Chia Network Inc has announced via tweet and press release their Non Fungible Token (NFT) standard called, creatively, NFT1. This is the standard outlined in CHIP-0005 as discussed here and we are going to talk about the standard a little bit today. As this directly impacts me as part of the Space Marmots project, I am disclosing that too.
First off, this may sound biased, but Chia’s NFT1 standard is significantly better when compared to the Ethereum ERC-721 standard underpinning much of the NFT ecosystem. As a quick primer the way ERC-721 works is that you publish a smart contract controlling your NFT mint to the solidity-based blockchain of your choice and then you send transactions to that contract to mint the NFT tokens that represent the assets being tokenized. There are some upsides and downsides to this approach. First off, the contracts themselves require a large upfront transaction to put on the blockchain. Especially on Ethereum Mainnet, big transactions ain’t cheap. Secondly, all the NFTs are inherently tied to that contract itself as an originator. It does, however, make it easy to find assets for a specific NFT collection, as you can head to Etherscan and put in the contract address then run the function in the NFT contract to find the asset URL.
The way the NFT1 standard works is wildly different. Because of the coin model used by the Chia Blockchain instead of the Ethereum account model, every NFT is a smart coin with its own rules. The minters of the NFT, like the Marmotverse, can set the rules of the coin with Chialisp and set the asset URLs and hashes to be stored on chain and then voila, its an independent NFT. A collection will be linked to those NFTs through metadata and will be discoverable a few different ways. Another big component that needs to be discussed here is DIDs, which are another CHIP (CHIP-0004) and this will be how a lot of collections will work.
It is possible to mint an NFT on Chia to either a DID or a non DID wallet. There is a greater cost, but greater flexibility in ownership to minting to a DID. I personally would recommend using DIDs for all minting, and each Marmotverse collection will use a unique DID as a starting point. It is really worth reading up on their documentation about the standard to get a good sense of how it works specifically, but the gist is that each NFT is a coin and the references for royalties or ownership can be a DID or a xch address.
The contents of the NFT look like this, and its something you should really familiarize yourself with if you plan on using Chia NFTs.
NFT identifier: nft1euzj4fuh2h46nd5dpm6vh2cmqkvnh2zwwpzd9l0awx496zrhe0psfmklxm
Launcher coin ID: cf052aa79755eba9b68d0ef4cbab1b05993ba84e7044d2fdfd71aa5d0877cbc3
Launcher puzhash: eff07522495060c066f66f32acc2a77e3a3e737aca8baea4d1a64ea4cdc13da9
Current NFT coin ID: 5cdfe3eb4429ad5cb12ab549b6d2f0f7d919fa9f4389d187ad7414f747a86bd4
On-chain data/info: ((117 "https://images.pexels.com/photos/11053072/pexels-photo-11053072.jpeg") (104 . 0x14836b86a48e1b2b5e857213af97534704475b4c155d34b2cb83ed4b7cba2bb0) (28021 "https://metadata_example.com") (27765 "https://license_example.com") (29550 . 42) (29556 . 1337) (28008 . 0x868463c2ae6f8a9585156c9ad9f4b9b01eeacc56fec82aa629c97135ff21823e) (27752 . 0x358d4eb4aedefbec22824036299eff24216d213a95c8f986f862f0a89a250a82))
Owner DID: did:chia:13p5fdxgm8e2pngdwp8m088t0etp7rgzx9ye2ju8v5ackcyg7t9nqx2um83
Royalty percentage: 300
Royalty puzhash: 827d2f77303929db5f3c26fd21b65901a342e36b9d912ac4440d6185f80d17a8
NFT content hash: 14836b86a48e1b2b5e857213af97534704475b4c155d34b2cb83ed4b7cba2bb0
Metadata hash: 868463c2ae6f8a9585156c9ad9f4b9b01eeacc56fec82aa629c97135ff21823e
License hash: 358d4eb4aedefbec22824036299eff24216d213a95c8f986f862f0a89a250a82
NFT series total: 1337
Current NFT number in the series: 42
Metadata updater puzhash: fe8a4b4e27a2e29a4d3fc7ce9d527adbcaccbab6ada3903ccf3ba9a769d2d78b
NFT minting block height: 1145481
Inner puzzle supports DID: True
NFT is pending for a transaction: False
URIs:
https://images.pexels.com/photos/11053072/pexels-photo-11053072.jpeg
Metadata URIs:
https://metadata_example.com
License URIs:
https://license_example.comNow to the announcement itself, with the stuff we did not know. Chia will be launching an NFT profile picture project themselves called Chia Friends where you can enter a contest to receive one of 10 000 Profile Picture NFTs for free, and they will be donating 100% of the royalties of to the Marmot Recovery Foundation. I am super happy to see Chia Network following the Marmotverse’s lead with the donation to the Marmot Recovery Foundation. I challenge all Chia NFT projects to similarly donate proceeds to a worthy charity. I encourage everyone to sign up for this giveaway at the Chia Friends link above.
There are also three galleries launching with NFT support, Dexie.Space, SkyNFT and SpaceScan. Literally none of the NFT galleries we were promised up front, or for most of the last year. Interesting, right?
This is an excellent launch, and I suspect we will be talking about this a lot in the coming days. Stay tuned for more Space Marmots news dropping very shortly.
