Project Update - Smart Contract Deployed

Good morning all! I’m super excited to annouce that after a lot of screentime I successfully deployed my test contract to the Rinkeby Network! This has been my first fully fledged coding project so for myself this is already a huge achievement that means my Pilot project is ready to go live on the Ethereum Main Net!

The biggest barrier at the moment is a matter of integrity! Though my code allows me to mint X - X,XXX,XXX and beyond portraits, I currently don’t have the coding knowledge to upload the works to IPFS and recall the CID in the metadata creation process.

What does that mean? Well When you purchase an NFT you’re actually purchasing the metadata associated with the NFT, which contains a URL to where the image is currently hosted. Hosting thousands of images in a single location isn’t an issue, a google drive folder would do, however what happens if Google imploads in 50 years? What happens if an errant artist accidentally deletes the account associated with the Google Drive folder? or worse yet pulls the rug on their project and switches out the artwork? At that point the investor (or potential descendents of investors) loses their asset.

So the solution is the IPFS which is a decentralised file storage solution. In the current iteration of the web, HTTPS downloads files of a single server, whereas IPFS downloads pieces of the file from multiple nodes on it’s network. The best part about IPFS is that each file is given a unique code (a CID) that can only reference the specific data in the file. If anything about the file was to change or be different, it’s CID would change too. You can think about the CID as a unique validating signature - imagine I own a signed piece by Da Vinci and maliciously decide to sell a copy that I’ve made of it. IPFS makes it so that although the Da Vinci piece may be identical, the signature on the work would say M Fletcher and easily spotted as fraudulent.

So back to integrity. In my code (and in my future code) I’d like the image created to be uplaoded to IPFS and the CID recalled into the minting script to be added to the metadata. Without this process I have to upload and update the meta data indivdually image by image, which is quite a time consuming process with way too much scope for error beyond 100 images.

So rather than decide to run an imperfect indie project that accepts the limitations of HTTPS, I’d rather stick to a methodology that preserves the value of the work without fear that in the far future the image links disappear and proof of ownership becomes impossible.