In most nft marketplaces the actual artwork was not signed. They signed a url, not even a fucking hash of the jpg.
1. For the majority (perhaps even vast majority) it was never pointing to ipfs, but to some server running somewhere.
2. On ipfs files will disappear eventually if there's no one to pay for their storage
2. Good point. I haven't investigated this but I should.
66.44% of NFTs are HTTP (centralised servers) and only 23.81% are on IPFS even when taking into account the gateways
> Put simply, ~10% of NFTs are on-chain, ~40% of NFTs are on private servers and are doomed, and ~50% remaining are on IPFS.
40% is the doomed figure. Which is way too high but there’s a lot of idiots minting shitty NFTs. Since the study wasn’t limited to NFTs on marketplaces (like we’re discussing here) that doesn’t surprise me.
Still, due to how IPFS operates, the majority of those assets will be gone, too.
Example from infura: https://community.infura.io/t/does-data-that-hasnt-been-used...
--- start quote ---
if the data you’ve pinned to IPFS is not accessed within the 6 month period, our garbage collecting system will delete the data. In order to keep data around indefinitely, you will need to access it somehow at least every 6 months.
--- end quote ---
And more on Hedera: https://hedera.com/blog/nft-storage-why-it-matters
I can't find the article now. IIRC someone crawled through OpenSea NFTs and the majority of the assets were gone.
metaplex defaults to arweave for uploads.