How to back up your NFTs 💾
Metaversal is one Bankless newsletter for weekly levels on NFTs, virtual worlds and digital collectibles
Dear Bankless Nation,
NFTs are unique digital things that live on blockchains like Ethereum.
Yet only a fraction of NFTs are total on the chainwhich is crypto jargon for NFTs whose media, e.g. art, is directly stored on, and forever retrieved from, the blockchain itself.
Still, it can be very expensive and inefficient to store a lot of NFT data in the chain, therefore many projects choose simpler outside the chain NFTs where the media is hosted on private centralized servers or decentralized storage networks such as IPFS.
The problem here? NFT platforms can go down and this can threaten your off-chain NFTs as their private servers are shut down or their IPFS storage payments run out.
The good news is that there is a way to mitigate the “IPFS payment freeze” scenario and that is by backing up your NFTs via the ClubNFT platform. For today’s post, I’m going to show you how!
-WMP
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ClubNFT was co-founded by Jason Baileyand you will be hard pressed to find a greater master and pioneer of the blockchain art movement than him.
In 2015, Bailey created art blog and art analysis database Artnome. His expertise in digital art allowed him to spot the potential of NFTs when he first discovered and began collecting them in 2017, the same year he would go on to (correctly!) predict that blockchain technology would ultimately creating a massive market for digital art.
Among many other milestones, Bailey also became SuperRare’s first NFT collector, a patron of many now-legendary crypto artists, and an accomplished crypto artist in its own right. Becoming one of the first major NFT pioneers back then, he also gained early first-hand experience of the problem ClubNFT is set up to solve: lost NFTs.
In other words, Bailey was a user of 2017-2018 era NFT platforms like Ascribe, Digital Objects, and Editional, and on those platforms he amassed more than a few NFTs that would be worth small fortunes today, like XCOPY’s genesis glitch mints. The problem, however, is that these platforms went down during the previous crypto bear market, and the media of these NFTs have since been lost, rendering them defunct.
To help defend new waves of NFT users from running into this “lost NFTs” woe, Bailey launched ClubNFT in 2021 as a resource center for NFT collectors, with the platform’s first flagship tool being an NFT media backup solution.
ClubNFT estimates that only around 10% of all NFTs store their media on-chain. Projects in this category include Avastar, CryptoPunksand Noun DAO. These types of NFTs do not need to be backed up since their metadata, including their art, will always be directly retrievable from Ethereum.
Next, ClubNFT estimates that approximately 40% of NFTs in existence today have their metadata backed by private servers, and as long as this is the case, these NFTs are vulnerable to these databases not surviving in the long term. Not good, right.
That means the rest, or about half of all NFTs, store their media on IPFS and can thus be backed up here and now before the years go by and storage fixation costs potentially go unpaid later. Consequently, ClubNFT’s first product is a one-click tool to easily download the media associated with your IPFS-based NFTs off-chain in case you ever need those files later.
I’ll walk you through how easy it is to use this tool below ⬇️
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Register/log in with your e-mail address at app.clubnft.com
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In the ClubNFT wallet dashboard, press Add Wallet button
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In the subsequent pop-up window, enter the address of the Ethereum or Tezos account whose NFTs you want to back up and click Add Wallet again
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Boom! ClubNFT automatically starts organizing the files of your IPFS-based NFTs – you can track the progress of this process and the status of the NFTs on a case-by-case basis from your Wallet Insights dashboard
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This file organizing process can take anywhere from hours to a couple of days depending on the size of your collection – when everything is ready, press Download Wallet Backup to receive a ZIP file of your media
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Now you have a backup of all your NFTs – hopefully you’ll never need it, but in case you do later it’s up to you how you want to store your ZIP folder in the meantime, e.g. on a hard drive in a secure location, in Google Drive, etc.
ClubNFT’s NFT backup tool is free, so consider trying it to see which of your NFTs have potentially vulnerable media that you can download for redundancy. But going forward, you’ll also want to be on the lookout as ClubNFT plans to roll out more infrastructure and more resources to help NFT users.
“We also recognize that while collectors have many marketplaces to choose from, there is a lack of tools and educational resources to help collectors collect in a smarter and safer way,” the platform says. Common questions. “Ultimately, it’s ClubNFT’s mission to build such resources. So you can expect a steady flow of powerful, easy-to-use tools and content from our workshop.”
William M. Peaster is a professional writer and creator of Metaversal– a bankless newsletter focused on the rise of NFTs in the crypto-economy. He has also recently contributed content to Bankless, JPG and more!
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Not financial or tax advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell assets or make financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.
Mediation. From time to time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive a commission if you purchase through one of these links. In addition, the Bankless writers have crypto assets. See our investment information here.
