How Adobe wants to make NFTs forgery-proof

The content credentials function is intended to help in the future to assign works of art to their creators and thus prohibit unsolicited copies.

At this year’s Adobe MAX conference, Chief Product Officer Scott Belsky will present Adobe’s attempt to make NFTs forgery-proof. The idea is essentially to add a cryptographic signature to the metadata. In the future finds This option can be found under the “Content Credentials” function. The contents of these content credentials are the processing information and (social media) identities as well as the associated crypto wallet addresses. The artists have to activate this function willingly in order to be able to use the offer.

Content credentials

The Content Credentials function developed by Adobe in the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) target for Creative Cloud users: will be available free of charge from the end of the month. On the one hand, the function is intended to give artists the opportunity to embed their own identity in the work at the push of a button. On the other hand, buyers should get an understandable tool to check the authenticity of digital works of art.

Belsky describes that the Content Credentials function will be carried out in the future when exporting via “Prepare as NFT”. However, this is an opt-in function. This means that anyone can activate it, but nobody has to. If it is activated, further metadata would be appended to the file in addition to the size and format when the work is converted to an NFT. These are the processing information (such as cut, brightness, contrasts, filters) and core information (creation place, time, type) of the works. In addition, the content credentials function records the identity of the person creating it and their linked wallet in the metadata. This information is used to create direct links to the social media identities. Nevertheless, it is still possible to only reveal the linked wallet information and thus disguise one’s identity.

Belsky also announced that Adobe will combine the content credentials function with the NFT marketplaces Opensea, KnownOrigin, SuperRare and Rarible. In the future, the authenticity should be easier for buyers to understand on the inside. By calling up the extended metadata, interested parties can check the origin and wallet without technical knowledge. All you have to pay attention to is whether artists: in and embossers: in have the same wallet addresses.

The company is also working to develop an open source developer kit for each team. This should also enable them to integrate the content credentials into their own products. In addition, Adobe announced on Twitter that it would also offer links to blockchains such as Polygon, Solana, Flow and Tezos in the future.

Adobe and Photoshop

Since its founding in 1982, Adobe has blossomed into today’s standard in photo editing. With Photoshop and the Creative Cloud, Adobe offers image creation, processing, storage and distribution. Use according to your own statement “[m]or more than 90 percent of all creative professionals worldwide ”Adobe Photoshop. Until now, these creative professionals have not been able to guarantee online that a workpiece comes from their own hands and their creative work. Two years ago, Adobe founded the Content Authenticity Initiative with the BBC, Microsoft and the New York Times (CAI) to combat misinformation. With the development of NFTs, there is another instrument that can now be made secure, easy and verifiable with the content credentials function.

NFTs (non-fungible tokens)

The idea of ​​an NFT is to record the data from a digital work of art (picture, video, song) in a smart contract on the blockchain. The most frequently used blockchain for NFTs is still ETH. The smart contract contains meta information such as token ID, object description and the URL. For this purpose, the wallet address of the person who created the smart contract and the transaction history starting from this point in time are recorded. The process is called NFT embossing, the person as the embosser: in.

After the embossing, a forgery of the NFT is (actually) no longer feasible. Nevertheless, many criminals manage to copy the meta information and use it to deceive the ignorant. This is because many forget to double-check the falsifiable information and the core smart contract element – the transaction history. The fallacy is that the shapers are the artists. Often, however, those who shape it are people who have the ability and are fast enough to create those smart contracts. Adobe tries to counteract this “theft” with the content credential function.