nifty asset

A lightweight standard for non-fungible assets.

Contents

• Features
• Overview
• Packages
• Building
• Testing
• Programs
• Clients
• CLI
• License

Warning

nifty asset has not been formally audited – use in production at your own risk.

Features

The main goal of nifty asset is to provide an open-source, lightweight and composable non-fungible standard on Solana. This is achieved by:

• Using a single account to represent a digital asset.
• Storing as much or as little data on-chain using optional extensions.
• Efficient zero-copy de-/serialization to minimize compute units utilization.
• Full-featured standard, including royalty enforcement, delegates, lock/unlock, inscriptions and groups (collections).
• Rust and JavaScript client packages.

Overview

Majority of NFT standards on Solana are built on top of SPL Token, which is mainly a fungible token program. A non-fungible is created by adding restrictions to fungible mints – i.e., for a mint to be considered "non-fungible", it must have supply 1, decimals 0 and no mint authority. As a consequence, NFT standards carry "baggage" from the requirements of fungibles to represent non-fungibles. For example, while non-fungibles have a supply of 1 by definition, there is still a requirement for separate mint and token accounts. Requiring a separate mint and token accounts is wasteful and adds complexity (e.g., more accounts validation) to a standard. In most cases, the only information required from a non-fungible token account is the owner (holder) address, given that the amount is always expected to be 1. At the same time, a token account takes 165 bytes of storage. Additionally, SPL Token - even including Token Extensions (a.k.a., SPL Token 2022) - does not enforce constraints to define different token standards.

Since different token standards will usually be defined in separate programs, the end result is a bloated (multiple accounts) standard – e.g., mint, token and (potentially) metadata accounts, in addition to SPL Token and Metadata programs. For most operations, all 5 accounts would be needed to interact with a non-fungible – and there are standards that the number of accounts is even higher.

nifty asset takes a different approach and re-imagines how non-fungibles are represented on Solana. In essense, a non-fungible asset is a unique slab of bytes on the blockchain identified by an address and it has an specific owner. When you transfer the "ownership" of this slab of bytes, you are changing the owner information of it. The contents of a non-fungible is as flexible as possible, given that they are "just" a slab of bytes – all data can be on-chain, or it can have "pointers" to external resources.

Packages

The packages below can be used to interact with nifty asset program.

JavaScript

npm install @nifty-oss/asset

Rust

cargo add nifty-asset

Building

To build the programs from the root directory of the repository:

pnpm install

to install the required libraries, then:

pnpm programs:build

This will create program binaries at <ROOT>/programs/.bin.

Testing

The repository contains both Rust BPF and TypeScript test. These can be run from the root directory of the repository:

pnpm clients:rust:test

for Rust BPF tests, and:

pnpm clients:js:test

for TypeScript tests.

Programs

This project contains the following programs:

• Asset AssetGtQBTSgm5s91d1RAQod5JmaZiJDxqsgtqrZud73

• Bridge BridgezKrNugsZwTcyAMYba643Z93RzC2yN1Y24LwAkm

You will need a Rust version compatible with BPF to compile the program, currently we recommend using Rust 1.68.0.

Clients

Each program in the project contains autogenerated Javascript and Rust clients:

Asset:

• JavaScript
• Rust

Bridge:

• JavaScript
• Rust

CLI

The project includes a Rust-based command-line interface:

• nifty

Contributing

Check out the Contributing Guide the learn more about how to contribute to this project.

License

Copyright (c) 2024 nifty-oss maintainers

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.