Improving Media Delivery for the NFT Revolution
Even as NFT startups continue to raise massive investment rounds, the sites hosting NFTs face the same challenges that other visual-heavy e-commerce, travel, and entertainment sites are already tackling.
The rapid growth, combined with the unique needs of NFT marketplaces, is making the world notice. But even NFT sites face the same website optimization challenges as other visual-heavy brands, what’s the best way for NFT sites to manage this? Here’s what Doron Sherman, VP of Developer Relations at Cloudinary, has to say.
Non-fungible token (NFT) trading volume went from $41 million in 2018 to $2.5 billion in the first half of 2021, representing a 60-fold growth in a mere three and a half years.
Even as NFT startups continue to raise massive investment rounds, the sites hosting NFTs face the same challenges that other visual-heavy e-commerce, travel, and entertainment sites are already tackling. How can companies bridge the gaps in visual experience when it comes to the quality of media delivery that NFTs demand? Let’s take a closer look at how sites can be improved to cater to the expanding needs of this quickly growing marketplace. With the technology around this evolving and becoming more than a fringe market, companies need to start focusing on hosting these new digital formats.
Understanding the New World of NFT Planning
Imagine a stock broker’s site that can’t process trades fast enough. Traders sit and watch powerlessly as the security they wish to trade swings up and down in value because the broker can’t keep up with the demands of traders using the site.
NFT sites have to manage similar risks. Contrary to popular belief, an NFT itself is not what is owned by the user. An NFT is simply a file that proves, through a digital certificate, the owner of the image or digital asset in question. So just like when trading stocks, it’s an agreement between two parties to buy and sell shares of a company through a bank; it’s not necessarily a monetary transaction between two parties directly. But unlike stocks, other traders aren’t anyone eyeing someone else’s unique stock collection to make a deal.
The first thing this means for NFT marketplaces is that their site must always be available. This may seem obvious – but the complexity of their uptime requirement is compounded when the name of the game is serving up images. A site could experience a spike in traffic at 3 a.m. in the U.S., where a web team may be based because of heavy traffic from another part of the world. To guarantee availability, NFT sites wisely turn to a multi-content delivery network (CDN) strategy. The site automatically reconnects to another provider to process transactions when one network goes down or slows down.
But while uptime and availability is a foundational requirements, maintaining a competitive edge and delivering a strong user experience requires much more.
See More: The Future of NFTs: Is FOMO the Best Business Model?
Managing NFT Delivery Planning with Optimized Media
Supporting high-fidelity image-based commodities presents a distinct challenge. The weight of so many images can cause websites of this kind to experience significant issues with bandwidth, loading speed, and overall user experience.
This is particularly important because images significantly impact SEO and Google Core Web Vitals (CWV) scores. For the uninitiated, CWVs are a set of metrics created by Google that are now a part of the algorithms used to establish SEO rankings. This includes figures related to how long it takes for a picture to load on a site and how long it takes for someone to be able to click on any one element of the site.
Getting such metrics right is key for anyone looking to capitalize on the NFT gold rush. That is where the right tools and measures need to be in place to ensure an engaging and seamless visual experience. That is what this market rests on – it’s deeply visual and experiential. Without the power to offer that level of user focus and engagement, hosting sites will not truly be able to crack into a field where competitiveness is rising indeed.
Web teams need help to ensure that all media assets are optimized for high-quality, high-speed delivery to all devices and browsers. Automation is the answer here, especially considering the number of assets that NFT marketplaces are responsible for at any given time. This frees developers to focus on other matters rather than the tediousness of making one-off code changes to optimize the site experience.
Providing a Flawless NFT Visual Experience
Businesses that want to be taken seriously in this new era must solve these content delivery challenges. One way to do so is to use an intelligently automated media solution capable of offering both rich-media management capabilities and a delivery platform. This offers brands a content-aware, intelligent visual-media foundation so that developers and marketers can work in tandem across the media lifecycle and shorten the time to market.
NFTs are still a wild west in terms of consumption and regulation, but one thing appears to be certain: they won’t long be limited to image alone. They will likely expand into richer media such as video, 3D, and AR/VR assets. So, NFT marketplaces and anyone wanting to get in on the action need to ensure they have the right tools and resources to manage their sites and provide a visual experience like no other. That is where the focus now needs to shift – in building experiences that can do justice to the emerging, expanding marketplace.
What tools and strategies are you using to improve the visual experience for an NFT revolution? Tell us on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook. We’d love to know what you think!
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