Jamie Thingelstad

Social media is a mess.

I’ve lost track of what is social about it. It is a Skinner Box of addiction. The reductionism of a timeline is tiresome. The dopamine inducing likes are there to create some saccharin view of engagement.

I recently noticed that I was falling back into behavior I had broken out of years ago. I was again finding myself checking the Twitter timeline to see what is happening. Then I would feel bad about introducing into my brain all this random crap. The coach part of me knows this isn’t what I should be doing. But the monkey brain loves to see new things, chase them down, and play with the ideas in my head.

The problem is me Twitter, not you. Actually that is wrong. The problem is both of us. The problem is actually the entire social media model. It is an apparatus of addiction built around nothing. There is no there to find. There is no end to reach.

So I unfollowed every account. If you notice I unfollowed you on Twitter, don’t take it personally. It’s me, not you.

POAP is more than just a fun crypto product, it is also a business. I put some brief thoughts together on what I thought would be a POAP product that I would pay for as both a collector and an issuer.

As a POAP collector, I would want to pay a relatively small monthly fee to be able to get cool information about my collection and display it well.

POAP Collector - $3/mo

• On-chain analytics, how close am I to POAP.eth via POAPs?
• Add annotation to each POAP so I can fill out the memory more.
• Notify me of POAP drops “around me”
• Notify me of any POAP Deliveries waiting for me.
• Credit for 1 mainnet migration a month.

Now, changing hats to the issuer side there are a whole different set of things. What if we just kept everything as is, but added a new POAP Pro level.

POAP Pro - $20/mo

• Issue POAP by email address, hide claim codes entirely from everyone.
• Collections/series of POAP.
• Integration with my analytics service, so embed my Phantom Analytics or other tracking code.
• Support for external identifiers in claim codes so I can embed an identifier to my systems.
• Post-claim redirect.
• Additional metadata added to each claim

I think you could then have a service to provide a “full service” experience for the issuer.

POAP Studio - $500/event, require Pro subscription

• White Label claim page
• Design services, POAP specific look
• Priority support, will hit your deadline
• Assistance with claim code distribution

And then you could turn both the Pro and Studio option into a subscription offering.

POAP for Business - $100/mo or $1,000/yr

• Everything in POAP Pro.
• 2 Studio events a year included.
• Would need something more.

And lastly, I think non-profits could be a really great avenue to get the word out about POAP. Aligning with non-profits would reach a very solid set of organizations that could benefit from POAP, and be a wonderful brand alignment with POAP itself. Make it super cheap or free for non-profits to use advanced POAP Pro and Studio capabilities.

POAP for Non-Profits - $20/mo or FREE

• PAOP Pro for free
• 1 Studio events a year

I was pondering cool things that POAPs could have and three ideas came to mind.

POAPs with Backs!

POAPs are a bit like challenge coins, and physical coins have a front and a back. Why not support two images for POAPs so they have a front and a back. This would be cool to flip them around and see the other side. It could be a whole new place to have creative imagery!

POAP Collections

I’ve gotten a few POAPs that are officially part of a collection. The Ethereum Merge and POAPathon Krampus PAOPs are examples of this. It would be cool if there was an official collection that these were part of and that was part of the event pages. You could even unlock a collection POAP when you have all the POAPs in that collection. Some groups do that now but it is manual.

Unique POAPs

I would love to get a POAP every time we do an escape room. But it would be even cooler if my specific instance of that POAP had additional data like the time it took for us to escape, how many clues we used, and our team name. If an issuer could add one off metadata to a specific claim code it could unlock a ton of use cases.

I got this survey to provide some feedback on features for POAP issuers but it didn’t have any comment areas, only quantitative inputs. So I put my comments in a blog post.

Priority Support

This could be valuable and probably only for non-personal use. If it included design assistance as well that could make it more appealing, something akin to POAPathon. If bundled into a “full service” experience I think there are companies that may pay for this.

Event Promotion / Verified Event

I think verification using signatures would be great. I’m not sure what type of verification and promotion this would be, and the devil is in the details here. POAP should avoid the problems that come from things like a “suggested user list”. Also, since POAPs are about attendance, I don’t know that it is useful to get a feed of events I’m not attending.

Collector Messaging

Two-way messaging with people that hold POAPs could be interesting, but it feels odd to do this with POAP versus Discord or Reddit. It feels more likely that you would token-gate a different service for this.

