OVERVIEW
Cryptocurrency and Blockchain technologies are fast becoming areas of public interest across a breadth of diverse domains, with novel applications ranging from financial services to state politics. In particular, promising future use cases of these decentralised technologies aim to re-define the concept of value, and potentially enable a new wave of accessible investment opportunities for the general public.
One such example of this is through Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), which act as digital certificates of ownership for a given piece of digital content. These stamps are stored as tokens on a public Blockchain (such as Ethereum), which uses complex hashing algorithms to ensure that each token is unique, tamper-proof and publicly-visible. This adds value to a range of digital content & artworks through enabling a single source of truth relating to its ownership and historic activity.
In particular, a vibrant online market is emerging in response to NFT technologies, with multiple web-based marketplaces being created to meet the demand of a growing ecosystem of creators, buyers and sellers. These websites focus on speed and usability; enabling users to create, buy and sell NFTs within minutes. However, the nascence of this technology means that associated language and conceptual understanding of the process remains somewhat esoteric; and the data that is both required and created through this process can still act as a barrier to entry for new users who are not familiar with the fundamental concepts of decentralised technologies.
The goal of this paper was to explore the metadata architecture of NFTs, and undertsand the role this plays in curation and collection organisation in online marketplaces. This was a final research paper for INFO-202 at the UC Berkeley School of Information.