The NFT Standards are expanding by lightning speed. With 2021’s bull cycle also taking many NFT project evaluations to new highs, today, new standards are being proposed almost daily on the Ethereum Magicians forum. The NFT Standards WTF wiki and working group considerably contributed to the acceleration of progress - With just a little over a year of history, it’s now grown three times in size!

To continue accelerating the ecosystem interoperability and to spawn more differentiated use cases, by writing this article, we set out to reduce the community’s information asymmetry and overhead with research. Our aim is to help everyone get on the same page. The latest EIP and ERC standards are placed in this article in no particular order. Standards has been extracted from the Ethereum Magicians forum.

EIP-4973 - Account-bound Tokens

Ethereum Magicians post Implementation

Description: Account-bound tokens are partially EIP-721-compatible "Soul bound" tokens that users can only issue through signed consent of another account. The standard implements EIP-712 to allow leaving tokens "unequipped" or off-chain. For more resources check out wiki page

EIP-5173: Non-fungible Future Rewards Token Standard

Ethereum Magicians post Implementation Description: This EIP incentivizes people to stay active within the community by receiving future rewards. It allows for creating equitable token structures for tradeable tokens, which benefit the community and not the team members. It's less concerned with the supply price itself but distributing the value across the community.

Minimalistic on-chain cross-game NFT attributes

Ethereum Magicians post

Description: EIP for tracking minimal set of data on-chain to allow games evolve in fully decentralised direction.

EIP-5185: NFT Updatable Metadata Extension

Ethereum Magicians post

Description: This standard extension is compatible with NFTs bridged between Ethereum and L2 networks and allows efficient caching solutions.This EIP watches where the metadata updates are taking place.

EIP-4906: EIP-721 Metadata update extension

Ethereum Magicians post

Description: Adds MetadataUpdate event which will make it easy for third-party platforms to timely update the metadata of many NFTs and keep track of metadata itself.

EIP-4885: Subscription Token Standard

Ethereum Magicians post

Description: Enhance the notion of subscriptions as thing of value for NFTs and multi token which can be exchanged for ERC-20 tokens.

EIP-1972 ERC-721 Lending Oracle

Ethereum Magicians post

Description: This EIP supports interface for a lending oracle to be implemented on chain for blockchain games. Currently, blockchain games utilize ERC721 tokens to represent a hero in the game or other in-game assets. In order to implement possibility for lending, the ERC721 contract has to be amended (which is not so convenient). The current specification allows the game devs to deploy a lending “oracle” contract on chain which keeps record of completed lending agreements without changing the core ERC721 contract of the game asset NFTs.

Idea: Standard digital receipts using ERC-721

Ethereum Magicians post

Description: Standard digital receipts using ERC-721 "NFT as a receipt will provide a traceable and private link between the funds leaving the customers account and the digital receipt which may include important information such as serial numbers and delivery tracking etc. This means that the customer can automate their record keeping with systems and understand exactly what has been purchased without a human having to provide copies of the receipts. MetaMask for example could show this full receipt when you click into an item in your transaction history."- author.

More NFT Standards

On Ethereum Magicians forum are many more recent NFT Standards. Here is a list to a few more:

• EIP-3525: The Semi-fungible Token

• EIP-X: ERC-721 Referable NFT

• EIP DRAFT: Extending ERC1155 with rentable usage rights

• EIP-5375 - NFT Authorship

  & many others

Have an idea? Want to improve the Ethereum Ecosystem?

Share it on Ethereum Magicians forum, engage with other community posts, create tests for your standard proposals!

Consider supporting work of the Ethereum Magicians by donating to the Ethereum Magicians Gitcoin Grant ✨

Intro into Music NFTs, current solutions for Music NFTs, New Music NFT Standard

Music NFT industry is becoming one of the most fast growing industries in web3. What most of us aren’t realizing is that the Ujo Music Team was bringing up the importance of tokenizing music as NFTs back in 2018. Highlighting the importance of digitizing and tokenizing digital copies of their music as improving direct relationship between musicians and their fans. Bringing independence to the artists as they don’t need to rely on major labels but artists can gain momentum by using blockchain and cutting big corporations off their business models. Blockchain gives us independence amongst many other advantages, in the music industry it means a way more.

