh people were scared they didn't know where their nfts were going to end up if they were going to still stay online but luckily like i said this content was hosted on ipfs and before this platform went fully offline pinata basically jumped in and we copied over the entire collection of all of these nfts onto our network before that con or before that platform went offline uh yeah so millions transferred over very quickly um and then the end of the day the content is still living these nfts are still working with no change in functionality that link never died and this is a really important example of how this type of uh this type of nft that you should be looking for can still live on um okay so what do you need to do to protect your nfts as somebody that is buying nfts there's three important points that i'm going to talk about here the first thing to do that you can protect your nfts is in the first place buy nfts that allow you to protect them to take ownership of that data so if you're buying an nft that's hosted on dropbox or some other random you know web server if that goes offline you're out of luck that nft is going to be gone find find nfts that are hosted on ipfs uh the second is make local copies of your nfts just because the nft is hosted on ipfs in the first place remember what we said if that goes offline you're still kind of out of luck so make those copies of your nfts before that happens we don't want to rely on luck to keep our stuff online we want to be proactive here and then lastly if you want your content and your nfts to be accessible whether it's plugging into different applications or you just want to make sure people can always view the image make sure that you have an always online copy of that nft i will obviously recommend pinata for this i'm a little bit biased but you can do this in any sort of way that allows you know your nft to be hosted on the ipfs network okay secondly buyers aren't the only participants here as an nft creator you also have some responsibilities your first one is going to be again using an off chain data storage solution that lets your users take ownership of that data we recommend ipfs for this and then secondly ensure your data has that always online backup so if you are hosting your content yourself we recommend hosting your nft data in multiple locations don't rely on the platform that you uploaded your nft to don't rely on like your desktop put it in multiple locations so that if something goes wrong your nft is still online and then thirdly this is really important you need to educate your buyers your purchasers of your content how to take control of that data so if you like ashley get abducted by aliens your users and your buyers can still have their nft data and their nfts will still continue to exist and work okay so thank you very much