The Non-Fungible Token (NFT) market appears prosperous of late. According to data from NFTGO, total traded volume for 30 days reached $6.2 billion. However, the most commonly adopted standard for NFTs, ERC-721, contains elements that may result in unfairness towards buyers.
A new report from Huobi Research Institute examines several other proposed standards and concludes that standards innovation could prompt the industry to re-invent itself.
In a new report titled “The Advanced Road for NFT Standards”, the disadvantages of the ERC-721 standard are analysed, including the need to pay gas fees multiple times for an NFT series to be minted and how bots can be used to mint rare NFTs if certain conditions are met. While some projects seek to avoid such a situation by randomly distributing NFTs with different properties according to their tokenIDs, users remain in the dark as to whether the distribution was indeed conducted fairly, as the right to issue NFTs still lies very much in the hands of project developers.
The report further examines ERC-721A, a new standard whose main selling point lies in saving gas fees by allowing for the gas cost for minting multiple NFTs to be almost equivalent to that of minting a single NFT. In ERC-721A, a holder’s address is updated only once when a batch of NFT is minted so long as two preconditions are met: 1. The user has sufficient balance to mint and 2. The NFT minted by batch is of a continuous tokenID. In addition, ERC-721A removes the redundant storage requirements associated with ERC-721.
Several new standards, dubbed ERC-721R, have also been hotly debated of late, with the two most famous ones attempting to solve the unfairness issues linked to ERC-721. ERC-721R, proposed by exo-digital-labs provides for trustless refunds, while ERC-721R proposed by erc721r.org seeks to distribute NFTs to minters more fairly by pseudo-randomly assigning tokenIDs.
