Authentic Non Fungible Tokens

Abstract

Nothing prevents several Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) to be associated to the same digital asset, for instance, an image. As a consequence, the NFTs ecosystem is flooded with NFT replicas associated to the same assets of famous NFTs. The purpose of this paper is to propose creating NFTs in such a way that NFT/asset combination can not be replicated. We call the NFTs created in this way, Authentic NFTs. NFT token ids are known in advance, before creating the NFTs. Our approach is to include the NFT token id in the digital asset, and have the asset being digitally signed by it's creator (author/artist). Given that NFT IDs are unique, our main finding is that any Authentic NFT replica can not be authentic. Either the NFT replica id does not match the NFT ID in the asset (if the asset was not modified), or the NFT replica asset is not signed by the asset creator (if the asset was modified).