How to View Data on the Blockchain

Intro.

Blockchain, cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and metaverses are terms that are gradually gaining more and more space not only in literature, even non-technical, but also in daily experience.

Consider, for example, the various platforms that allow the tracking of food chain products, the various NFTs launched on the market by big names in fashion and automotive, and the use of cryptocurrencies and NFTs in the many existing metaverses.

All these examples lead to a common factor: an underlying blockchain (which in the case of NFTs determines the ownership of a link to digital content). Without going into the technological and procedural details that make each application unique, let’s see what are the most used ways to quickly and securely view individual assets registered on a blockchain (regardless of what this asset represents, whether it is data, a digital twin – that is, the digital copy of a physical object – or an NFT).

Blockchain Records.

Regardless of the blockchain used, every transaction entered in the ledger is marked with an identifier (usually referred to as TXID) and associated with the block number in which it is contained. To make retrieval of data associated with the transaction easier, most blockchains offer the public a specific service, generally called an Explorer, which allows for real navigation in the ledger and direct search of both transactions and blocks. Obviously, having access to the data contained in the recorded transaction is not synonymous with having access to the information contained: often blockchain records are encrypted and only the owner, or anyone with the key, can obtain the clear information.

In any case, access to data through the Explorer almost always occurs via unauthenticated web interface: a specific URL redirects directly to the requested transaction. In the specific case of NFTs, one is not so much interested in the blockchain registration (which only determines the ownership) as in the digital object that the NFT represents: in this case, the URL to use is the one associated with the marketplace where the object is deposited for custody and/or future sale.

Given that a generic piece of data is pointed to by a URL, accessing the information is simply done by opening the address with a web browser that will display the content; the next step is to encode that URL in a media that is easily shareable: a QR Code or an NFC tag.

QR Code.

As we all now know, this is a two-dimensional barcode: created in 1994 to solve some logistics problems in Toyota factories, it saw some application (especially in publishing) in the early 2000s only to be almost forgotten until the advent of COVID19.

Here, the need to provide information without the need to physically “share” objects (restaurant menus, instruction sheets or documents in general) gave a second life to QR Codes, the use of which today is virtually universal. So why not encode the URL to access data contained in the Blockchain?

There are many smartphone apps that encode data into a QR Code, as well as many corresponding websites (which usually offer, for a fee, complete management platforms).

NFC Tags.

In some respects, they can be considered the functional evolution of QR Codes (so much so that especially in industrial and logistics settings, many solutions based on QR Codes have been migrated to RFID – contactless technology at the base of NFC tags -).

Although not yet explicitly known to the general public, their use is already present in our daily lives as it is the basis of contactless credit cards or the increasingly widespread digital business cards.

These are a specific passive electronic circuit, i.e., one that does not require a power source – battery – to operate, and when stimulated by a reader, it is capable of sending a series of data, the length of which depends on the chip used