Monthly Archives: October 2021

In the previous posts, we have discussed the ERC721 standard and how metadata and the actual asset behind a token are stored. With this, we have all the ingredients in place to tackle the actual implementation. Today, I will show you how an NFT contract can be implemented in Solidity and how to deploy and test a contract using Brownie. The code for this post can be found here.

Data structures

As for our sample implementation of an ERC20 contract, let us again start by discussing the data structures that we will need. First, we need a mapping from token ID to the current owner. In Solidity, this would look as follows.

mapping (uint256 => address) private _ownerOf;

Note that we declare this structure as private. This does not affect the functionality, but for a public data structure, Solidity would create a getter function which blows up the contract size and thus makes deployment more expensive. So it is a good practice to avoid public data structures unless you really need this.

Now mappings in Solidity have a few interesting properties. In contrast to programming languages like Java or Python, Solidity does not offer a way to enumerate all elements of a mapping – and even if it did, it would be dangerous to use this, as loops like this can increase the gas usage of your contract up to the point where the block limit is reached, rendering it unusable. Thus we cannot simply calculate the balance of an owner by going through all elements of the above mapping and filtering for a specific owner. Instead, we maintain a second data structure that only tracks balances.

mapping (address => uint256) private _balances;

Whenever we transfer a token, we also need to update this mapping to make sure that it is in sync with the first data structure.

We also need a few additional mappings to track approvals and operators. For approvals, we again need to know which address is an approved recipient for a specific token ID, thus we need a mapping from token ID to address. For operators, the situation is a bit more complicated. We set up an operator for a specific address (the address on behalf of which the operator can act), and there can be more than one operator for a given address. Thus, we need a mapping that assigns to each address another mapping which in turn maps addresses to boolean values, where True indicates that this address is an operator for the address in the first mapping.

/// Keep track of approvals per tokenID
mapping (uint256 => address) private _approvals; 

/// Keep track of operators
 mapping (address => mapping(address => bool)) private _isOperatorFor;

Thus the sender of a message is an operator for an address owner if and only if _isOperatorFor[owner][msg.sender] is true, and the sender of a message is authorized to withdraw a token if and only if _approvals[tokenID] === msg.sender.

Burning and minting a token is now straightforward. To mint, we first check that the token ID does not yet exist. We then increase the balance of the contract owner by one and set the owner of the newly minted token to the contract owner, before finally emitting an event. To burn, we reverse this process – we set the current owner to the zero address and decrease the balance of the current owner. We also reset all approvals for this token. Note that in our implementation, the contract owner can burn all token, regardless of the current owner. This is useful for testing, but of course you would not want to do this in production – as a token owner, you would probably not be very amused to see that the contract owner simply burns all your precious token. As an aside, if you really want to fire up your own token in production, you would probably want to take a look at one of the available audited and thoroughly tested sample implementations, for instance by the folks at OpenZeppelin.

Modifiers

The methods to approve and make transfers are rather straightforward (with the exception of a safe transfer that we will discuss separately in a second). If you look at the code, however, you will spot a Solidity feature that we have not used before – modifiers. Essentially, a modifier is what Java programmers might know as an aspect – a piece of code that wraps around a function and is invoked before and after a function in your contract. Specifically, if you define a modifier and add this modifier to your function, the execution of the function will start off by running the modifier until the compiler hits upon the special symbol _ in the modifier source code. At this point, the code of the actual function will be executed, and if the function completes, execution continues in the modifier again. Similar to aspects, modifiers are useful for validations that need to be done more than once. Here is an example.

/// Modifier to check that a token ID is valid
modifier isValidToken(uint256 _tokenID) {
    require(_ownerOf[_tokenID] != address(0), _invalidTokenID);
    _;
}

/// Actual function
function ownerOf(uint256 tokenID) external view isValidToken(tokenID) returns (address)  {
    return _ownerOf[tokenID];
}

Here, we declare a modifier isValidToken and add it to the function ownerOf. If now ownerOf is called, the code in isValidToken is run first and verifies the token ID. If the ID is valid, the actual function is executed, if not, we revert with an error.

Safe transfers and the code size

Another Solidity feature that we have not yet seen before is used in the function _isContract. This function is invoked when a safe transfer is requested. Recall from the standard that a safe transfer needs to check whether the recipient is a smart contract and if yes, tries to invoke its onERC721Received method. Unfortunately, Solidity does not offer an operation to figure out whether an address is the address of a smart contract. We therefore need to use inline assembly to be able to directly run the EXTCODESIZE opcode. This opcode returns the size of the code of a given address. If this is different from zero, we know that the recipient is a smart contract.

Note that if, however, the code size is zero, the recipient might in fact still be a contract. To see why, suppose that a contract calls our NFT contract within its constructor. As the code is copied to its final location after the constructor has executed, the code size is still zero at this point. In fact, there is no better and fully reliable way to figure out whether an address is that of a smart contract in all cases, and even the ERC-721 specification itself states that the check for the onERC721Received method should be done if the code size is different from zero, accepting this remaining uncertainty.

Inline assembly is fully documented here. The code inside the assembly block is actually what is known as Yul – an intermediate, low-level language used by Solidity. Within the assembly code, you can access local variables, and you can use most EVM opcodes directly. Yul also offers loops, switches and some other high-level constructs, but we do not need any of this in your simple example.

