Storage

Is my metadata stored on chain?

Yes. We finally found a good solution that allows Mintbase to become a truly decentralized platform.

As of 27th of May 2020, newly created NFT metadata will be stored on Arweave. Arweave is a hybrid blockchain they call the blockweave where data is immutable and stored permanently. Now we have a provable timestamp with immutable data that has been mined and verified by several nodes. This opens the door for legal contracts, unchangeable art, and begins our manifest destiny to becoming a trustless platform meaning if Mintbase ever dies, your tokens will live on.

Tokens that were created before 27th of May 2020 are stored as can be seen below (previous storage system).

Please note that we are experimenting and Mintbase is not liable for any files that break when uploaded. If you spent money and your transaction has not gone through, please reach out to us on telegram or discord and we see what we can do. Decentralization is all about tradeoffs though and the main con is that the block times are at 2 minutes and can take up to 8 from our small sample of testing making the only painful part for our minters on the upload side. The speed and reliability are improving over time.

You can find more information on the Arweave transition here.

Previous storage system (before 27th of May 2020)

Your data right was stored on Google Firestore when you minted a token on Mintbase. When you look at Trust Wallet or Coinbase Wallet and see your NFT, that data is not coming from our servers, they use an API created by OpenSea. This is the case not only only for Mintbase, but also for other NFT platforms.

We are trying our best to build our architecture as decentralized or distributed as possible. However we need to guarantee the usability of our platform. As it stands now, the scalability trilemma in blockchain is still not solved. This means that there are tradeoffs that crypto projects must make when deciding how to optimize the underlying architecture of their own blockchain. These are security, scalability and decentralization. If you have any feedback or want to chat about this topic, please reach out to us on Discord.

Is my metadata stored on chain? (before 27th of May 2020)

No, blockchain is about trade-offs right now and finding compromises. For us, the usability is a main focus. The decentralized web is incrementally getting better day by day. Blockchains at its current state are mainly not built to store data on it, that’s why there are projects like IPFS, FileCoin, Swarm and Pinata being built. None of these projects can compete with traditional storage options. Decentralizing every single piece of our business is not possible just yet because it would mean major drawbacks and inferior, slower processes or even complete loss of data.