Namespace ownership

So far we have mostly discussed NFTs being added to personal belongings using tags. However, our goal is to serve as a flexible and modular digital identity layer for physical items. Part of this versatility is a built in namespace ownership ability for Pingify NFTs.

What is a Token Namespace?

According to the ERC-721 standardisation, each NFT token has a unique ID as a 256bit integer. To optimise the value of token id without breaking token standards we interpret each token ID as a base38 string allowing for letters, numbers, ‘_’ and a ‘.’. This provides a more useful context for each NFT encoding a unique name in each one. The special characteristic of these IDs is that the ‘.’ Acts as a separator for namespaces. Much like the system of domain names on the internet, an entity can own a domain name, with Pingify NFTs a wallet can own a Pingify Namespace as an NFT. This grants the owner of the Namespace the exclusive write to mint Pingify NFTs with their owned namespace. For example if a business owns the namespace NFT of “DESIGNER_HATS”, they can exclusively mint any NFT beginning with that token id followed by a ‘.’, for example: “DESIGNER_HATS.SPECIAL_1” or “DESIGNER_HATS.SUPER_RARE”. All of this functionality is built into the core Minting mechanism of the Pingify smart contracts, therefore each NFT can be easily be verified as minted by that entity, providing an easy framework for even small businesses to enter the Pingify ecosystem.