title: FIND THE MISSING PIECE: Adding Digital Preservation to the NFT Trading Ecosystem
creators: Pengyin Shan
abstract: The NFT (Non-fungible token) market is experiencing explosive growth. While artists, collectors, and crypto enthusiasts are jumping into this ecosystem, traditional collectors have found it more challenging to evaluate asset value in this NFT market than in the established collectible market. This paper navigates the reason for this problem by examining the design of NFT using ERC-721 and ERC-1155 standards, then illustrates that NFT’s infrastructure makes its evaluation more challenging based on its unstable or lacking connection to the underlying digital assets, which makes the evaluation of NFT inconsistent. This paper will propose a revised business model with a workflow to add digital preservation to the NFT trading ecosystem.  The paper suggests adding digital preservation clients to the Ethereum blockchain and building communication with the back-end digital preservation system to guarantee the stability of NFT’s digital assets. In the end, this paper will discuss the benefits of the new business model and workflow, with potential future challenges and opportunities to the revised NFT market.
keywords: non-fungible tokens (nfts) digital preservation metadata standard nft trading nft flaw