Why Art Blocks Uses JavaScript in Its Smart Contract

Blockchain technologies have somehow managed to land in the worst of both worlds—decentralized but not really, immutable but not really.If someone steals your ape JPEG, if you’re lucky, OpenSea might delist it and make it much harder for them to turn a profit on it. But you still won’t get your JPEG back, or have the opportunity to cash out on it y... See more

Anyone who hasn’t stepped foot in one of these festivals might think “there’s no scarcity in digital art because you can right click save the jpeg.” But what the right clickers don’t get, is that this will be both technically and socially impossible in the metaverse, where digital art, avatars, land, etc. are all seamlessly tied to blockchain recei... See more

Instead of storing the data on-chain, NFTs instead contain a URL that points to the data. What surprised me about the standards was that there’s no hash commitment for the data located at the URL. Looking at many of the NFTs on popular marketplaces being sold for tens, hundreds, or millions of dollars, that URL often just points to some VPS running... See more

Second, the blockchain also keeps a record of all the transactions connected to the NFT and the property it represents. In art sales, for example, that could represent the provenance of something going back to the creator.