Let the NFTs flow: A Comparison Between NFT Architectures on Ethereum and the Flow Blockchain

Abstract

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are promising additions to the blockchain universe. After Ethereum introduced the NFT concept in 2015, it quickly rose in popularity, triggering other public blockchains to support their own versions of these new types of token by extending their smart contract capabilities to enable minting of these new tokens in their ecosystems. Ethereum is the reference for NFT development, establishing the token standards widely used today. The popularity of NFTs in Ethereum created a rich application ecosystem that also revealed limitations in scalability and throughput for this network. An attempt to solve these issues resulted in the creation of Flow, a new NFT-centric blockchain that claims to solve the scalability issues that plagued Ethereum. This paper presents the alternative NFT architecture introduced by Flow and how it compares with Ethereum’s version.