The Issue of Centralization in NFT
Due to the flexibility of NFT and the rich content it carries, its data storage, circulation, and operational process become much more difficult and complicated than those of FT assets. This undoubtedly poses a great challenge to platform/service designers. In order to control the development cost and time, the conventional solution is to host some business segments in the form of centralized services, such as using centralized servers or multi CDN content distribution for NFT data storage and using centralized custodial services to process NFT business, etc.
Implementing the key segments of NFT business in a centralized way simplifies the process design and reduces the difficulty in development, but it compromises the operational transparency. user access and quality of service become dependent on the network environment. And the key segments such as background servers are also prone to be the target of malicious attacks.
The emergence of NFT use cases has greatly enriched the decentralized economy. NFT is a set of structural data including contract data and metadata. This structural data is created and stored on the blockchain, same as FT. Unlike FT, NFT also has resource data that represents the multimedia attachments, such as text, images, audio, video, and other media content. Due to the large size of these data, often they are stored off-chain.
Decentralization is the main characteristic of blockchain. Peer-to-peer distributed computing, storage and cryptography are the guarantees for its privacy, security, and reliability. NFT is a killer app of blockchain. Though its structural data is on-chain without depending on centralized servers, currently, most of NFTs’ resource data and business processes are still relying on centralized computing storage, which has become the bottleneck of the entire system.
To tackle above mentioned problems, E8 team chose to completely remove the centralized design in the NFT business and to develop a fully decentralized platform with no background service, but with complete front-end process and decentralized storage.
