NFT Review 2024 - 4: NFTs as a database for merit
Can we help push the NFT narrative further with Merit?
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Dear NFT enthusiast,
A while back, I wrote a post about Decaying Categorial Meritocracy and Semibound tokens built on top of the modular NFTs stack. To save you from reading it all, let me try and present a TLDR here and see if it resonates with some builders.
Semibound tokens are soulbound, but with a built-in DAO layer where anyone can propose a transfer of a semibound token to another address by putting down a deposit. If the proposal passes via vote from supermajority of holders of that same collection’s NFTs, the transfer is allowed this one time. If it fails, the deposit is burned.
Modular NFTs imply nestable NFTs (NFTs containing NFTs) and equippable NFTs (NFTs having pre-defined slots to put other NFTs into, visually and functionally).
Decaying Categorial Meritocracy then uses Semibound modular NFTs to represent profiles which can contain “merit” in various forms. This merit is connected to categories. For example, on a protocol like Farcaster, the "/farming” channel could have mods, and the “/furniture_restoration” channel could have mods.
A mod clearing / downvoting / upvoting / boosting posts in either of these channels gets MERIT in that channel, i.e. categorial merit. Over time, his merit grows in that channel as he is slowly escalated to the status of superadmin, or supermod, and his vote is worth more than other people’s vote, relative to his merit power.
Merit is an NFT with dynamic attributes for points, or even containing transferable or non transferable ERC20 tokens. This NFT can, for example, be a cap, and the cap changes color based on merit level, thereby making the equippable both aesthetic and functional.
But how do we prevent whale accumulation of merit? This is where the decay comes in. The less the merit is used, the more it decays. As humans naturally tend to lose interest in new and shiny things, the most active early members will gradually fall off. As they do, instead of staying alpha dogs forever, their merit will decay and new blood will have the opportunity to revive the protocol, and earn their way to the top with good on-chain behavior.
All this has several advantages:
keeps the protocol young, by making sure new people keep joining
keeps the protocol active, by making sure people need to use it to retain merit
allows you to reward (with inflation or protocol fees) those with most merit which will be definition always be your current most active users, further incentivizing activity
prevents whaling and a plutocratic capture of the protocol, as monetary value is detached from voting value
allows cross-pollination of userbases when modular NFTs are used, because those are out-of-the-box compatible with all other modular collections, and can be made co-equippable with other projects and collections. This offers not only massive gains through royalty of equippables on top of the protocol fees, but also allows seamless integration across different apps and protocols, reading from chain to learn someone’s reputation and rewarding it in other launches as well (better airdrops!).
Many more advantages exist, but I’m curious about your thoughts, dear reader - do you agree with this approach, would you be interested in testing this out? What pitfalls do you see?
Thank you for reading and have a great week.
— NFT Review
🖼 crypto-native
Yuga acquires Proof, thereby absorbing Moonbirds. Simultaneously, Garga returns as CEO to save BAYC from the Pudgy flippening and other disasters. Will a change in leadership breathe new life into the collections under their belt? Let’s see!
ASCEND launches pooled lending of NFTs, allowing you to borrow against NFTs in a pool. Two important things to note:
1. Pooling your BAYC with 100 different BAYCes means you might end up with any of the 100 when withdrawing - there is no guarantee you get yours back.
2. Pooling your NFTs means you will miss out on push airdrops that are just added to the NFT holder. This means snapshots and similar won’t work any more for you.
ZORA made it easy to buy and sell on the secondary.
↳ Place offers or buy instantly.
↳ List or sell now.
↳ Browse and accept offers.
No-code frame builder for Farcaster / Warpcast.
🕹️ games
Gunzilla Games, a web2 game with some NFT integrations, comes to XBOX. The blockchain elements are - game economy on chain, and character progression. Seems to be using the blockchain as a database. Not a good idea and will stop using blockchain if it gets any kind of popularity, but kudos for pushing the envelope.
Foundry produce comprehensive writeup about play to earn system in @Parallel. Prime income, deck building, card acquiring tips and more can be found here. It’s in Russian but Google Translate handles it well.
Decentraland introduces pre-built templates into the SDK. Still not decentralized.
Nifty Island’s new global quest for increased rewards is live!
🌎 global adoption
Ana Maria Caballero writes a guide of Parisian galleries to visit if you want to support digital art. For the NFT-Paris-goers, this is a treasure trove.
eBay shrinking its NFT efforts. I have thoughts… firstly, was there even an NFT effort going on?
Secondly, it is no surprise all these boomer attempts keep failing - Coinbase NFT is also still dying a very slow death. Not because it’s not good, but because crypto has 30000 unique people at most, and 5000 of those are into NFTs.
These marketplaces are all vampire attacking each other’s 1000-user-large customer base, while also enforcing KYC, thus preventing themselves from “growing” the way that no-kyc NFT marketplaces are growing: by wash trading.Orb.club v2 launches on Lens. I tried it and am underwhelmed - the onboarding experience is okay, but it offers nothing we haven’t seen before from a variety of “web3 twitter competitors”.
Photocaster by Pinata, providers of IPFS storage services, is a rudimentary web3 instagram built atop Farcaster.
Forbes buys virtual land in the still-not-decentralized-or-launched Sandbox. A somewhat pandering move, but perhaps worth it for the signal it sends to similar dying media. As a reminder, Forbes writers regularly take bribes to include false statements and promotional links in posts.
Avalanche has purchased a stake in Sports Illustrated Tickets and become the blockchain provider for its NFT-enabled ticketing service, Box Office. An interesting approach - now if only they would use modular NFTs to do ticketing right!
9dcc's First Full NFT Fashion Collection Is Designed for the 'Crypto Mob'. A phygital flood getting ready for NFT Paris!
🧐 interesting
Non-playable-coin mint is live. Compose your insane NPC and mint it by redeeming one NPC coin.
alignDRAW - The CryptoPunks of AI Art - delronde argues for bluechip-level provenance of the mint of the first generative text-to-image prompts and their outputs.
📖 reading
The Metaverse as a Radical Medium: New communities are filling the virtual worlds vacated by the speculators, observes Bay Backner.
Linda Dounia on Memory Machines: Artist Linda Dounia spoke with Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) about the potential of AI to combat cultural as well as biological loss, using her project Flore Perdue as a springboard.
The State of the Culture, 2024: A brief analysis of the dopamine-junkie culture of today and Big Tech’s role in it. Also interesting to consider how much we, the candle-riding degens, the shitcoin surfers, are part of it or addicted to a similar thing.
That’s all for this week, see you in the next edition! Got some links to share with us, artists to feature, NFTs to sell, jobs to promote, or events to popularize? Get in touch with Bruno and don’t forget to follow us!