The recent FTX incident is still unfolding. Many Solana NFTs are hosting their metadata on FTX servers, and now all those NFTs have broken metadata, and the links go to a restructuring website.

In the meantime, @web3isgreat tweeted that Coachella NFT Marketplace, which relies on FTX API, is also broken. The marketplace shows 0 NFTs.

There is still a large percentage of the collections that are hosting their metadata on a centralized server, like AWS. 

Why does decentralization matter?

Despite the image and metadata being broken, the tokens still and always belong to the owners. Thanks to cryptographic and blockchain technology, the tokens are designed to be owned and controlled by the owner without relying on centralized intermediaries.

In fact, many people are buying NFTs as an investment. NFTs by themselves are not investments, it merely represents a moment of radical potential for the re-appropriation of plundered data rights.

But is this really the case?

Buying an NFT Hosted on a centralized server is just like an old Chinese saying, buy a wooden box and return the pearls in it.

You are owning a token but do not own the data rights.

The issue gets worse when people start to investigate NFTs in many other fields other than digital assets. Such as using tokens to record people’s proof of attendance or other achievements. Once hackers, downtime, and errors happen to any of the centralized data hosts, the disaster begins.

Decentralized solutions

The first step is to store images on Arweave, a global, permanent hard drive built on the blockweave, a derivative of the blockchain. Arweave is building the web in which websites and applications are permanently stored, and the provenance of information can be traced. By paying to store it for at least two hundred years, we are eventually owning the data.

The next step we can do is to make it fully on-chain NFTs. The Proof of Merge NFT issued by a16z, created by Michael Blau (x0r) and  Mason Hall, is a good example. The proof of merge token is a commemorative token to a major planned Ethereum upgrade - The Merge. The token metadata captures the meaning of ‘proof of merge’ and even the image - the yin-yang symbol.

This an isolated case, the creators have no intention to use this for later data interpretation and integration, at least till now.

If we want to investigate the decentralized data layer on-chain further, we need to go one more step to model the data in a structured way, which is where semantic web technology comes in.

One of the approaches is based on the idea of adding semantic metadata, or information about the meaning and context of data, to NFT metadata to make it more easily understandable and interpretable by computers. This technology allows computers to process and analyze data, making it possible to develop more intelligent and useful Dapps. Some of the key technologies underlying the semantic web include RDF (Resource Description Framework), which is used to represent and encode semantic metadata.

By way of encoding the semantic metadata, we are essentially creating a decentralized way to publish data on-chain, link the data from various data sources, integrate the data from different sources and subsequently be able to query and retrieve information across these different sources.

This makes web3 easier for everyday navigators. So we know who we are connecting to and able to make an improved search. For example, who’s in my contacts is a member of the XYZ DAO so I can ask for a referral.

It enhances interoperability in the way that semantic web technology enables different web3-based systems and applications to better understand and share information, which can facilitate collaboration and improve the overall usability of the web3. So that no one is creating the data moat here.

It helps to build more intelligent web-based applications: With the ability to more effectively process and analyze data, it becomes possible to develop more intelligent and useful web3 applications, such as personalized recommendation systems and intelligent assistants.

It’s a wrap-up.

Issuing decentralized NFTs and buying decentralized NFTs protects the data sovereignty on Web3. Co-building the data layer is even building the public goods that benefit every corner of web3.

Building to remove the reliance on centralized intermediaries from every perspective is the mission of web3 builders.

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