Collector Notifications

One-way messaging to collectors of your POAPs would be great. For sure this would be a really big win. When I’ve explained to people how they can use POAPs at their events nearly everyone wants to use it to communicate and that isn’t possible today.

Custom Page Designs / White Labeling

For non-personal use I think this could be nice if it were relatively easy to do. I’ve done a number of POAPs for different organizations and nobody has asked about this, but if you were doing a lot of them this could make sense.

Post Claim Redirect / User Redirect

A redirect could be nice, but I think it would be sufficient for most use cases to be able to have a event setting for a URL for people to go to after claiming. Would not need to be an automatic redirect. This seems like a nice convenience feature, something similar to what most mailing list platforms do.

Drop Analytics / Drop Reporting

Analytics on events could be interesting, but these features need to all be at the wish of the issuer. I value privacy, and would want my drops to be the same way.

There are two dimensions to this too. One would be extending existing web analytics to the drop pages. That could be very helpful for some issuers.

On-chain analytics have a potential to be much more uniquely interesting. It could be valuable to know what POAP events people are connected to and what NFT projects those same users engage with. I do not like the idea of tracking anything relating to net worth value.

There were three topics that didn’t make this survey that I would also like to see.

1. Ways to make claim code management and distribution easier. When I talk with people about distributing POAPs managing the claim codes is always a burden.
2. Anti-farming for issuers would be nice. I had one POAP event get completely farmed and I would like to be able to invalidate that event somehow.
3. Creating images for POAPs seems like an obvious capability. POAPathon is doing this at small scale. Even for organizations that have their own designers they may want help getting that POAP-look.

POAP (pronounced poe-app) is one of my favorite crypto application. There is a good overview of what POAPs are for. I think POAPs are a great way of capturing memories and events, and potential creating connection and community. I love that they are a crypto app that has no monetary component. I’ve created many POAP events as well as collecting many.

I love how POAP has gown thus far! The growth has been amazing and the organization has continued to create meaning and value. There are three areas that I would like to see POAP extend and wanted to explore in more detail.

Integration Hooks

POAP has an existing API which is great for people looking to create applications using POAPs. However, there is a bigger opportunity for POAP to offer simple integration hooks that could be used by many services and people to extend as they please.

1. RSS has been around since 1999 and is still one of the most widely supported way to syndicate activity across the web. RSS is used by hundreds of different Feed Readers, which would be great for POAP to support. Equally important are services like IFTTT and Zapier that can take any RSS feed and use that as a trigger for automation. If every event offered an RSS feed of POAP claims, that could be used by event organizers to power a ton of automations when a token is claimed.
2. Webhooks would also allow additional integrations with POAP events. Webhooks would be a great middle option between the full POAP API, and something simple like RSS. If you could register one, or even multiple, Webhooks for an event that would be triggered on a claim you could do even more powerful extensions into platforms like Zapier. Additionally this would allow an easy way for app developers to connect to POAP events and claims.

Event Enhancements

POAP events themselves are pretty simple today. They have a summary, image, location (text), a URL, and relevant date information. Events could be enhanced in two material ways: authenticity and different types of events.

1. Creating a POAP event is incredibly simple. You don’t need to even create an account, all you need is an email address. This is great to remove friction but it also means that anyone can create any event. POAP has put significant effort into the curation body and review process to make sure that events meet some basic standards. But there is no way to assert that an event is truly from the organization or event it describes. It would be great to be able to sign the event with your wallet! For example, my Birthday POAP would be more authentic if the event was signed by the thingelstad.eth wallet. This opens up a common set of issues associated with verification, but verifying that events are authentic would make those POAPs more meaningful.
2. There is an opportunity to have POAPs for things that are bound to locations instead of times. There is already a POAP Geocaching app in the store and there has been at least a couple experiments like this. That would be a cool capability, but I would also think that POAPs that are well known to collect at locations would be very neat. I would make one for my house that visitors could collect (preferably signed by both thingelstad.eth and knoxave.eth!). Another use case I would love is a POAP for summiting a climb. If you removed time limitations, this would be ideal for restaurants and cafes to have a perpetual POAP you can claim for visiting their location.

Web2/3 Onboarding

POAP is a great way to introduce people to crypto. I have personally introduced well over 100 people to crypto by giving out POAP tokens for various events. I’ve put together a very simple guide for people to claim their first POAP, including setting up a wallet! But more could be done here to make it easier for people.

