Technology

Blockchain

Before blockchains, data on the internet could be easily copied and distributed, which is why products on the internet have been able to reach billions of people across the world in ways that no physical product could.

However, there has always been a need for some things to be scarce, but that was not possible on the internet. Money has no value if it can be copied and distributed for free. The same is true for personal property, rare historic items, and sentimental items.

The key innovation of the blockchain was to create scarcity on the internet for the first time. The first blockchains created a limited quantity of "coins" or "tokens" and kept track of who had them at all times. Even if someone copied the data, the blockchains recognized the copies as artificial counterfeits and they wouldn't be confused with the real ones. There is much discussion about why people want these digital items but whatever the reasons, so long as there is demand for more than the number that exist, they have value.

Today, there are many different blockchains that use different methods to keep track of different digital items. The original way of keeping track that was invented for Bitcoin and later used with Ethereum and other early blockchains is called Proof of Work, which has received much criticism for the large amount of energy it takes to operate. More recently, new methods like Proof of Stake have emerged, which drastically reduce the energy consumption of those blockchains.

Vault runs on a blockchain called Flow, which uses an environmentally-conscious Proof of Stake method. A recent report from Deloitte found that minting an NFT on the Flow blockchain uses as little energy as a Google Search or an Instagram post.

NFTs

Though few people ever used the word fungible until recently, there has always been a concept of fungible items, for which we don't care which ones we have, only how many.

But most things we own are actually non-fungible. Most people don't believe that their homes, their furniture, their clothes, or other possessions can be easily swapped back and forth with others. For some things, this is especially true. We recognize that for historic artwork, classic comic books, or game-worn jerseys, their provenance and the stories behind them elevate their value.

Eventually, this concept was brought to blockchains too by allowing developers to create individually-numbered tokens and tracking their ownership history, hence making those tokens non-fungible. On top of owning an individually-numbered thing, developers are able to choose what to attach to that thing, like images, video, and text.

This is what you usually see when you buy NFTs. You are not just buying the image file of the artwork, but the provenance and ownership history of the individually-numbered token that image is attached to.

Yes, someone can easily copy and distribute the image file, but without the token, which cannot be copied, that copied image has no more value than a photograph or poster of the Mona Lisa.

Vault's NFTs are created using an NFT development platform called Gigantik by our partner Gig Labs.

Wallet

When using blockchain applications like Vault, instead of creating accounts with each app like you used to, you create a single account that works with many apps. This is the basis of a new data paradigm called Web3, in which users own their data and bring it with them across the internet instead of each application owning their own slice of the user's data.

The Vault website integrates with a Flow wallet provider called Dapper Wallet. When you sign in to Vault, you are actually signing into your universal Dapper Wallet and authorizing it to share your identity with Vault. When you purchase Vault NFTs, they live in your wallet instead of in our app, and that's how you can freely interact with them from Vault's site, or from many other apps in the Flow ecosystem.

Previously, Vault worked with a different wallet provider called Blocto. If you haven't signed in to Vault in a while and are being asked to create a new account or no longer see your NFTs, don't worry, your collection is safe. You can still access your Blocto wallet from Blocto's mobile app and you can still use apps that integrate with Blocto wallet, but to view your collection from Vault's site or to purchase new Vault NFTs, you'll have to use Dapper. If you'd like to keep your Vault collection together, you can use our wallet migration tool to transfer your collection from your Blocto wallet to your new Dapper wallet.