# Non-Fungible Token (NFT): Overview, Evaluation, Opportunities and Challenges

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.07447 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07447/

## Key facts

- Cited by 25 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 16 May 2021.

## Built on by (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Show me your NFT and I tell you how it will perform: Multimodal representation learning for NFT selling price prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01676/) (2023)
- [BC4LLM: Trusted Artificial Intelligence When Blockchain Meets Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06278/) (2023)
- [Detecting Financial Bots on the Ethereum Blockchain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19530/) (2024)
- [EX-Graph: A Pioneering Dataset Bridging Ethereum and X](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01015/) (2023)
- [Logic Meets Magic: LLMs Cracking Smart Contract Vulnerabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.07058/) (2025)
- [Is Your AI Truly Yours? Leveraging Blockchain for Copyrights, Provenance, and Lineage](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06077/) (2024)
- [Blockchain-Empowered Trustworthy Data Sharing: Fundamentals, Applications, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06546/) (2023)
- [The Metaverse: Survey, Trends, Novel Pipeline Ecosystem & Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09240/) (2023)
- [A Review on Building Blocks of Decentralized Artificial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02885/) (2024)
- [Deep Smart Contract Intent Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10724/) (2022)
- [NFTVis: Visual Analysis of NFT Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02712/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, and Edge Computing for Web 3.0](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13731/) (2023)
- [DMind Benchmark: Toward a Holistic Assessment of LLM Capabilities across the Web3 Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16116/) (2025)
- [UEChecker: Detecting Unchecked External Call Vulnerabilities in DApps via Graph Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01343/) (2025)
- [Counterweights and Complementarities: The Convergence of AI and Blockchain Powering a Decentralized Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11299/) (2026)
- [NFTGAN: Non-Fungible Token Art Generation Using Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10577/) (2021)
- [Projecting Non-Fungible Token (NFT) Collections: A Contextual Generative Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15493/) (2022)
- [Visually Wired NFTs: Exploring the Role of Inspiration in Non-Fungible Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17031/) (2023)
- [Abnormal Trading Detection in the NFT Market](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04643/) (2023)
- [Tokenized Model: A Blockchain-Empowered Decentralized Model Ownership Verification Platform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00048/) (2023)
- [Metaverse Survey & Tutorial: Exploring Key Requirements, Technologies, Standards, Applications, Challenges, and Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04718/) (2024)
- [Fractal Signatures: Securing AI-Generated Pollock-Style Art via Intrinsic Watermarking and Blockchain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20519/) (2024)
- [A new framework for prognostics in decentralized industries: Enhancing fairness, security, and transparency through Blockchain and Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05725/) (2025)
- [Towards Understanding Deep Learning Model in Image Recognition via Coverage Test](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08814/) (2025)
- [CSTrader: A Testbed for Language-Grounded Trading in a Community-Driven Virtual Asset Market](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31461/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The Non-Fungible Token (NFT) market is mushrooming in recent years. The concept of NFT originally comes from a token standard of Ethereum, aiming to distinguish each token with distinguishable signs. This type of token can be bound with virtual/digital properties as their unique identifications. With NFTs, all marked properties can be freely traded with customized values according to their ages, rarity, liquidity, etc. It has greatly stimulated the prosperity of the decentralized application (DApp) market. At the time of writing (May 2021), the total money used on completed NFT sales has reached 34,530,649.86 USD. The thousandfold return on its increasing market draws huge attention worldwide. However, the development of the NFT ecosystem is still in its early stage, and the technologies of NFTs are pre-mature. Newcomers may get lost in their frenetic evolution due to the lack of systematic summaries. In this technical report, we explore the NFT ecosystems in several aspects. We start with an overview of state-of-the-art NFT solutions, then provide their technical components, protocols, standards, and desired proprieties. Afterward, we give a security evolution, with discussions on the perspectives of their design models, opportunities, and challenges. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first systematic study on the current NFT ecosystems.