What are Sapiens Masterpieces NFTs?

These are NFTs, referencing the first high-quality, digital representations of various iconic paintings, minted on the XRPL.

Because blockchain records are time-ordered, these can only ever be minted once at this point in history. Like early-edition collectibles.

Technical walkthrough of the NFTs

Sapiens Masterpieces NFTs are immutable records on the XRP Ledger (XRPL), serving as proof of ownership of a specific address. However, this address is not a typical web address. It's a Content Address, which is a string of letters and numbers that is unique to the exact digital file it represents.

For example, for the Mona Lisa, or more precisely for a high-quality, faithful digital representation of the Mona Lisa, the Content Address is:

"QmUe7RWnUSWWnGBCgxht7FcPMHrSjZpw8Sq1bko33Ku3cj".

Think of this Content Address as an identifier generated directly from the digital file's "DNA". Just as no two individuals share the same DNA, no two digital files share the same Content Address.

Every digital file is ultimately just a sequence of zeros and ones. The Content Address above is a compact, 46-character "id" derived from that exact sequence, uniquely tied to the digital file's binary structure, or in this case, to the binary structure of a High-Quality, faithful representation of the Mona Lisa. In the case of Sapiens Masterpieces NFTs, the first high-quality one ever to have been uploaded to the XRPL.

Even though this sequence is a random-looking sequence of characters and not the digital image itself (clearly), no other file has this sequence. This is why, if you claim ownership over this sequence of characters, it is equivalent of claiming ownership of the file it represents. The sequence is just a different form of the digital image.

You can use this Content Address directly to retrive the corresponding digital image via the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), a decentralized protocol for an always-on hosting of the actual digital files, collectively across a collection of computers. This can be done by following a link that serves files from the IPFS network. In this example, this is such a link: https://ipfs.filebase.io/ipfs/QmUe7RWnUSWWnGBCgxht7FcPMHrSjZpw8Sq1bko33Ku3cj

So far so good, but technically this is not the Content Address that a Sapiens Masterpieces NFT (or an NFT in general) claims ownership of, there is one more step to do. We would like an NFT to also contain information about the digital image such as its name, description, the collection it is part of or if it has any attributes.

Therefore, the Content Address that the NFT is an immutable proof of ownership of is something called the The NFT Metadata. The NFT Metadata does include the Content Address of The Digital Image, but it also includes other information about the NFT.

Let's see this, in the case of the Mona Lisa.

This is the file whose ownership is ultimately "engraved". This contains the NFT's name, description, issuer (Sapiens Masterpieces), collection as well as the Content Address of the associated Digital Image.

Lastly, let's have a look at how the actual record on the XRPL looks like. The actual "engraving" if you will, the NFT.

Voilà, click on the image to see this on the XRP Ledger, showing the address of the current owner of the Mona Lisa by Sapiens Masterpices.