Circulation of Transformed Image Derivatives with Parameterized Aliasing in the Off-Chain Storage

In major NFT marketplaces, digital image contents such as illustrations and photographs generally reside off-chain due to cost, performance, and privacy concerns. InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), a decentralized storage system, is widely used to store and distribute off-chain data of NFT artworks. Applications of digital images generally require displaying, printing, and redistributing them in a variety of sizes, colors, and formats. Unfortunately, the content addressing in IPFS impedes reusing transformation results derived from an original image since totally different IDs from the original must be given for them. They can never comprehend any relation and transition between the original and derivatives. We introduce on-demand image transform functionality and cooperated ID aliasing capability into IPFS for identifying images generated through a transform with a combination of an original's ID and parameters of the applied transform. Our implementation allows retrieving results of newly demanded transforms by inquiring about corresponding IDs for the aliases to others. A preliminary experimental result demonstrates that the proposed ID aliasing can mitigate the processing overhead by promoting reclaiming of transformed images.