Is vinylkey an NFT ?

The vinylkey digital certificate represents a vinyl album in the real world. The onchain info represents the physical album in two different ways. The first way is the album contains an embedded NFC tag with a unique number like a car VIN. This unique number can be read by your phone by tapping the center of the album. The second way is that each album is pressed in a visually unique way and photos of the album are stored onchain in an immutable way. See our help page here on how to tap a vinylkey NFC tag.

So are these NFTs? Technically, yes, but we use it as a certificate of authenticity. vinylkey is not the kind of NFT people are most familiar with. We use this technology as a digital certificate of authenticity and ownership. NFT is a generic technical term for a token that represents anything ( digital or physical ) that is unique ( non-fungible ). We have these around us everywhere right now. The deed for land or the title for a car are “tokens” that represent that particular land or car. The county deed office and the DMV office is a centralized authority that manages these. An NFT smart contract (ERC721) can also manage certificates(tokens) to represent anything that can be uniquely described. These are managed onchain in public that anyone can view and verify.

Why not just use QR code? The NFC chip also serves as an authentication and anti-counterfeiting method. It is easy to copy a QR code and make a copy of a valuable album. The NFC chips comes from the factory with a read only ID number built-in so it requires much more effort to clone.