Replacing NFT Catalog with a Decentralized Alternative [Proposal]

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This post is to discuss officially sunsetting support for NFT Catalog in favor of Tokenlist, a more decentralized alternative. Conversations around NFT Catalog and the creation of Tokenlist have been discussed over multiple sessions in the publicly accessible Flow Tooling Working Group and we wanted to bring the conversation to the larger dev community

Context

NFT Catalog served various purposes since it’s inception, originally solving early issues with storage allocation that were resolved in later versions of Cadence, the platform became used by NFT devleopers and marketplaces interested in pulling data from verified NFT collections. NFT Catalog is not actively maintained and operates in a very centralized fashion, requiring individuals to manually verify collections that are added which is against the overall ethos of web3 and often creates bottlenecks and requires time.

Ecosystem projects such as Flow Wallet and IncrementFi have already transitioned over to Tokenlist.

What is Tokenlist

Tokenlist offers a more developer-friendly approach to token management across EVM and Cadence, with dev-centric features:

  • Simple API Access: Easily pull metadata and token details. Note: All NFTs compatible. with Crescendo have already been added to Tokenlist from NFT Catalog.
  • Decentralized Verification: Open for community-driven verification—anyone can add or verify metadata.
  • Trust Layer: Projects and individuals can rely on trusted verifiers to ensure data accuracy.

Proposal

Officially sunset NFT Catalog and redirect projects to Tokenlist, incorporating community feedback into the new tool. Transition projects off of NFT Catalog and over to Tokenlist until December 15th.

Your Input Matters

Would love to hear from the developer community on:

  • How do you currently leverage NFT Catalog? What is not ideal about the process?
  • What features are most critical for your projects from NFT Catalog?
  • Are there any gaps you see between NFT Catalog and Tokenlist?
  • How can we improve the transition process to avoid disruptions?
  • What are your thoughts and concerns on the transition?

This change is meant to provide more flexibility and reliability, but we want to make sure the transition works well for the entire community. Feel free to reply here with your feedback and helping shape the future of tools in the Flow ecosystem.

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We at find do not use the nft catalog anymore after storage iteration.

The verification aspect of tokenList is a nice concept however who is going to own that and be a verifier?

Another thing i find a bit strange with its implementation is that it does not add FT/NFT to it automatically when they are deployed on chain. Somebody has to go in and manually add them. And also if a project updates their contract with say new metadata that also needs to be added manually. If my understanding her is wrong then please let me know.

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We at find do not use the nft catalog anymore after storage iteration.

FT/NFT list is mainly for scenarios without an address.
For example, when clicking on IncrementFi to display all tokens, or clicking on Flow Wallet to view available Collections/FT Vaults. This is a different application scenario from Storage iteration.

Another thing I find a bit strange with its implementation is that it does not add FT/NFT to it automatically when they are deployed on chain.

Because it is completely on-chain, it is difficult to achieve automatic updates from a purely on-chain perspective
Certainly, a backend can be coordinated to listen to events and then send automatic registration transactions, but I feel this is a bit excessive.

And also if a project updates their contract with say new metadata that also needs to be added manually.

No you don’t need to add again.
After Crescendo, the registration of FT/NFT only accepts Contract View Resolver, so in the list, there is only a pointer of Address + ContractName. If without a Verifier, it all comes automatically from the contract.

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@Aliserag What does this mean? Is the plan now to render the NFT Catalog invalid and panic or return empty results?

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Hey @austin! That’s correct.

Is there anything that Tokenlist doesn’t support that is needed by Flowty or reservations about it? If it is a large hassle I can investigate the possibility of longer hosting maintaince (but no more updating or verifying new collections).