A new website called The NFT Bay claims to have right-clicked and saved every NFT on the Ethereum and Solana blockchain networks as JPEG files, stirring up a debate on what makes NFTs so valuable.
The website was created by Geoff Huntley, who described himself as “a software engineer and DevOps engineer with a ‘Jack-of-All-Trades’ background.”
?OMG WHO RIGHT CLICKED ALL OF THE #NFTs?☠️
??☠️ https://t.co/o0YRK78AkL ?☠️?
? pic.twitter.com/g74TFqzX0n— ?☠️ thenftbay.org ? ?? (@GeoffreyHuntley) November 18, 2021
“Did you know that an NFT is just a hyperlink to an image that is usually hosted on Google Drive or another Web2.0 webhost?” Huntley wrote in The NFT Bay’s description. “That’s why you can right-click save-as because they are standard images. The image is not stored in the blockchain contract.”
According to The Verge, the site features a torrent file that will allow you to download a file called “preview.jpg” containing several JPEG images of Bored Ape NFTs. There are also zip files said to contain all of the NFTs from the Ethereum and Solana blockchains — about 20TB of data.
In a press statement posted to GitHub, Huntley said he considered the initiative to be “an educational art project.”
“Fundamentally, I hope through [The NFT Bay] people learn to understand what people are buying when purchasing NFT art right now is nothing more than directions on how to access or download an image,” he wrote.
The project has inspired a heated debate about the value of NFTs, claiming that NFTs are, fundamentally, just JPEG images that can be downloaded and shared with the masses. Several NFT enthusiasts and owners replied to Huntley’s original tweet, defending NFTs and explaining that The NFT Bay does not change the value of NFTs, since proof of ownership is stored on the blockchain.
In other news, the buyer of a $3.4 million USD Bored Ape NFT spoke to HYPEBEAST about his motivations.
