Case Study: Why NFTStar Trusts Decentralized Cloud Storage for Sports Collectibles
The new platform was able to meet its need for a storage alternative that is secure, scalable, and cost-effective.
Industry
Sports, metaverse, and GameFi.
Use case
Storage for NFT collectibles and metaverse infrastructure.
Challenges
Providing users with direct content ownership at a low cost, that easily scales as the business grows.
Solution
Decentralized cloud storage is a scalable and cost-effective way for NFTStar to provide users with direct ownership over their digital assets, data protection, and fast retrieval times.
Results
NFTStar has uploaded over 1 PiB of sports NFT collectibles raw data and metadata to the Filecoin network via NDLabs.
Overview
NFTStar is building an integrated and global sports metaverse platform based in Singapore. Its goal is to create a web3 community that fosters direct connections between sports stars and their fans.
The project has worked with legendary athletes including Neymar Jr., Giannis Antetokounmpo, Luís Figo, Christian McCaffrey, and Son Heung-Min. The NFTs that are minted on the platform leverage their IPs and are utilized as a Fan Pass with exclusive perks for collectors like meet and greet events, raffles, and special prizes.
NFTStar also launched MetaGoal, a Play-to-Earn football manager game where users can form their own football teams with fantasy Player Card NFTs and compete for rewards.
Problem: Scalable and Cost-effective Ownership
Sports NFT collectors expect their digital assets to be easily traded and exchanged without the risk of losing the data that makes them valuable like its image files, provenance, and unique identifiers. In order for the NFTStar platform to grow, it must be able to provide direct content ownership that is verifiable and secure.
Furthermore, it must be able to do this in a scalable and cost-effective way. As more users join NFTStar, collect sports NFTs, and participate in MetaGoal, meeting the platform’s data needs with popular web2 cloud storage services will become increasingly expensive.
NFTStar needs a storage solution that is able to handle enterprise-level needs for NFT and GameFi features through a flexible storage market that offers competitive prices. This kind of low-cost yet scalable storage solution only exists via Filecoin’s peer-to-peer marketplace.
Solution: Filecoin and NDLabs
NDLabs is a software development studio that helps businesses find the right technology solutions for their products. Thanks to its experience in building solutions for NFTs and the metaverse, the studio was able to assist NFTStar in making the right infrastructure decisions for its platform.
Together they chose Filecoin for their storage needs and put faith in the decentralized infrastructure the protocol offers. The project has stored over 1 PiB of sports NFT collectibles on Filecoin so far.
How the team used Filecoin
Filecoin is uniquely positioned to meet NFTStar’s enterprise-level storage needs as a decentralized cloud storage service. It relies upon a competitive enterprise storage market with over 18 EiB of available storage space and a fast-growing community of independent Storage Providers who offer flexible and competitively priced deals for secure storage and increasingly fast retrieval.
Scale and cost
The average price to store 1 GB per month with a SP is currently $0.0000014 USD as reported on the Filecoin stats website. Meanwhile, centralized storage services charge $0.013 on average per GB per month.This means that storing on Filecoin can cost up to 0.0008% per gigabyte less when compared to current web2 market rates.
Security and verifiability
Likewise, Filecoin’s storage method defaults to copying data to multiple regional nodes distributed across the globe. This provides the type of security guarantee that NFTStar requires by ensuring the redundancy and verifiability of the data that is stored on the network via a Proof of Storage consensus algorithm.
Retrieval times and user experience
In addition to providing storage, the network’s geographic scale improves the platform’s user experience by reducing time spent on data retrieval. This feature will be improved even further in the near future.
The Filecoin ecosystem will soon offer NFTStar special tools for storage and retrieval for data management and security after the launch of its Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM), slated to launch in the first few months of 2023. These are capabilities that are currently unavailable on any other decentralized cloud storage service and are too costly under the business models of current web2 counterparts.
Conclusion
The scalability, cost, security, and usability guarantees offered by Filecoin were NDLabs’ proposed solution for NFTStar’s needs. More so, both teams were welcomed as active builders in the web3 space and supported by the Filecoin network’s engaged technical community.
NFTStar has shared its belief that Filecoin “will gradually replace the cloud service solutions of web2 enterprises” and that these data needs will be “gradually migrated to the Filecoin network.”
Find out more about Filecoin and how you can start storing NFT, metaverse, and GameFi content on decentralized storage. You can also join the community on Slack to stay in touch.
