Pinning FAQ

What is pinning and why is it important?
Storing your NFT artwork and associated files using the IPFS protocol is considered a best practice. However, even then, it’s possible for your NFT files to disappear.

For example, and very relevant in our current environment, if the marketplace where you purchased your NFT stops paying for IPFS, your valuable artwork could literally disappear overnight.

Pinning is a way to essentially “copy” a file to another location on IPFS, thus creating redundancy for your NFTs.

Pinning with ClubNFT represents an almost effortless, free way to immediately ensure and boost the availability of your collection. Without pinning, you run a higher risk of your NFTs breaking and thus not being indexed and displayed on Dapps and marketplaces.
What’s the difference between backing up my NFTs and pinning them?
Backing up your NFTs is the ideal long-term insurance policy to protect your NFTs should they ever disappear from IPFS. In that event, as long as you have a backup on-hand, you could reupload your NFTs to IPFS (we can help with that if such an event occurs), and your NFTs would be completely restored.

Pinning is an excellent solution for ensuring that your NFTs have redundancy and increased availability on IPFS.  This provides a safety mechanism should the marketplace stop pinning your NFTs.
Does ClubNFT pin all of your NFTs?
Pinning as a action only relates to NFTs that are stored using the IPFS protocol. You can learn more about IPFS and pinning in Artnome’s article “The NFT Apocalypse”.

Pinning with ClubNFT takes place at the account level, so we pin all of your IPFS NFTs across all of your Tezos and Ethereum wallets you’ve added to the ClubNFT app.
How can I learn more about pinning?
For a less technical overview of the role of IPFS and collecting, read Artnome’s article "The NFT Apocalypse."

For an expert analysis, check out our CTO’s interview with Molly Mackinlay.
Why do some of my NFTs show up as not pinned?
You can think of pinning as creating a copy of your file and storing it in a different location - thus adding a backup of your NFT and making it safer. Pinning as a concept is only relevant to IPFS (a protocol for decentralized storage.) Part of the magic of IPFS is the ability to retrieve a file no matter where it’s stored on the IPFS network.

However, many NFTs (especially on Ethereum) have some or all of their files stored on centralized web servers (e.g. Amazon Web Services). Since files stored on private servers live at a specific web address, creating a copy and storing it somewhere else wouldn’t help to preserve the availability of the NFT. Should your NFT on a private server disappear for some reason, there’s really nothing you can do to restore it.
Can I just use other similar pinning services?
Other pinning services typically require the user to pin CID (content-ID) by CID.  In addition to being technically more challenging, for users with 100s or 1000s of NFTs, this could be very time-consuming. With ClubNFT, just add your wallet(s) and all your associated NFTs are magically pinned. It’s a zero-effort solution.

General FAQ

What is ClubNFT?
ClubNFT is a place where collectors can find awesome tools and educational resources that help solve important pain points related to managing their NFT collections.
How do I contact ClubNFT?
Whether you are looking for partnership opportunities, have an idea or complaint (god forbid!) or are just feeling lonely and want to chat with someone, we’re around. You can reach out to us via our Contact Us page.
Why was ClubNFT established?
Many of you may know ClubNFTs founder, Jason Bailey, by his better-known sobriquet Artnome. But what you may not know is that during the last downturn in the NFT space, several marketplaces went belly-up, including Editional and Digital Objects, among others. When these marketplaces disappeared, a number of Jason’s NFTs also were lost to time (including several in the seven-figure range!).

This loss (and the associated psychic pain) spurred Jason to raise funds, build a team and launch ClubNFT. Our first order of business here at the Club was to build a tool to protect collectors like you against such devastating losses in the future. And we’ve done just that (check out our free NFT protection tool.)

But we’re not stopping there! We also recognize that while collectors have plenty of marketplaces to choose from (some may say, too many!), there is a dearth of tools and educational resources that help collectors collect in a smarter, safer fashion. And ultimately, building such resources is ClubNFTs mission. So you can expect a steady flow of powerful, easy-to-use tools and content from our workshop.
How do I contact ClubNFT?
Many collectors believe that their NFTs are “on chain” and therefore safe from deletion. In fact, only about 10% of NFTs are truly “on chain”. Around 50% of NFTs are on private web servers, where there’s no value in backing up. The remaining ~40% of NFTs are on IPFS, and these are the files that really make sense to back up.

While IPFS is the gold standard for how NFTs are stored, this does not mean they are completely safe. Files can still disappear from IPFS if the server(s) hosting those files shut down, or through the normal “garbage collection” processes that run on servers and remove files.

While pinning files on IPFS can significantly help with ensuring the long-term survival of your NFTs, it is still possible for these files to disappear over time. The best insurance policy is to have a physical backup of your NFTs stored away safely on your hard drive (or better still, a cold storage device.) In the event that an NFT you own disappears from IPFS, you can restore the associated file(s) to IPFS with minimal effort.

To learn more about why it’s important to back up your NFTs, you can read our post on RightClickSave called “The NFT Apocalypse.”
What is the ClubNFT SAFE course?
While collecting NFTs can be fun (sometimes to the point of addiction!) and profitable, and a great way to support the digital arts community, its decentralized nature introduces some risks as well. Our SAFE course is designed to educate collectors and artists on what those risks are, and how to best mitigate them.
What is the relationship between ClubNFT and RightClickSave (RCS)?
RightClickSave has editorial independence but is a ClubNFT-funded publication. While ClubNFT and RightClickSave share a common mission to inform and protect NFT collectors and artists, RCS’s mission extends to cover all facets of digital art and NFT ownership, and to help elevate digital art to its rightful place in the broader art world.
How do I contact you about work opportunities with CNFT?
We post job openings on our About page. Scroll to the bottom of this page to check the current openings! You can also reach out to us directly via our Contact Us page.
How do I get a headband?
Nothing brings back the 70’s quite like a ClubNFT headband. The best way to get the drop on a new ClubNFT headband giveaway is to follow us on twitter.
What blockchains do you currently support?
Our initial focus was to protect Ethereum-based NFTs given their high economic value and wide adoption of the Ethereum blockchain in the NFT space. Tezos was a natural follow-on, due to the high engagement of the NFT art community with Tezos and our own ties to that community. We have no plans of stopping at that though, so you can expect us to continually expand the reach of our tools to other blockchains over time.