# NFTs, Standards, Problems and Where We Go from Here By [Mr.Sunshine](https://paragraph.com/@mrsunshine) ยท 2022-01-09 --- In the past few months, I spent a lot of time coding in the NFTs world. From building NFT projects to different consumer-friendly apps. And, of course, also launched [Gallerium](https://gallerium.xyz). In the process, I learned a lot about what is working today and what is still missing. And oh boy, there is still a lot to be desired if NFTs are here to stay. The beauty of the promise of NFTs lies in the fact that they are a standard. Anyone can implement this standard, and then, in theory, this NFT can readily be displayed, sold, and traded in any app out there. In reality, the situation is more complex than that. The current NFT standards of ERC-721 and ERC-1155 lack many essential features, which creates a situation in which different apps can interact and display NFTs in a very different way. To illustrate some of the problems of the current standard and imagine how we can improve on them, let's take a fictitious example of a service that helps creators manage and showcase their NFT projects. This service has a few basic requirements: * Ability to display general information about the project * Ability to display all the NFTs created by a project * Ability to display information about the owner of each NFT * Ability to display past trades of each NFT Sounds very basic, right? Well, let's dive into each of these requirements: **Displaying general information about the project** You might be surprised to know that nothing in the NFT standard talks about how to save and query general information about the project/collection. There is no standard way to query such information. For example, the collection description you see when you go to OpenSea is not saved on the contract - it's coming from OpenSea's database. That means that any other service that wants to display the collection doesn't have access to this data. A future extension to the ERC-721 standard should include optional standard fields such as "description", "team", "contact\_information", etc. **Ability to display all the NFTs created by a project** As much as it sounds crazy, but the current NFT standard doesn't provide for any simple query of "give me all the individual NFTs in the project." The only way to get this information is to index the blockchain and look for all the minting events for the specific project contract. Doing so is not an easy task. Many companies popped up recently that are doing precisely that and offering an API for startups to consume. But indexing all blockchain is not an easy task; each API sometimes sends back a bit of different information. That means that different apps might display the same collection, NFT, or information differently. A future implementation of the standard should support a simple "getAllTokens' method, which allows any app to query the contract directly for this information. **Updating Metadata** I've seen many projects launch their NFTs with initial metadata and later on update it as they need to fix something or enhance their offering. Unfortunately, the NFT standard doesn't require developers to emit an update event. That gets worse - as most apps out there are built on top of those 3rd party APIs of companies that index the blockchain, it means that some apps will display the latest metadata while others will keep showing the old one. As a result, the same NFT might show a very different image or attributes in each app. A great update to the standard will be, at minimum, to have a "updated\_at" field or, as mentioned, require emitting an update event whenever a metadata update has happened. **Conclusion** There are many other examples of things that you would imagine being basic and standard but are not implemented or required today. Don't get me wrong, the people who created the initial NFT standard did a fantastic job, and I'm a big believer in their potential to change business and products as we know it. But I don't think that anyone could have predicted the growth we have seen in the past year, and we now need to work on the next iteration of the standard - supporting current needs. --- *Originally published on [Mr.Sunshine](https://paragraph.com/@mrsunshine/nfts-standards-problems-and-where-we-go-from-here)*