However, people do like having a live copy of the file available in a well known location. To repeat: because of the magic of cryptographic hashes, the artwork in question doesn't have to be located anywhere in particular. It only matters that at some point in the future, when the owner of the NFT wants to sell it, they can produce the file which provably matches the hash. With the hash, it doesn't matter where the file is located right now in cyberspace. QmXkxpwAHCtDXbbZHUwqtFucG1RMS6T87vi1CdvadfL7qA The hash (and therefore unique identity) of the Beeple file is the following string: Therefore, the hash becomes the identity of the file - if you have a hash and a file, you can independently verify the two match. A hacker can't create a different file that generates the same hash. No two files with different contents (or different lengths) will generate the same hash. The correct way to link a token with a piece of digital art is through a hash, which can be used with the decentralized darknet.Ī hash is a unique cryptographic 'key' (sic) generated from the file contents. Some are smart, others are stupid - and by 'stupid' I mean 'tantamount to fraud'.

Our four examples of NFT mentioned above show four different answers to this question. So if artwork isn't on the blockchain, where is it located? and how do the NFTs link to it? Yes, this less than a tenth the purchase price of $69million, but when you account for all the artwork for which people have created NFTs, the total exceeds the prices for all NFTs. That Beeple artwork would cost about $5million to put onto the blockchain. It's just that it's very expensive to put artwork on the blockchain. Therefore, tokens point to artwork that is located somewhere else than the blockchain.

That Beeple piece is 300-megabytes in size. Tokens can't*** contain artwork - art is too big to fit on the blockchain. #2 How do NFTs contain artwork? or, where is artwork contained? With these two numbers, you can go find the token on the blockchain, and read the code to determine what the token contains, how it's traded, its current owner, and so on. Here are some example tokens, listing the contract number (the long string) and token ID (short number), as well as a link to a story on how much it sold for recently.

New 100 dollar bill scan for artwork