SemNFT: A Semantically Enhanced Decentralized Middleware for Digital Asset Immortality

Lehao Lin, Hong KANG, Xinyao Sun, Wei Cai

Abstract: Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) have emerged as a pivotal digital asset, offering authenticated ownership of unique digital content. Despite it has gained remarkable traction, yet face pressing storage and verification challenges stemming from blockchain's permanent data costs. Existing off-chain or centralized storage solutions, while being alternatives, also introduce notable security vulnerabilities. We present SemNFT, an innovative decentralized framework integrated with blockchain oracle middleware services, addressing these persistent NFT dilemmas. Our approach compresses NFT source data into compact embeddings encapsulating semantic essence. These arrays are stored on-chain, while facilitating reliable decentralized image reconstruction and ownership verification. We implemented ERC721-compliant smart contracts with supplementary functionalities, demonstrating SemNFT’s seamless integrative capabilities within the ecosystem. Extensive evaluations evidence marked storage optimizations and preservation of requisite visual fidelity by comparison with existing solutions. The proposed SemNFT framework marks a significant advancement in holistically confronting rising NFT storage and verification challenges without compromising decentralization. It substantively propels the meaningful evolution of NFT infrastructure to achieve digital asset immortality.

Primary Subject Area: [Systems] Systems and Middleware

Secondary Subject Area: [Systems] Data Systems Management and Indexing, [Content] Media Interpretation, [Experience] Multimedia Applications

Relevance To Conference:

Non-fungible Token (NFT) is a type of virtual token that utilizes blockchain technology to authenticate decentralized digital asset ownership. It includes any format of multimedia data, eg. images, audios, videos, etc.
We present SemNFT, an innovative decentralized framework integrated with blockchain oracle middleware services. Our approach compresses NFT multimedia data into compact embeddings encapsulating semantic essence. These arrays are stored on-chain, while facilitating reliable decentralized reconstruction and ownership verification.
Therefore, our work contributes to multimedia systems and middleware used for compressing, storing, reconstructing, and authenticating NFT digital assets. Thus, we select Systems and Middleware as our Primary Subject Area.
Further, because our work is also relevent to multimedia data, and can be occupied in multimedia interpretation and applications, we select Data Systems Management and Indexing, Media Interpretation and Multimedia Applications as our Secondary Subject Area.

Submission Number: 2625