By Anthony Georgiades, Co-founder of Pastel

NFTs can no longer be deemed as the next phase in the ever-changing cryptocurrency landscape — the unique approach to digital asset ownership is now well-established with the potential to grow a market as large or even larger than Bitcoin. NFTs create new opportunities for digital asset ownership by offering a unique avenue to improve the control of traditional liquid assets. Since NFTs can be used to log ownership of anything, including digital purchases of lands in virtual worlds, music, and game publishing, the possibilities for NFT use cases are legitimately endless. 

Millions of NFT users see the recent proliferation of the NFT market and mainstream adoption as just the tip of the iceberg for NFT expansion, but for hackers and scammers the NFT industry is a goldmine for rug pulls and an easy way to facilitate hacks. Even the most prominent NFT collections like Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks, which boast some of the industry’s highest floor prices, have fallen victim to the predatory tactics of these scams. With this phenomenon in mind, the layer 1 NFT blockchain Pastel Network developed novel technologies that are proven to provide any user with access to a safe and secure solution for storing and authenticating NFTs.

Pastel Network has created its own purpose-built blockchain designed exclusively for NFTs, providing enhanced reliability, sustainability and transparency for the NFT ecosystem. Every NFT application that launches on Pastel benefits from the Network’s innovative protocols. These include Sense, a sophisticated verification system that can detect subtle differences in NFTs, and Cascade, a distributed storage protocol that offers an on-chain permanent solution for NFTs. 

Pastel co-founder Anthony Georgiades believes that in order to truly combat this looming issue of security hacks that NFT marketplaces, creators and collectors are still struggling to overcome, the ecosystem needs a platform that can deliver secure, trustless and reliable services. 

Pastel protects against scams and fraud

Although some NFT marketplaces are implementing bans on collections that slide in between the lines of plagiarism and parody, there are still many instances where NFTs with mirrored and identical characteristics are being sold, leaving collectors wondering if they truly own a rare digital asset. Pastel’s Sense protocol was built to assess the relative rareness of a given NFT against near-duplicate meta-data. Sense, which is a near-duplicate detection system, quantifies the rareness of NFTs and adds insight into how rare a piece of digital artwork is by giving it a rareness score between 0% (completely a duplicate) and 100% (completely unique) by likening each asset to a digital fingerprint. The Sense protocol provides any user, no matter the origination of the asset, a trustworthy method of verifying authenticity by comparing it against others across the ecosystem. 

Through this protocol, Pastel Network transforms NFTs into a fixed list of over 10,000 numbers, using deep learning models, algorithms and statistical techniques. The protocol can then determine the relationship between a given ‘fingerprint’ and reference database of all existing fingerprints on Pastel’s platform, Web2 databases and NFT marketplaces like Rarible. Through the use of SuperNodes, or independently-operated super computers running high-powered software on the network, Pastel is able to perform various checks through the database and can be integrated by any third-party network like Solana via a lightweight open API. 

A new approach to NFT storage solutions

In the first few days of the new year, NFT marketplace trading volumes soared exponentially with marketplaces like OpenSea witnessing their best day in Ethereum trading volumes and the industry hitting record numbers. However, to sustain the industry’s long-term growth, users need platforms that can provide a comprehensive solution for indefinite storage. 

For those familiar with the space, the most popular storage solution for on-chain digital assets is IPFS, which removes external dependencies and provides decentralized storage solutions for digital assets, however, this model was not developed specifically for NFTs, so it is still flawed. 

Additionally, since IPFS owners are responsible for maintaining the data, if the owner stops sustaining the data the NFT disappears. With Pastel’s Cascade protocol, the NFT data is broken up into chunks, replicated, and ultimately redistributed to each SuperNode on the network. This decentralized distribution ensures that the NFT will remain on the network forever, so there is no concern for storage or security vulnerabilities. Additionally, users can rest assured that even if a network disruption causes most of the SuperNodes to go down, NFTs will still be fully recoverable.

Pastel Network’s cutting-edge, open source protocols offer the optimal protection against the threat of scams and rug pulls that creators and collectors face constantly. These preeminent protocol standards are indispensable for the future viability of the NFT ecosystem.