ipfs

DX Engineer | DevRel at OpenZeppelin | Building orbiter.host & bhvr.dev | opinions are my own

Girly out in space exploring every damn thing.

Oh. Heard it's better to encode NFTs and host them onchain directly. 

Thanks for the explanation.

yeah, i think Nouns using that to store the nft
Nouns are stored directly on Ethereum and do not utilize pointers to other networks such as IPFS. This is possible because Noun parts are compressed and stored on-chain using a custom run-length encoding (RLE), which is a form of lossless compression.

The compressed parts are efficiently converted into a single base64 encoded SVG image on-chain. To accomplish this, each part is decoded into an intermediate format before being converted into a series of SVG rects using batched, on-chain string concatenation. Once the entire SVG has been generated, it is base64 encoded.

I’m not actually that supportive of “forever” or “permanent” NFTs. Using onchain data for NFT data is a waste of space imo. 

Why bother with IPFS then? Because like most things in nature, preservation happens when people care. If people don’t care about a particular NFT then it can be cleared off the network and reduced data waste. If people do care then anyone can grab the CID and pin it to ensure its persistence on IPFS. 

The difference between using centralized storage and IPFS is that it gives the people a choice as to what should be preserved, rather than someone just flipping the switch on their Cloudflare account.

Some thoughts on that: https://warpcast.com/stevedylandev.eth/0x668005c3