20 Aug NFT-Drive beta test

We have talked a lot about NFT-Drive before on Symbol Blog but it has always been a bit of a mystery to me as all of the information I have seen is in Japanese (I really wish that I could read Japanese, it would make my blog posting sooo much easier).

NFT-Drive was created by @EUFjZEyIuzS9rIi and the basic concept of system is that you can mint NFT mosaics and store the associated data (e.g. an art piece, photo or video) on the Symbol blockchain rather than replying on an external source for storage of your digital art.

I love this tweet showing how it can be used to store video on the Symbol chain and decode the data again so that the video can be viewed in all its glory.

ついに720p 30fps 1min　2万3千トランザクションのオンチェーンNFTデータを完成させる。
これは実験であるがSymbolブロックチェーンの脅威のテクノロジーが伝わるだろうか？#symbol #nem pic.twitter.com/Kx50ge5xCD

— ボー太郎博士（一級NFTアップロード師） (@EUFjZEyIuzS9rIi) May 19, 2021

The beta test

I was lucky enough to be accepted as a beta tester for NFT-Drive on testnet and so I thought I would struggle my way through minting and sending an NFT without being able to understand any Japanese. I figured this would be an excellent test of how easy it is to use the tool! 😆 (spoiler: it is actually really simple).

In this article I am going to take you through the basic steps and introduce you to one of my cats (hence the blog image)..

Getting started

So it is a closed beta test and so first of all I had to log in with a username and password provided. Then I was presented with a screen asking me for some kind of input(???) – first hurdle 😕

I thought it might have asked for a username but I wasn’t really sure so luckily @RadioRa26841511 was on hand to help me out and translate for me. It was asking for a username that I used to sign up for the test which was “symbolblog”.

So far so good..

NFT options

Next I was presented with a screen asking for the following information:

First of all you need to enter the Symbol address that you want to send the NFT to (i.e. your existing testnet wallet). Then I chose to create a brand new mosaic (there is a fee for this) but you could associate the NFT with an existing mosaic ID that you have created by entering the ID here. I only want to issue a single mosaic and I specify that it can be transferred between accounts. I chose not to encrypt my NFT but if I didn’t want anyone else to be able to view it 😳 then I would have entered a password here.

Choosing an image

So now we are all set. We just need to drag and drop out photo into the webpage. Here is one of my cats Satoshi looking particularly relaxed (and fat) – let’s make him into a NFT! 😆

This part is super simple. Just drag your chosen image onto the NFT-Drive webpage and you are good to go.

Here you can see Satoshi has been uploaded and is ready to be minted into an on chain NFT – he will be immortalised on the Symbol testnet!

As you might notice in the image above a fee is displayed. The Satoshi NFT will cost a total of 507 testnet XYM. This pays for mosaic creation and all of the transactions required to store the image data on chain. The larger the image the more transactions required and the higher the cost.

I have already funded the address from the faucet but directly after the fee calculation you will be shown an address and asked send the required funds.

After the funds have been received, the page updates and you will be able to submit the data – this is where the technical wizardry begins!

It will take a little while but you will be issued a mosaic to the wallet address you entered in the input form. We can check this on the explorer. Here is the NFT mosaic which has been transferred to my address.

There is a lot going on behind the scenes here though. If I click on the sender’s address then I see that there were thousands of transactions that made this NFT possible. We see that the NFT mosaic was send to our recipient account in block 334435 – that is a simple transaction between two accounts. However… it was created in the previous block 334434 from several aggregate transactions.

If we look more closely at this block we will see that over 5000 transactions were used to store the 2.1Mb image data on chain. This is why the fee to create the NFT was so high!

If you look at the individual transactions within the aggregate you can see that the message field contains a lot of incomprehensible text. I guess that this is a binary representation of the image data which can be used later to reconstitute the original image.

Viewing your NFT

And here he is – Satoshi (aka in our house “Big T”). You can check out the NFT yourself here! – ah edit: you can’t access it without the beta test login 😞

So that’s how you send an image as a NFT mosaic and store the data on chain using Symbol!

There is also a competition running – I am not aiming to win but you can check out the ranking here. There is some serious NFT minting going on!

Closing thoughts

First of all I just want to say that this is really cool – I love the concept and all of the work that has gone into making this happen – @EUFjZEyIuzS9rIi we salute you!

Data issues and scaling

We have talked about this before but there have been concerns (including from the core devs) about rolling this out on mainnet. If it were to take off then that would mean a ton of transactions and this could both cause congestion, higher fees and bloat the chain leading to increased data storage requirements for nodes.

However.. The vision for Symbol is to evolve into a complex network of subchains so you could envisage that there could be dedicated subchains for data storage and on chain NFTs meaning that the main Symbol chain would not have to deal with this deluge of data and transactions, which instead would be handled by nodes on the subchain that are dedicated to this task.

Cat jealousy

I am now off to mint a second NFT of my cat Udon – I don’t want him to feel left out and he is a lot more photogenic than Satoshi anyway 😻

Edit: here he is Udon (aka “The King”). He knows he’s a beautiful cat 😆 He also cost a whopping 2114 testnet XYM to create! That’s going to be a lot of transactions but the image is 6000×4000!