Consensys Mesh, a blockchain technology incubator, today revealed that it will announce a new nonfungible token platform at the ETHDenver 2022 developer conference on Friday that will increase NFT security and ease the collection of royalties.

The platform, called TreeTrunk, is designed will be launched in a beta release on Polygon Network’s Mumbai testnet. It is a blockchain smart contract that allows NFT artists to mint a primary original and produce a set of unique “prints” that can be distributed in a fashion similar to what exists in the physical art world.

NFTs are a type of digital asset that uses blockchain technology to represent the ownership of digital items such as artwork, music, videos and in-game items. Using an NFT a person can prove that they can own an item by showing that they have access to a cryptographic token associated with the asset. The token can be bought, sold and traded between parties allowing for an exchange of ownership.

When artists use NFTs to represent digital artwork, it is a way for them to monetize their work. When an NFT is sold, artists can also receive royalties when it is resold, permitting residual income when the artwork becomes popular. However, the current NFT ecosystem lacks an easy way to identify authorized “signed” prints that don’t belong to primary collections.

In normal circumstances, NFT artists mint multiple copies of the same artwork as NFTs and sell them individually in order to monetize their project – sometimes iterating a number or some other unique element to differentiate them.

Using TreeTrunk, the artist would instead hold onto the original and produce authorized prints, which can be used to prove a cryptographic provenance family tree of NFTs. This means that anything minted outside of this tree is not authorized and can be rejected by marketplaces or potential buyers.

The TreeTrunk team took its inspiration from traditional lithographic printing techniques and used what they call “crypto-lithography” to cause the prints to differ from the original but also authenticate back to it as a derivative.

“The TreeTrunk method is the closest thing in the digital world to owning a physical piece of art and displaying it in a museum without the fear of anyone making and selling millions of unauthorized perfect replicas just by looking at it,” said TreeTrunk Chief Technology Officer Dr. Andreas Freund. “This means that so-called ‘right-clickers’ are merely copying a known facsimile, not the real thing.”

“Right-clicking” refers to copying the artwork from the screen directly and claiming ownership, except in the case of TreeTrunk, the prints are each digitally unique (even if it is imperceptible to the human eye).

The TreeTrunk platform and protocol envisions that it will be useful in combatting emerging NFT plagiarism happening in the market. During 2021 the NFT market rose to a stratospheric $41 billion, up from $100 million in 2020. This led to the discovery that almost 80% of NFTs created on OpenSea were either spam or plagiarized.

Although the new technology would not be able to tackle problems with spam or handle issues with improperly minting copyrighted works, it could provide artists a way to better protect their own collections.

“We made improvements in the NFT standard for artists’ rights and collector protection from content verification to license management,” said Ira P. Rothken, technology attorney and co-founder of TreeTrunk. “It was important to improve on the way NFTs handle legal rights so that it’s no longer a game of guessing what the license agreement terms are, especially on secondary market transactions.”

Photo: Pixabay