NT-NFT Substrate Pallet

Ventur NT-NFT Pallet

Project Summary

The NT-NFT pallet is a Substrate module that implements Non-Transferable Non Fungible Tokens.

Problem

NFTs have generated significant value by creating a decentralized distributed digital representation of ownership. While the conventional paradigm of NFTs has found great success as a solution for assets with transferable ownership like art and even real estate, it is not suitable for assets like credentials and memberships, which need to be tied to a specific entity. Assets such as these require the implementation of Non-Transferable NFTs (NT-NFTs).

The need for NT-NFTs has been discussed in the crypto community; most notably Vitalik Buterin recently wrote about the concept under the moniker of Soulbound Tokens.

Solution

Our solution is to implement Non-Transferable NFTs within a Substrate pallet.

At its core, our pallet is based off of Substrate's existing open source Uniques pallet. From Uniques' base NFT implementation, we stripped out transferability and have modeled functionality for proposing and accepting NT-NFT assignments. Proposals and acceptances are intended to prevent the assignment of unwanted spam NT-NFTs to individuals. Additionally, we have added an optional expiration value which is aimed specifically at supporting impermanent credentials and memberships.

Next Steps

Refine NT-NFT Pallets Implementation
Develop starter implementations for basic certification and membership use cases
Integrate the NT-NFT pallet into Ventur, a business process focused parachain
Create a testnet for Ventur and NT-NFT functionality