The State of Music NFTs

Transparency as a tool to make payments more transparent and royalties efficient, to track data like consumption and usage of the content. Blockchain also gives musicians control over their own content without giving ownership to 3rd parties like record labels to own their content. One of many advantages is royalty payments which can be split amongst artists, producers, publishers. This could be easily applicable to music streaming, but is hard to track every play on different platforms. we do have problems with royalties in Web2 world, bringing this to Web3 just doubles it. Although we do have a royalty standard in Web3 — the ERC-2981, it is supporting only single split royalties. i.e. only one account address can receive royalties from sales. Mirror introduced Splits which is supposed to change the way we are looking at collaboration. Splits allows splitting royalties from donations between collaborators addresses from NFT sales. In the music NFT industry, the music and the cover itself is NFT. Good thing to mention, Mirror is publishing platform focused mainly on writers but Splits can be used for Music NFTs too as it allows collaborators to split revenue from the NFT sale. Similar tool as Splits on Mirror are 0xSplits which works basically the same. 0xSplits will allow integration with dApps like music NFT marketplaces which collaborators can use for splitting revenue from NFT sales. By the time of writing, 0xSplits royalty project is live on test net only.

With the ability of using smart contracts for music sales, it is just a matter of time until we will find new standard as solution. Royalties are perhaps the main missing particle which is missing in the music NFT industry, another one is metadata. We do struggle with metadata when speaking about NFTs in general in terms of NFTs as artwork, PFPs NFTs… now adding music NFTs to the scope of metadata importance. Founders from multiple companies & DAOs are working on a new Music NFT Standard. It is meant to be an improved version of ERC-721 and OpenSea metadata standards which both are very general and non intuitive for musicians. The main issue we have with both standards is the lack of on-chain metadata. I wrote many articles on issues with ERC-721 and metadata. Generally speaking, we should find alternative to stop using JSON as a metadata blob. Uploading metadata on-chain is costly but we are in the process of finding solution without blowing the chain and wasting money on gas fees when minting Music NFTs.

Some examples of ERC-721 deployment contract with gas optimization:

Gwei Slim ERC-721 by Iain Nash

Metaverse NFT Factory by Aleksey Bykhun

New Music NFT Standard proposal

Teams at Catalog and Mint Songs are working on a new standard — ERC based on what has been discussed in the Water and Music Working Group. There are two proposals on standards, both are being discussed across teams and related developers. Check out their Music NFT Metadata proposal (this proposal is in draft stage and gathering feedback).

The main considerations for new Music NFT standard which should be applied:

• Backwards compatibility for frozen metadata, once the metadata gets frozen ie uploaded on chain we should be able to work with them afterwards

• More optionality and powerful royalties that don’t lean too heavily on the intricacies of the Web2 space without complying past standards, this has to be new but usable

• Token as primary metadata authority for aggregators, data integrity and control the rights of artists and labels, allowing these roles to function as composable permission-less structures

• Expanding scope of ERC-1155 — use Music Token Standard instead of Music NFT

• Type of data has to be future proof, if we are going to create a standard we have to make sure it will be useable in the future too, metadata should have 3 types of metadata: descriptive, ownership & performing rights, recommendation data — tags

• Metadata should also cover 3 levels of the product — album release, recording data, composition data about rights grated with the sale

• Existence of album tokens with interoperability with song tokens

• Reference name of metadata standard as version number

I’m excited to see the development of Music NFTs getting more popular. Many big influencers are highlighting the importance of Music NFTs. With the circumstances of pandemic the creators lost their primary source of income -merchandise and live shows. Music NFTs give creators a chance to continue working in music industry and have income without sacrificing their passions for compensation.

Sources & Inspirations for this article:

A Beginner’s Guide to Music and Blockchain: Why it Matters for Musicians

A better Music Token Metadata Standard

Can Web3 Really Revolutionize Music Royalties?

Music NFT Wiki page (Will be Updated soon)

Thank you to Garrett Hughes from Mint Songs and to Jeremy Stern from Catalog for reviewing previous version of this article and providing valuable feedback on Music NFT topic 🙏

In the NFT space it's pretty known that we are facing a lot of issues which are usually attached to the lack of technical development of ERC-721 as the most used NFT Standard. The main issue with this standard is associated with Metadata. There are numerous issues of how not so competent this standard is and people like Transmissions are sharing insights how this standard can be improved. But before you start hating this standard, you need to understand the fact that ERC-721 was created in 2017 when the Ethereum chain was "in diapers''. The ERC-721 was proposed to allow smart contracts to operate as tradable tokens similar to ERC20 token standard as we were missing having the option to create and trade non fungible items on chain. It is the most used standard that NFTs are being minted using this smart contract, which is being modified by marketplaces in order to add functions to it which the basic standard is missing. 

ERC-721

The fact that ERC-721 - the most used NFT standard is super simple - is giving a ton of headaches to the developers. This standard defines metadata as tokenURI which is referring to IPFS (or other storage provider service) URL (link).

