The DAS reduces the cost to mint a basic NFT from ~0.012 SOL β ~0.003 SOL
I assume NFT compression (basically, moving more data off-chain to save costs) will reduce minting costs even more, but estimated costs for compressed NFTs are not mentioned in the docs
2/ INCREASED FUNCTIONALITY
The DAS moves more functionality into the NFT program
For example, sales will be forced to go through the program, meaning royalties can be enforced
As another example, fractionalization will also be built into the program
Currently, NFTs of static images are rendered consistently across wallets/dapps. But the experience for audiovisual NFTs is inconsistent
The DAS introduces strongly typed JSON schemas for representing different media types
4/ IMPROVED EXTENSIBILITY
What if you want to extend an NFT with extra data that's custom to your use case?
You can already do this by creating another account that stores the extra data
But DAS will make it easier to discover these accounts (via a registry), and easier to keep these accounts in sync as the NFT gets sold/burned/etc.
5/ MORE EFFICIENT READS
Instead of using getProgramAccounts (slow), or relying on 3rd party indexers (potentially inconsistent/unreliable), Metaplex will provide its own performant API for querying NFT information
1/ Every token in Solana, fungible or non-fungible, has a mint account
The mint account's address uniquely identifies the token
This account also determines who is allowed to mint more tokens and how many tokens are in supply
NFT mints should have supply = 1 and decimals = 0
2/ Once a single NFT has been minted, which increases supply from 0 to 1, the mint authority (the account that is allowed to mint more tokens) should be set to "None"
This means no more tokens can be minted, fixing the supply at 1βthe token is now non-fungible!