Make Your Creator Coins a Golden Ticket: Adding Actual Value to Creator Coins
I have gone on record several times about how I am skeptical around PFP NFTs.
Not only do I think the majority of them are stupid-looking (which I know some people see as part of the appeal), but I also think they are highly questionably marketed.
Ugly and expensive apes or whatever are not the only use of NFTs, however.
Rather than just complain, I want to help the community figure out how to use the technology to add to the world, and one of the things I have been thinking a lot about is how crypto can help fund art, while also providing value to their fans.
Why hate on PFP?
I don't hate on PFP, I just don't get the appeal, and I especially don't understand the extreme valuations of some of them.
In October 2021 a single cryptopunk NFT sold for $532 million, much higher than all previous NFT sales, leading to speculation on social media that this could have been some kind of scam, security exploit or money laundering
What are PFP NFTs?
For those who don't know (and most PFP NFT projects don't usually explain), all PFP means is "profile picture", aka Avatar.
Yes, you can right-click, hit save, and set your avatar to any of these "premium" profile pictures. 99% of the time with no consequences. Not that I would want to use one to represent my own brand.
Between various *Punks, CryptoKitties, Bored Ape Yacht Club, and the Beeple stuff, NFTs have been closely associated with JPG "artworks", but that is not what an NFT has to be.
Like in the physical art world, many people buy these "arts" in the hope of buying low and selling high. Artificial scarcity is introduced to pump up the valuation, like with Pokemon, Baseball cards and World Cup foil stickers.
Rewarding Hodlers Beyond Speculation
So you sell or auction your art, then the owner sells to someone else to realize the value beyond "enjoying the art", perhaps as part of a collection ("Gotta Catch Em ALL!").
While I would love to make lambo money from my art, the idea of the only way to get a rewarding experience from my creations is to sell it doesn't sit well with me.
As a proof of concept, over on DeSo I kocked up a tool that will allow me to identify hodlers of my creator coin. This will allow me to "airdrop" NFTs rather than auction or sell them directly.
The reason I am doing this on DeSo is because every user gets their own coin automatically, and Rally, while being the biggest creator coin market, isn't letting minnows make coins there yet, and besides the programming API on DeSo is feature-rich and easy. I expect someone could do this on Hive/Hive Engine but I haven't been able to figure out where to start with that.
Rally has the mind share and the influencers but not the developer-friendly technology stack as yet, it seems interesting how that is playing out ... I will keep monitoring the situation ...
Of course at the time of writing I still need to figure out what my NFTs should even be and how to send them directly to users, but I immediately know I can reward people who own my coin.
(Experimentation is ongoing so let me know of ways you like to be rewarded by hodling)
Preventing Churn
But what if people buy your coin just long enough to get an airdrop or NFT gift, then immediately dump for profit?
While I was originally focused on offering my coin Hodlers extra value, I realized using the coin-holders as a membership list, I can make an actual community around my coin (using Discord initially, but I could easily integrate with a content gating system or Circle.io).
This will encourage people to hodl long term, over and above the appreciation of the value of the coin. Making it more valuable to hold than churn will in turn increase the value for people who hodl.
Churning isn't prevented but means that they gain profit today at the expense of an ongoing reward and an even greater future profit.
More options can be added along the way for those who hold coins longer than average - perhaps people who hodl for x-days get additional airdrops, or a special "VIP" category of NFT, and so on.
Progress So Far
I have code for generating the hodl user list, and for the integration, I can use Discord Webhooks on my Maker Hacks Discord server as a proof of concept.
It turns out the tricky part I need to figure out is matching a DeSo user to a Discord user! Someone pointed me to a project that is doing this via a validation process, much the same as Rally users have bots for claiming member benefits. Seems most come down to posting some secret message via bot.
What Do You Say?
Other than being happy just collecting or trading PFP, what do you think about these ideas?