What comes to mind when many of us think of the NFT market? Usually, the answer to this is million-dollar meme NFTs and digital art of animatronic monkeys. Indeed, the NFT market has captured the public imagination over the last few years, growing from a novel blockchain concept to a bonafide technological movement.
Billions have been put into NFTs and this is only going to increase as time goes on. Underneath all of this glamour and excitement is a serious issue that the NFT space has been battling; fraudulent NFTs.
This almost sounds like an oxymoron considering the major selling point of NFTs is that they are one-of-a-kind and authentic. However, as with any other burgeoning market, malicious actors have been running scams with NFTs.
Artists have woken up to find their works tokenized and sold without their consent. Users have found themselves paying top dollar for unauthorized copies. The issue of fraudulent NFTs is one that threatens the future of the space if it is not solved. After all, why would people want to pay so much for NFTs if they cant be sure of their value?
The good news is that PRüF, an emerging next-generation NFT protocol, is addressing this issue head-on.
How PrüF Works
As the name implies, PrüF is all about creating legitimacy within the NFT space by tying each asset back to a verified issuer and allowing NFT holders to authenticate their assets.
When an NFT creator chooses to mint their asset with PrüF, they will first need to verify their identity within the protocol to get a Node, or minting authority. After this, they will have access to several blockchains that they can use to tokenize their assets. These assets, once tokenized, will be accessible in the PRüF dashboard.
The assets created using PrüF are also permanent and future-proof. This means there is no danger of them becoming obsolete as many blockchain-based assets will. Unlike many methods used to store NFT data, PRüF enables on-chain storage with a variety of storage chains and includes mechanisms for trustlessly upgrading storage as technologies change or if a current method becomes obsolete.
PRüF’s Larger Impact
While no one wants to be swindled and what PRüF is doing is certainly helpful to individual NFT holders, its impact is wider-reaching. Importantly, it solves one of the biggest challenges facing the NFT space today.
Fraudulent NFTs aren’t just an inconvenience to the average NFT holder; they threaten the core value proposition of NFTs themselves. After all, what are they worth if no one can be sure of their authenticity? Now, with PRüF, the authenticity of any NFT, regardless of its blockchain, can be proven by tracing it back to the issuer’s domain, website, and verified social media presence.
PRüFs future-proofing of NFT protocols means that NFTs’ longevity can be assured. This has been another major worry among users. Blockchains are meant to be mostly permanent but what guarantee is there that an NFT will survive 10 or 100 years into the future and not become obsolete?
With PRüF, the NFTs can evolve the same way that their blockchains do without losing any of their value over time. What these features do, in essence, is secure a place for NFTs in the world for a long time to come. Instead of allowing these value-destroying issues to lurk in the background, PRüF is solving them for the good of the wider NFT community.