31/10/2022 This week in the metaverse: Save your NFTs from disappearing, Microsoft squanders an early advantage, and Meta is hemorrhaging money

Club NFT team
ClubNFT CEO Jason Bailey.
MATTHEW J. LEE—THE BOSTON GLOBE/GETTY IMAGES

Welcome to “This week in the metaverse,” where Fortune rounds up the most interesting news in the world of NFTs, culture, and the metaverse. Email[email protected]with tips.

Carlos Topo Maseda was at a friend’s wedding in Puerto Escondido, Mexico, last November when he began to panic.

A flurry of tweets claimed thatHic Et Nunc, the NFT marketplace where he had spent much of the past year creating and buying non-fungible tokens, had suddenly shut down. The project’s websitereturned an error, itsTwitteraccount had been discontinued, and Topo Maseda couldn’t access any of his NFTs.

“​​From one day to another, they disappeared,” he said.

Topo Maseda eventually recovered his NFTs from a clone website that copied Hic Et Nunc’sopen source code, but not everyone may be so fortunate, especially as other NFT marketplaces shut down or are acquired during the crypto bear market, according to Jason Bailey, CEO of ClubNFT, a platform that backs up NFTs.

Although many collectors believe their NFTs will be safe forever because they exist on a blockchain, this isn’t necessarily true, Bailey toldFortune. Although some elements of an NFT exist on a blockchain, only around 10% of them are fully on-chain because of how expensive it is to do so, Bailey claims. Instead, about 40% of all NFTs are hosted on private servers, which means they could be lost at any time.

“People are confused because they hear these stories about blockchain and how things exist forever and last forever,” Bailey continued. “What they don’t realize is the art and the metadata that they’re actually looking at when they go to the marketplace, the thing they fall in love with, isn’t almost ever on the blockchain.”

Carlos Topo MasedaCarlos Topo Maseda nearly lost all his NFTs last November when the marketplace Hic Et Nunc suddenly shut down.
COURTESY OF CARLOS TOPO MASEDA

An NFT usually has three to seven components, Bailey said, which could include the main image, any metadata that defines rarity traits, or the artist’s name. But these elements are often stored on private servers that could be shut down on a whim, similar to what happened with Hic Et Nunc. This could leave a collector with a shell of an NFT that points to a long-gone image, ultimately making it worthless.

To solve this problem, some NFT marketplaces have turned to IPFS, or InterPlanetary File System, which is universally compatible and uses a unique hash to guarantee that the elements of an NFT can be retrieved as long as they still exist somewhere online or are available to you.

Metaplex Studios CEO Stephen Hess toldFortunethat his company offers IPFS to its users because it’s one of the best systems for securing an immutable NFT.

“We see collectors looking for permanence,”Hesssaid. “They want to know that they’re buying this piece of art and it will be around for generations to come.”

But IPFS means nothing if a marketplace shuts down and stops paying for “pinning,” which is what almost happened with Hic Et Nunc. Pinning is essentially a recurring fee for hosting the NFT. It’s similar to paying to store your files on a cloud storage service like DropBox.

To avoid the pitfalls of a marketplace storing your NFT on private servers or stopping payments that would make IPFS useless, ClubNFT allows collectors to download a free local backup of their NFTs and their elements. Even if the marketplace where you bought your NFT shuts down and stops paying for pinning, you can use the local backup to restore it using IPFS, and then start paying for pinning yourself.

After Topo Maseda’s experience with Hic Et Nunc, the first thing he did was back up the NFTs he was able to recover, which he now keeps on two separate hard drives.

“For me,” he said, “that was the moment where I understood what it meant to own your data.”

Arts

https://fortune.com/crypto/2022/10/28/this-week-in-the-metaverse-save-your-nfts-microsoft-squanders-early-advantage-meta-hemorrhaging-money/

Interesting NFTs
No Future #3/15
None.
#28372
By OthersideDeployer
Beautiful Worlds
Welcome to the ‘Beautiful worlds’ where nature and technology have merged into a single entity. These are Ai generated and hand finished visions of solarpunk future in which I would really like our future generations to live and prosper: the future we might have if we took the very “alternative route” which now lies before us: replacing states and corporations which free federations of communities and cooperatives, using decentralist and ecological technologies to create a world beyond economic scarcity and social hierarchy, defined by autonomy, mutual aid, diversity, and inclusiveness. The long-term goals of solarpunk are freedom and well-being for all by adopting and developing such ecological technologies as: solar, wind, wave and geothermal energy rather than oil or gas to generate electricity; a world of decentralized eco-cities, permaculture and vertical farming, free and open-source software, open-source hardware, small-scale fabrication laboratories, micro-manufacturing, 3D-printing, and countless examples of commons-based peer-production online: meeting the maximum amount of needs, in the shortest time, using the minimum possible amount of energy. It’s a world of decentralized and confederated eco-communities, using technology for human-centric and eco-centric ends rather than for accumulating power and profit – mending the metabolic rift between first nature (the natural world) and second nature (human culture) – and where social hierarchies of race, gender, sexuality, and disability are considered horror stories from the past “oil age”. Solarpunk desires societies of polycultural ethnic diversity and gender liberation, where each person is able to actualize themselves in societal environment of free experimentation and communal caring; This philosophy proposes that in order for the social and natural worlds to reconcile, humans must first transform their relations to each other – recreating society along egalitarian, cooperative, and democratic lines – and then transform their relations towards nature – adopting an attitude to cooperation, rather than domination, towards the planet and its nonhuman forms of life. Text by Connor Owens. This artwork took me a year to create and for you it will take a year to discover. Master autonomously updates once a day at 12am with one of 366 original artworks. Enjoy!
The Complete MF Collection
THE COMPLETE MF COLLECTION by Beeple
Mittens
Good day! I'm Mittens. I'm often referred to as the Niles Crane of the group. I once tricked a rooster. I don't like to talk about it. We can be friends, but keep the ultra purrsonal stuff to yourself, please.