ERC721 is using tokenURI which is a unique resource identifier of the NFT itself. This can be linked to a server where the metadata - picture (file) is stored. Usually IPFS, Arweave or centralised server link. So NFT metadata is defined as a URL which points out to the server where the NFT file (JPEG, PNG...) is stored. 

Other attributes / properties are not defined in the ERC-721 contract itself. Opensea made metadata implementation of rich metadata to ERC-721 and ERC-1155 standards aiming to provide more options for metadata. This implementation is pretty popular around ERC-721 and ERC-1155, it is being used around the projects quite a lot. 

ERC-1155 

The ERC-1155 is extending the features of ERC-721 and adding multi token features like storing data of multiple items, atomic swaps — trading multiple items by batching the items into one or multiple accounts in a single transaction, multi transfers and unification. This standard makes it easier to store multiple items in a single smart contract with the minimum possible amount of data needed to recognise (distinguish) the token from others. The contract contains tokenID that contains the configuration and all the behaviour governing the token collection. Each item has its own unique identity and can be traded, indexed and fully fungible with others. This standard is supporting only image files as metadata.

ERC-2477 is metadata standard 

This standard was initially proposed to solve issues with describing metadata in ERC-721. It introduces tokenURIIntegrity and tokenURISchemaIntegrity functions. These are supposed to provide access to assets on-chain by adding schema to the metadata itself which is describing metadata in a more readable way. 

This standard is stagnant which means it is inactive for a period of 6 months or greater. Most likely there are other solutions like OpenSea metadata standard or Zora metadata media which can replace this standard.** **

The OpenSea Rich Metadata standard 

The Opensea metadata standardisation is using schemas which are being added to JSON files, schemas are describing data as visual characters. This standard is supporting multimedia attachments - audio, video and 3D models including interactive traits for your items which makes it easier to filter and sort items on OpenSea marketplace.

Zora Media Metadata standard

Zora protocol has a bunch of amazing documentation and modifications of ERC-721 and NFT smart contracts. In ZDK you can find a bunch of modules for interacting with ZORA NFT contracts including ERC-721, metadata schemas and many handy tools. 

Why should we even care about NFT Metadata ?

It is complicated for the NFT marketplace (or any other NFT minting platform) to know what’s the mimeType (definition) of an element definition of metadata - whether it is "img", "video", "iframe", "gif" or other file format. The front end does not know what kind of file you just uploaded on the platform as it can read only the tokenURI which points to IPFS/Arweave/ centralised storage link. The link itself contains (if it is uploaded to IPFS): ipfs://SHA (hash algorithm), for example: ipfs://QmQ9xMUDiWtVp1YMU1f1MpcdsB3enP6V3JfYmTmhnju5JC which does not gives any information to backend how the file should be displayed. Whether it is a video, image, gif... the front end needs to know what type of file you just uploaded in order to show it correctly. This can be done by adding check boxes of what file you minted in order to show it correctly on the front-end.** **

New EIPs which are aiming to solve (not only) metadata issues

These EIPs were created by NFT Standards Working Group members. 

EIP4494 Permits for ERC721

The implementation is modifying Permit EIP-2612 but with added functions to support functions of non fungible token instead of fungible token functions.

Identify NFT Content Type

This EIP is identifying underlying content  and associated data type of the NFT file itself via on-chain getter function. 

JSON Metadata Standard

This ERC is proposing to add TypeScript specification of JSON file representing metadata. 

Permit singleton

ERC for backward-compatible signed ERC-20/ERC-721/ERC-1155 transfers. This implementation is wrapping ERC-20, ERC-721, or ERC-1155 assets with a permit function.

Conclusion

There are a few gaps in the NFT ecosystem and development and as a community we can do better. The biggest issue the NFT dev ecosystem  is facing are metadata. Generally speaking, in the most used standard ERC-721 the metadata is lacking. The ERC721 is using tokenURI which is a unique resource identifier of the NFT itself. This can be linked to a server where the metadata - picture (file) is stored. Usually IPFS, Arweave or centralised server link. Many projects are using the implementation of ERC-721 which is not very gas efficient. We need better support of video formats of NFTs as there are many issues with video and music NFTs. Platforms are creating their custom solutions which are going against smart contract cross platform interoperability. 

More to explore

NFT Metadata

Tutorial How to decode NFT file from ERC-721 using etherscan

Dive into NFT Standards wiki

Join the community on GitHub and Telegram

Excited to see new NFT standards being created and surge in NFT ecosystem development!

We are going to host the NFT Dev Meetup in Denver! More updates are coming soon!