In my previous article I wrote about considerations literary authors may want to take into account when minting the same piece of work multiple times on different blockchains:

This article considers how maintaining a registry (perhaps itself a blockchain) of authors and their public addresses across blockchains would be helpful in preventing the problem of one individual on blockchain X impersonating an author who publishes NFTs on blockchain Y, given the assumption - raised by the previous article - that literary authors can benefit by creating cross-chain NFTs while simultaneously making the scarcity of those NFTs across all blockchains clear to buyers considering purchasing one of more of those NFTs.

On March 15, 2023, a direct message involving a group of 10 participants was created within the PageDAO discord server for the purpose of coming up with a metadata standard for publishing on web3 (message #1085684897005441114 for those in the group) in general. Those 10 participants then held a discord meeting in which brainstorming commenced, with the chat during the meeting being saved to the direct message. Various ideas were discussed, with plans for a Zoom meeting to occur on March 23, 2023, so that more people could participate in further planning. The group decided to call itself the “Web3 Publishing Metadata Standard Initial Focus Group.”

Among the considerations discussed was basing any standard on Ethereum Improvement Proposal 5375 :

Samuele Marro (@samuelemarro), Luca Donno (@lucadonnoh), "ERC-5375: NFT Author Information and Consent," Ethereum Improvement Proposals, no. 5375, July 2022. [Online serial]. Available: https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-5375.

In this standard, “authorship” and “author” refer to the creator of the NFT, and do not imply “authorship” in the sense of one who produces literary output. It thus applies to a much wider audience than that envisioned by the focus group, in addition to being specific to ethereum-based blockchains; the output of the focus group is meant to handle “publishing” metadata regardless of blockchain, that is, metadata specific to the book/article/poem publishing industries which would allow dApps based on different blockchains as well as the same blockchain to share information on authors and their NFT creations in a consistent manner. In addition, the thrust of EIP 5375 is addressing the issue of the creator of an NFT wanting to claim that a different individual was the creator or co-creator of the NFT - thus, a method is desired by which a creator can consent to being listed as the creator or co-creator. This misattribution can occur unintentionally due to the non-standard nature in which creators are identified- see the EIP for more info.

One Problem with Regards to Publication Across Blockchains

Imagine, for example, that author Nancy McClure publishes NFT books under two different pseudo-names : “Fred Jones” and “Marvin Bellicose.” She can currently accomplish this on one blockchain (call it B1) by creating two different addresses on B1, one for each pseudo-name. Let’s call them AF and AM (for Address Fred and Address Marvin). She then connects her wallet to an NFT book marketplace (call it M) using AF, which then displays the books she has written as Fred Jones. If instead she connects using AM, she then sees the books she has written as Marvin Bellicose.

However, what if she wanted to publish those same books on a different blockchain (call it B2)?. She would need to create two different addresses on B2 which don’t look at all like the addresses on B1 (because they are different blockchains) - call them AF2 and AM2. She would then connect her wallet to M using AF2 to publish as Fred Jones on B2, or using AM2 to publish as Marvin Bellicose on B2. This assumes that the single marketplace M can handle connecting to both marketplaces.

What is to stop an impersonator (Jack Fakeman) from creating AF2 and AM2 on B2 and then republishing the books as if he were the real Nancy McClure? nothing.

One the Way to One Possible Solution with Regards to Publication Across Blockchains

Imagine that the focus group comes up with a set of metadata which allows the implementation of a registry of NFT literary authors together with their NFT literary creations regardless of which blockchain is used. If the registry could equate the set {B1, AF, AM} with {B2, AF2, AM2} then author identity could be established. HOW this could be done is still subject to brainstorming (for example, how to prevent Jack Fakeman from creating the second set in the registry); however the purpose of the focus group is to come up with what underlying metadata needs to be specified to allow the implementation of solutions, not the solutions themselves; and not just the solution to this one problem, but to other problems involving the correct and consistent identification of authors with their works