Once we have the code size and know that our recipient is a smart contract, we have to call its onERC721Received method. The easiest way to do this in Solidity is to use an interface. As in other programming languages, an interface simply declares the methods of a contract, without providing an implementation. Interfaces cannot be instantiated directly. Given an address, however, we can convert this address to an instance of an interface, as in our example.

interface ERC721TokenReceiver
{
  function onERC721Received(address, address, uint256, bytes calldata) external returns(bytes4);
}

/// Once we have this, we can access a contract with this interface at 
/// address to
ERC721TokenReceiver erc721Receiver = ERC721TokenReceiver(to);
bytes4 retval = erc721Receiver.onERC721Received(operator, from, tokenID, data);

Here, we have an address to and assume that at this address, a contract implementing our interface is residing. We then convert this address to an instance of a contract implementing this interface, and can then access its methods.

Note that this is a pure compile-time feature – this code will not actually create a contract at the address, but will simply assume that a contract with that interface is present at the target location. Of course, we can, at compile time, not know whether this is really the case. The compiler can, however, prepare a call with the correct function signature, and if this method is not implemented, we will most likely end up in the fallback function of the target contract. This is the reason why we also have to check the return value, as the fallback function might of course execute successfully even if the target contract does not implement onERC721Received.

Implementing the token URI method

The last part of the code which is not fully straightforward is the generation of the token URI. Recall that this is in fact the location of the token metadata for a given token ID. Most NFT contracts that I have seen build this URI from a base URI followed by the token ID, and I have adapted this approach as well. The base URI is specified when we deploy the contract, i.e. as a constructor argument. However, converting the token ID into a string is a bit tricky, because Solidity does again not offer a standard way to do this. So you either have to roll your own conversion or use one of the existing implementations. I have used the code from this OpenZeppelin library to do the conversion. The code is not difficult to read – we first determine the number of digits that our number has by dividing by ten until the result is less than one (and hence zero – recall that we are dealing with integers) and then go through the digits from the left to the right and convert them individually.

Interfaces and the ERC165 standard

Our smart contract implements a couple of different interfaces – ERC-721 itself and the metadata extension. As mentioned above, interfaces are a compile-time feature. To improve type-safety at runtime, it would be nice to have a feature that allows a contract to figure out whether another contract implements a given interface. To solve this, EIP-165 has been introduced. This standard does two things.

First, it defines how a hash value can be assigned to an interface. The hash value of an interface is obtained by taking the 4-byte function selectors of each method that the interface implements and then XOR’ing these bytes. The result is a sequence of four bytes.

Second, it defines a method that each contract should implement that can be used to inquire whether a contract implements an interface. This method, supportsInterface, accepts the four-byte hash value of the requested interface as an argument and is supposed to return true if the interface is supported.

This can be used by a contract to check whether another contract implements a given interface. The ERC-721 standard actually mandates that a contract that implements the specification should also implement EIP-165. Our contract does this as well, and its supportsInterface method returns true if the requested interface ID is

• 0x01ffc9a7, which corresponds to ERC-165 itself
• 0x80ac58cd which is the hash value corresponding to ERC-721
• 0x5b5e139f which is the hash value corresponding to the metadata extension

Testing, deploying and running our contract

Let us now discuss how we can test, deploy and run our contract. First, there is of course unit testing. If you have read my post on Brownie, the unit tests will not be much of a surprise. There are only two remarks that might be in order.

First, when writing unit tests with Brownie and using fixtures to deploy the required smart contracts, we have a choice between two different approaches. One approach would be to declare the fixtures as function scoped, so that they are run over and over again for each test case. This has the advantage that we start with a fresh copy of the contract for each test case, but is of course slow – if you run 30 unit tests, you conduct 30 deployments. Alternatively, we can declare the fixture as sessions-scoped. They will then be only executed once per test session, so that every test case uses the same instance of the contract under test. If you do this, be careful to clean up after each test case. A disadvantage of this approach, though, remains – if the execution of one test case fails, all test cases run after the failing test case will most likely fail as well because the clean up is skipped for the failed test case. Be aware of this and do not panic if all of a sudden almost all of your test cases fail (the -x switch to Brownie could be your friend if this happens, so that Brownie exits if the first test case fails).

A second remark is concerning mocks. To test a safe transfer, we need a target contract with a predictable behavior. This contract should implement the onERC721Received method, be able to return a correct or an incorrect magic value and allow us to check whether it has been called. For that purpose, I have included a mock that can be used for that purpose and which is also deployed via a fixture.

To run the unit tests that I have provided, simply clone my repository, make sure you are located in the root of the repository and run the tests via Brownie.

git clone https://github.com/christianb93/nft-bootcamp.git
cd nft-bootcamp
brownie test tests/test_NFT.py

Do not forget to first active your Python virtual environment if you have installed Brownie or any of the libraries that it requires in a virtual environment.

Once the unit tests pass, we can start the Brownie console which will, as we know, automatically compile all contracts in the contract directory. To deploy the contract, run the following commands from the Brownie console.

owner = accounts[0]
// Deploy - the constructor argument is the base URI
nft = owner.deploy(NFT, "http://localhost:8080/")

Let us now run a few tests. We will mint a token with ID 1, pick a new account, transfer the token to this account, verify that the transfer works and finally get the token URI.

alice = accounts[1]
nft._mint(1)
assert(owner == nft.ownerOf(1))
nft.transferFrom(owner, alice, 1)
assert(alice == nft.ownerOf(1))
nft.tokenURI(1)

I invite you to play around a bit with the various functions that the NFT contract offers – declare an operator, approve a transfer, or maybe test some validations. In the next few posts, we will start to work towards a more convenient way to play with our NFT – a frontend written using React and web3.js. Before we are able to work on this, however, it is helpful to expand our development environment a bit by installing a copy of geth, and this is what the next post will be about. Hope to see you there.