Do NFTs' Owners Really Possess their Assets? A First Look at the NFT-to-Asset Connection Fragility

Wang，Ziwei1; Gao，Jiashi2; Wei，Xuetao2

10.1145/3543507.3583281

2023-04-30

ACM Web Conference 2023 - Proceedings of the World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2023

2099-2109

Most NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) use multi-hop URLs to address the off-chain assets due to the costly on-chain storage, but the path from NFTs to the underlying assets is fraught with instability, which may degrade its value. Hence, this paper aims to answer the question: Is the NFT-to-Asset connection fragile? This paper makes a first step towards this end by characterizing NFT-to-Asset connections of 12,353 Ethereum NFT Contracts (6,234,141 NFTs in total) from three perspectives, storage, accessibility, and duplication. In order to overcome challenges of affecting the measurement accuracy, e.g., IPFS instability and the changing availability of both IPFS and servers' data, we propose to leverage multiple gateways to enlarge the data coverage and extend a longer measurement period with non-trivial efforts. Results of our extensive study show that such connection is very fragile in practice. The loss, unavailability, or duplication of off-chain assets could render the value of NFTs worthless. For instance, we find that assets of 25.24% of Ethereum NFT contracts are not accessible, and 21.48% of Ethereum NFT contracts include duplicated assets. Our work sheds light on the fragility along the NFT-to-Asset connection, which could help the NFT community to better enhance the trust of off-chain assets.

Blockchain Characterization Fragility NFTs Trust

第一 ; 通讯

英语

EI

20232014104306

Digital storage ; Ethereum

Data Storage, Equipment and Techniques:722.1 ; Computer Software, Data Handling and Applications:723 ; Database Systems:723.3

2-s2.0-85159377919

Scopus

1.Southern University of Science and Technology,University of Birmingham,Shenzhen,Guangdong,China
2.Southern University of Science and Technology,Shenzhen,Guangdong,China

Wang，Ziwei,Gao，Jiashi,Wei，Xuetao. Do NFTs' Owners Really Possess their Assets? A First Look at the NFT-to-Asset Connection Fragility[C],2023:2099-2109.