In this article we will talk about the importance of having a backup of your NFTs, since many collections have the data in storages such as IPFS or private servers that could fail or collapse.
NFTs are known to be digital assets that live within the blockchain. However, only a few of non-fungible tokens are fully on a blockchain, since, it is costly and inefficient to store an entire collection of NFTs on the blockchain. Consequently, many projects opt to store NFTs data off-chain such as private centralized servers or decentralized storage networks such as. IPFS.
This is where problems can occur, as these platforms can crash and threaten the integrity of your NFTs that are off-chain. Some of the inconveniences that could happen are that the private servers shut down or the IPFS storage payments run out.
Today I bring you a tool that can put an end to this danger and mitigate the most catastrophic scenario that could happen. The platform that seeks to solve these problems is ClubNFTwhich performs backups of NFTs through a project. However, first let’s get to know the story of its creator and how he carried out his idea thanks to his first-person experience.
ClubNFT was co-founded by Jason BaileyJason Bailey, one of the pioneers in the NFT art movement and the blockchain ecosystem.
In 2015, Bailey set out to create a ART BLOG with a database that fairly analyzed the arts in the ecosystem as they were being created. The experience he has gained in digital art led him to easily assimilate the potential of NFTs and in 2017 he began collecting them.
That same year, he predicted that blockchain technology and non-fungible tokens needed a mass market for digital art (his prediction was correct, as, that year OpenSea was created).
Among other milestones, Bailey was also one of SuperRare’s first NFT collectors, becoming one of the great NFT pioneers at the time. Being into the industry, he acquired NFTs from projects such as XCOPY’s Glitch Genesis, however, the problem is that these platforms went bankrupt during the crypto bear market and the media of these NFTs were lost, rendering his own collections inactive.
In the aftermath of this misfortune, much less to lament, Bailey, set out to create a help to prevent new users of NFTs from encountering problems similar to his own and in 2021 launched ClubNFT as a resource center for NFT compilers and a substantial tool for backing up non-fungible tokens.
ClubNFT has compiled information on the dozens of collections that exist on the market and came up with a shocking result. Only about 10% of all NFTs are fully stored on the blockchain. Projects such as CryptoPunks, Avastars and Nouns DAO fall into this category and backup would not be necessary, as, these types of NFTs and their metadata, including their artwork, can always be retrieved directly from Ethereum.
In addition, ClubNFT says that 40% of the NFTs in existence today have their metadata backed up on private servers and could create a vulnerability, making the databases unsurvivable in the long run. Consequently, the rest or about half of all NFTs, store their media in IPFS and this is where ClubNFT can come into play and back them up there, before years pass and the storage fixation costs may not be paid in the future by the creators of the NFTs collections (as has happened to Bailey).
The tool that ClubNFT has is through a few clicks and you can easily download the media associated with their IPFS-based NFTs out of a blockchain so that in case you need these files in the future you can have them.
You can register and log in with an email address. here.
On the ClubNFT wallet dashboard you can choose the “Add Wallet” button.
In the pop-up window that will appear you have the option to enter the address of your Ethereum or Tezos wallet whose NFTs you want to back up.
ClubNFT then automatically puts its tool to work in organizing your IPFS-based NFT files.
It can take anywhere from several hours to a couple of days, depending on the size of your non-fungible tokens. If everything is ready, it will give you the option to “Download Wallet Backup” to receive a ZIP file of your data.
With the backup archive of all your NFTs (hopefully you will never need them) it will be up to you where to store it, whether on a hard drive, secure location or Google Drive, among other storage tools.
6.It is worth noting that so far, the ClubNFT metadata backup option is free and would be a good way to test and see which of your non-fungible tokens have potentially vulnerable media.
Finally, ClubNFT plans to implement other infrastructures and resources to provide further assistance to NFT users who want to use this platform to collect information from their non-fungible tokens in a smarter and more secure way.
Written by Rodrigo Catalan (TW: @RodrigoCatalanB) for NFT Express.