The NFT Bay has been dubbed "The Billion Dollar Torrent" — and promises to feature every single crypto collectible that's been issued on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains.
The NFT Bay — both in name and appearance — has been inspired by The Pirate Bay, a notorious torrenting platform that allowed users to download illegal versions of movies, TV shows and movies.
Created by Geoffrey Huntley, The NFT Bay currently boasts more than 15 terabytes of images — allowing visitors to download JPEGs of "unique" tokens en masse without having to right-click on every single one.
Users can search for the specific NFT that they're looking for, or filter results based on popular collections including Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks.
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Why?
The NFT Bay has been dubbed "The Billion Dollar Torrent" — and promises to feature every single crypto collectible that's been issued on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains.
It seems the website is determined to highlight what is believed to be a fatal flaw in how NFTs are issued. On a plain text page — designed to look like the files that featured cheat codes for popular video games (if you downloaded that sort of thing, of course) — Huntley wrote:
"Did you know that a NFT is just a hyperlink to an image that's usually hosted on Google Drive or another Web 2.0 host? People are dropping millions on instructions on how to download images. That's why you can right-click Save As, because they are standard images. The image is not stored in the blockchain contract."
Huntley also pointed out that centralized web hosts are known to suffer bouts of downtime, but added:
"This handy torrent contains all of the NFTs so that future generations can study this generation's tulip mania and collectively go…. 'WTF? We destroyed our planet for THIS?!"
Of course, this tongue-in-cheek website won't do anything to derail the crazy world of NFTs, or stop them from being sold for astronomical prices.
Nonetheless, it does raise some compelling points — not least whether the images associated with NFTs should be stored on the blockchain itself. At present, spiralling data costs mean this is impractical on the Ethereum network.
