How to make an NFT disappear

Ed Clements is a community manager for OpenSea who fields these kinds of problems daily. In an interview, he explained that digital artworks themselves are not immutably registered “on the blockchain” when a purchase is made. When you buy an artwork, rather, you’re “minting” a new cryptographic signature that, when decoded, points to an image hosted elsewhere. This could be a regular website, or it might be the InterPlanetary File System, a large peer-to-peer file storage system.

"I use the analogy of OpenSea and similar platforms acting like windows into a gallery where your NFT is hanging,” he said. “The platform can close the window whenever they want, but the NFT still exists and it is up to each platform to decide whether or not they want to close their window.”

"Closing the window" on an NFT isn't difficult. NFTs are rendered visually only on the front-end of a given marketplace, where you see all the images on offer. All the front-end code does is sift through the alphanumeric soup on the blockchain to produce a URL that links to where the image is hosted, or less commonly metadata which describes the image. According to Clement: “the code that finds the information on the blockchain and displays the images and information is simply told, ‘don't display this one.’”

An important point to reiterate is that while NFT artworks can be taken down, the NFTs themselves live inside Ethereum. This means that  the NFT marketplaces can only interact with and interpret that data, but cannot edit or remove it. As long as the linked image hasn't been removed from its source, an NFT bought on OpenSea could still  be viewed on Rarible, SuperRare, or whatever—they are all just interfaces to the ledger.

In the case that an NFT artwork was actually removed at the source, rather than suppressed by a marketplace, then it would not display no matter which website you used. If you saved the image to your phone before it was removed, you could gaze at it while absorbing the aura of a cryptographic signature displayed on a second screen, but that could lessen the already-tenuous connection between NFT and artwork.

He said he couldn’t even find a record of the token itself on the Ethereum blockchain, though he was able to view the transaction in which he spent $500 and bought the image. This was truly disturbing, because even if an NFT artwork has been taken down, the signature should still be available.

“This one’s a pickle,” said Mewny, speculating that the token hadn’t actually been minted at all, and that it would be minted “properly” at a later date in order to save on expensive Ethereum fees. It’s not unlike those cafeterias which sell customers little plastic tokens that can later be exchanged for food after queuing. Except in this case, the token is invisible, the queue never ends, and the “food” is a JPEG stuck to a wall—which abruptly disappears after about a week.

Take, for instance, the buyer B39A88, who last week purchased this collection by the artist “Foswell Banks.” (Who may or may not be this reporter.) The payment record is there and the art is on OpenSea. But under the ERC-721 tab the NFT tied to the artwork is nowhere to be seen. We know, however, that it is online; it’s just not compatible with Etherscan.

In the end, it turns out that the case of Kuennen's missing NFT came down to two causes: a terms of service violation on OpenSea that resulted in the image being suppressed, and an unreadable ERC-1155 standard that made it inaccessible on Etherscan. We know this because we reached out to OpenSea CTO Alex Attalah and he took a look at Kuennen’s Moon Ticket screenshot.

He wondered whether there was any way he could restore the image without having to gaze into the blockchain itself. Probably not. Could he, at least, somehow restore the link to the image? But where was it even hosted? Was it even hosted? None of this seemed even remotely hopeful. The best bet, he figured, would be to just resell it as it is, and call it avant-garde.

Source: Vice News

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