A recent article at RightClickSave.com was pointedly headlined “The NFT Apocalypse.” Written by Jason Bailey, the creator of the art and tech blog Artnome.com and founder of GreenNFTs and ClubNFT where he serves as CEO, the article claims that “more than half your NFT collection will likely break in the next five years.”

Valid point! And if you happen to have invested millions, or even hundreds of thousands, or even thousands of dollars in that collection that’s an ominous threat. One that should be taken seriously.

Hope not hype. Still, one of the hallmarks of the blockchain sector is the degree of hyperbole found here.  Hype is so endemic that the Gartner Group applied its tech innovation “Hype Cycle” to it.

That cycle is constituted by an “Innovation Trigger,” followed by “Peak of Inflated Expectations,” then “Trough of Disillusionment,” “Slope of Enlightenment,” and, at last, “Plateau of Productivity.”

The word “apocalypse” does not suggest understatement. And yet, we submit that this is not an outcry from the Trough of Disillusionment. Rather, it identifies a ticking time bomb.

Happily, it is one which  RChain Cooperative’s technology and RChain Publishing Cooperative’s mainnet, is specifically designed to counter. How so?

First, what is at the heart of Bailey’s dire warning?

“In an ideal world, all NFTs would be on chain and I wouldn’t be writing an article about the inevitable NFT Apocalypse. Unfortunately, storing large files like images and videos on chain is crazy expensive and almost nobody does it. To put it into perspective, one megabyte of data on Ethereum can cost thousands of dollars at recent market rates. As a result, very few projects store everything on chain.

Out of my collection of over 1,000 NFTs, only one project, EthWords, is fully on chain. Because EthWords does not incorporate images, it remained affordable for them to keep it fully on chain.

…

“There is no way to sugarcoat this: NFTs on private servers (~40% of all NFTs) are doomed and there is nothing one can do, as a collector, to save them. When a marketplace mints a new NFT and creates a permanent link from the token on the blockchain to an image stored on their private server, the collector has zero control over what happens to the image.

“It gets worse. Because NFT marketplaces are essentially tech startups and, statistically speaking, 90% of tech startups fail, 50% in the first five years, when these marketplaces do fail, they also shut down their private servers, at which point your images disappear and your NFT permanently points to nothing.”

The author recommends that the collector back up the wallets holding their NFTs (for free) at backupmynfts.com. And he suggests that it would be prudent to pay a service such as Piñata to back up your files as well.

We are great believers in redundant data backup. Please comply!

Yet this recommendation strikes us as more of a clever workaround than an optimal solution.

#NFT #Apocalypse . Three horsegirls of the apocalypse. Love, #JOY and #Happiness .https://t.co/z7dPjxvJ5X pic.twitter.com/41FukIt45w

— Harijs Krauze (@HarijsKrauze) July 29, 2022

Utilizing the only blockchain that is scalable enough to store video on chain and stream it from chain, RChain Publishing’s RDrive is designed to automatically, at trivial cost,  store your data right on chain. However, given that, as Bailey correctly says “one megabyte of data on Ethereum can cost thousands of dollars at recent market rates” how can on chain storage be practical and affordable?

Here’s how.

Gas fees, transaction volume, and rent. First of all, RChain’s “gas” (called phlogiston or “phlo”) fees are several orders of magnitude less than that of Ethereum. How so? RChain is designed to sustain a transaction volume hundreds or a thousand times greater than Ethereum.

Cryptokitties would not bring RChain to a standstill.

With 1000x as many transactions and 1/100 the transaction fees, those validating for the network can expect to get 10x what Ethereum’s validators do. Throughout the lifetime of the protocol these numbers are only going to get better. Win-win!

Also, the economic structure supports it. RChain has a “rental” model. The only scalable model is one whereby the cost of the data is amortized over the life of the residency.

Concurrent upload and streaming. Also, as a matter of basic mechanics, you have to be able to process data upload and download requests at scale. You need to be able to chunk the data and upload the chunks concurrently. Chains that are not concurrent, such as the incumbents, will not be able to achieve this.

Suppose you break a large video file into 10 chunks, if you upload the 10 chunks of video data all at the same time, the total time it takes to upload all 10 chunks is just the length of time it takes to upload the largest chunk. If you have to process each chunk one at a time, the length of time it takes to upload all 10 chunks is the sum of the time it takes to upload each chunk. If all the chunks are the same size, that’s 10x slower than uploading all the chunks concurrently.

Sharding. There’s one more key piece of the puzzle. At the end of the day you don’t want the entire community treating mainnet as if it were a repository for the world’s videos.  In other words, you don’t want the equivalent of hundreds of millions of people uploading millions of videos onto YouTube on a daily basis. You need a sharded network.

Shards are dedicated to different data sets and compute resources. Think of a domain name like amazon.co.uk. Roughly speaking, names between the “.”s can be thought of as referring to subnetworks. So, amazon is a subnetwork of the co network, which is a subnetwork of the uk network, which is the top level network.

RChain shards are  subnetworks of the RChain network. Transactions that refer to resources across multiple shards roll up to the parent shard for consensus about that transaction. For a broad shallow network like the internet or RChain, the vast majority of resources involving resources across many shards will roll up into the mainnet.

For example, consider that you have a subnetwork that is dedicated to travel. The different airlines have a shard that is just for scheduling and purchasing airline tickets.  Another shard is just for scheduling and booking hospitality, hotels and AirBnBs and whatnot.

When a user uses a travel service she requires both the air transport and the hospitality or else doesn’t want the trip. This requires going to both the airfare and hospitality shards.

The consensus on that transaction will happen at the mainnet level. And by the way, that’s how it works on the current network, except without a blockchain. Travel services like Kayak make calls to and coordinate services like the AlaskaAir or Four Seasons that, in this context, can be considered subsidiary to the whole trip transaction the user wants.

Scalable model for on chain data. In summary, we require a model of transactional computing that

• supports low gas fees and
• high transaction volumes
• supports data rental and
• sharding

to have all the elements necessary to do data on chain at scale. The fact that RChain implements this model explains how RChain averts the possibility of an NFT Apocalypse without having to engage in cumbersome workarounds.

Currently the threat of an NFT Apocalypse is all too real. With RChain the digital asset–whether a digitization of visual art, an audio asset, or a video asset–is stored directly on chain along with the NFT certificate.

The asset and the NFT are together, part of one thing.

RChain – Watch an historic demo of media streaming from a layer 1 blockchain

With RChain?

Apocalypse Never!

Authored by: Lucius Gregory Meredith, Steve Ross-Talbot, and Ralph Benko

Lucius Gregory (Greg) Meredith is president and founder of RChain Cooperative. Greg is a mathematician, and the discoverer of the rho-calculus, a co-inventor of OSLF (Operational Semantics in Logic Form), and the inventor of the ToGL approach to graph theory.

Steve Ross-Talbot, appointed board member of RChain USA, 2019; chair of RChain Europe, 2018; CTO Estafet, 2017; Thoughtworker, 2016; Chief Strategy Officer of ZDLC, a Cognizant funded business unit, 2015; Visiting Professor in Computer Science at Kingston University, 2011; Hon Research Fellow Napier University in 1996, former chair of all WS* standards at W3C.

Ralph Benko, an advisor to RChain Cooperative, and co-founder and general counsel to New Pavilion, an NFT consultancy, senior counselor to The American Blockchain PAC,  co-author of Redefining the Future of the Economy: governance blocks and economic architecture, is a former White House official.