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Vipin Bharathan  Dec 30, 2021, New York.

NIFTY is a proposal for a project in Hyperledger labs. Hyperledger labs is an open source community. Any and all are welcome to join the lab. NIFTY aims to create an easy way to issue and trade NFTs; it will create a marketplace for NFTs. 

An NFT, as many already know, is an acronym for Non Fungible Token. A token is a digital or physical object that stands for something else. Tokens must be issued following a strict process, there must be easy ways to verify that a token is a legitimate representation of value. The object that a token stands for can be digital or analog. Key to the definition of an NFT, is fungibility. Fungibility is a property for units of commodity or a good to be interchangeable. USD is fungible, gold of the same purity and composition is fungible. Fungibility needs a measure, a unit of currency, a gram of gold, a barrel of oil, one share of IBM. Fungibility hinges on the indistinguishability of such units. Fungibility like many properties lies on a spectrum. 

For NFT, the definition of fungibility is negated; that is, each token is unique and one cannot be exchanged for another. 

A software system for the creation and trading for NFTs has to account for a way to tie the NFT to the unique object, to issue the NFT; a marketplace for trading NFTs, which means establishing a price for the NFT as well as to transfer ownership. This means an implementation of these actions through interfaces supported by NFT token attributes and metadata.

As reuse is one of the defining characteristics of human endeavor, the following is proposed. 

  • Adopt a token standard (a combination of the TTF and ERC- inspired standards)  
  • Implement a marketplace (reuse samples from Hyperledger fabric)
  • Use Hyperledger Fabric as the underlying utility. See how ERC standards have been implemented in Fabric.
  • Generalize

As Ethereum has been the main driver of NFTs, standards are most mature in EIPs (Ethereum IImprovement Proposals). These standards have been implemented in Open Zeppelin and in other locations. Three standards are of note: ERC 721, ERC-1155 and ERC 998.  Of this ERC-721 is most commonly used. The implementation of eThaler as ERC-1155 in Hyperledger labs and its subsequent reuse in the Climate Accounting project means that these standards are mappable to Hyperledger projects.

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