Hi PH! 👋 I recently went down the NFT rabbit hole 🐇 and found something shocking. 🤯 Did you know NFTs are not permanently stored on the blockchain? Not all of them, at least. Or not how you probably imagine them to be. Turns out the NFT itself and the associated image are two different things. As in: the NFT doesn’t contain the artwork, which is more often than not stored somewhere else. 🚩 This is a big problem, because the place where the images are stored are often traditional, centralized, web2 servers. Think something like a Google Drive folder. Google might just take it down, and then your NFT would be gone, forever. And as with any centralized server, it can just go down, or the owners might stop paying for it... and the NFT would just stop existing altogether 💀 There’s nothing the owner of that NFT can do, because the server is just out of their reach, it just doesn’t belong to them. The key part of the NFT was stored all along in something that was out of their control and that was almost guaranteed not to last forever. Most NFTs are just not what most people think them to be, and many friends I’ve talked to are completely unaware of this fact. Understandably so: it is pretty counterintuitive given the main angle in which NFTs are being portrayed by media and influencers alike. But the truth is most NFTs take no advantage whatsoever of the blockchain. People are buying $20k NFTs whose data is stored in servers that can be edited just as I edit my website. 💡 That’s why I made LooksMutable.

👀 Looksmutable is a website that analyzes your wallet and spots which NFTs you own are mutable (bad), and which are actually stored on the blockchain. It's completely free to use.

You can analyze any NFT collection, and find out which ones do it the right way, and which ones don’t.

You can also analyze any wallet, even if it’s not yours, so you can sneak into other’s portfolios and see how many “bad” NFTs they actually own.

You can even explore wallets from famous NFT influencers and celebrities

The reality is pretty scary, though: most wallets have <50% “good” NFTs, and over 70% of all analyzed NFTs we’ve analyzed so far are just “bad”.

I documented the whole process from idea to launch on Twitter, in the most #buildinpublic fashion possible: https://twitter.com/rameerez/sta... 🚀 I made this tool not only so you can protect your investments and use it before deciding to invest in any NFT, but mainly as a tool to educate people about mutable and immutable NFTs. If you know someone into crypto or NFTs, send them this! 🙏 It may help them. As always, happy to answer any questions you might have! 🙌 P.S.: I wrote an in-depth blogpost about this. It’s more technically precise and has a few extra interesting details! https://rameerez.com/no-your-nft...

rameerez

Prompthero

Maker

3yr ago

Alex Styl

androidDev.careers

Congrats on the launch Rameerez 💯 What are the next plans for the project?

@alexstyl Thanks Alex! I'd love to turn this into something that could really help people inform their purchase decisions and navigate safely the NFT space. As for concrete actions, I'm more than open to feedback! I'll build whatever the community needs most.

Raman Ksaitor

Cyber Security Jobs

Congrats on launch @rameerez! Long overdue project. Still very few people understand that their jpegs are most often hosted on S3 and not on IPFS… or that the metadata is coming from someone's API and not from IPFS lol.

@ksaitor It's amazing the NFT space is not more focused on this. I've seen so many centralized services be born and die in the past 10 years... I can only expect most NFT API servers to die in the upcoming 10 years. Yet people think of most NFTs as a long-term investment... We still have a long way to go, especially educating newcomers IMHO

LooksMutable

Discover if your NFTs are really forever

Discover if your NFTs are really forever

LooksMutable

Discover if your NFTs are really forever

Discover if your NFTs are really forever

Do you use LooksMutable?

Do you use LooksMutable?

You might also like