Technical questions about NFTs

Question

I'm new to both blockchain and Tezos. I've created an NFT from a PNG just to try and I'm not sure I've understood all the concepts under the hood.

As far as I understand, an NFT Collection (on Tezos) is a smart contract respecting the FA2 token standard.

This smart contract defines some operations that can be executed on Tezos.

Minting an NFT is preparing the metadata and the file itself and calling the ```mint operation on the smart contract to create one or more tokens, each one with an identifier and an URI.

The mint operation will add tokens to the Smart Contract.

Here are my questions:

• Can we have a token without a smart contract ?

• When a token is transferred from someone to someone else, it still "belongs" to the smart contract but the smart contract indicates that the token has been transferred ?

• Can we transfer an NFT collection from someone to someone else ?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Can we have a token without a smart contract ?

No. Tokens are not native constructs to the Tezos protocol. Only Tez is native. Anything else must be created using a smart contract.

it still "belongs" to the smart contract but the smart contract indicates that the token has been transferred

Correct. Smart contracts have their own storage which is used to indicate X token is owned by Y address. The storage of contracts is public so you can easily see which addresses own which tokens by querying and parsing the storage of a smart contract.

Can we transfer an NFT collection from someone to someone else ?

Yes, by updating the storage of the smart contract.