1. POAP events can currently be minted from a claim code, or reserved using an email address. The email option is a nice intent but it doesn’t do much. You reserve your POAP to mint later, even after the expiration date for the event. But until you mint it you will not show up on the list of token holders, and cannot do anything else. This is an okay feature but it is confusing. People tend to thing they are done after reserving with an email address. POAP should send reminder emails to nudge those that have reserved to move forward with minting. And it would be great for event organizers to be able to see reservations to help people get them minted.
2. Better yet would be to have POAP provide a non-custodial wallet for users that don’t have one. This could work very similar to what Reddit has done to get Collectible Avatars working. In Reddit, you can provide your own wallet, or you can let Reddit make one for you. The wallet that it makes is completely real, and you have the choice of letting Reddit store the seed phrase to recover it, or you can manage it on your own. This would be ideal for POAP as well. With this capability you could get rid of the reservation process entirely by creating a wallet and managing it for people. If it is fully capable, like a Reddit wallet, you could even give it an ENS name and add it to a MetaMask or Rainbow if you wanted.

I’m sure that POAP has a long roadmap and more things to work on than they have time to do. I think it would be great to see enhancements like the above because I think they hit on key areas that would drive POAP growth and adoption.

Enabling integration capabilities would allow POAP issuers to do things like send a Tweet every time a POAP is claimed. Additional authenticity would allow more confidence in POAPs, particularly if POAP Checkout is used to raise funds for a good event. And taking on more of the wallet tasks for users would make onboarding new people to POAP so much easier.

See also POAPathon Future Thoughts.

Our niece loves Bubble Tea so we all enjoyed one at Chatime in the Mall of America.

• Jamie: Mango Smoothie with Crystal Boba
• Tammy: Açaí Berry Spritz Tea Tapioca Pearls
• Mazie & Nora: Passionfruit Smoothie Tapioca Pearls
• Tyler: Cookies & Cream Smoothie Crystal Boba

On the December 30th POAPathon Community Call there was a request for feedback on where POAPathon should go in 2023. I thought about it and here are my thoughts.

First some background. POAPathon is a community driven organization that facilitates design contests for people that need an image for a POAP event. I love creating POAP events, but I lack the design skills to create great images. I’ve used POAPathon a few times to get amazing images for my events. The process, collaboration, and results are great.

Some POAPathon designed events I’ve done include:

Magic Pines Summer of 2022
by kavishsethi

Jamie Thingelstad’s 51st Birthday
by designatum.eth

TeamSPS 2022 Kubb Tournament
by InsertGenericArtName

POAPathon DAO

Creating a DAO for POAPathon would enable two important functions:

Treasury for the DAO to fund programs, strategy, and execution.

To fund the treasury some percentage of all bounties should be directed to the DAO. POAPathon is providing direct value by creating this marketplace, and directing some of those funds into the treasury to be used by the DAO is best for the overall health of the community.

Governance tokens to enable decisions making.

Governance tokens have no monetary value and should never be bought or sold. These tokens would be distributed for actions done in the DAO. Examples would include:

1. Sponsoring a contest.
2. Submitting a design to a contest.
3. Volunteers managing a contest.
4. Volunteers sending a newsletter (see below).
5. Volunteers hosting a community call.

There is likely a broad list of additional activities that could be rewarded with governance tokens, but there are two activities that should not be:

1. Winning a contest is already rewarded with the bounty. Governance tokens should be given equally to any artist that participates in a contest. Winning should not be a factor for governance tokens.
2. Community call attendance is already rewarded with POAPs, and that should continue. That rewards engagement, and governance tokens reward contribution. However, a volunteer hosting a community call should be rewarded.

Serious thought would need to be given to governance token amounts for each activity. Fortunately POAPathan has been doing nearly all of these things for a year or more, and that historical set of activities could be used to model what the amounts should be. Future changes to reward amounts could be handled via a DAO vote.

Lastly, the DAO should be run on Gnosis Chain in recognition that POAPs are distributed on Gnosis Chain. (Disclosure: I am a Gnosis Chain validator.)

Contests On-chain

Today contests are created via a survey, USDC is sent to POAPathon, and the Contest Managers (POAPathon volunteers) are trusted to setup the contests and distribute the funds. To further embrace a trustless approach, contests could be moved to a smart contract and executed on-chain.

When a contest is created the USDC would be sent to a contract. That contract would then manage the distribution. Some percentage would be sent to the DAO immediately after the contest is approved. The remainder would be sent to the addresses of the winners.

There are a lot of options here. It would be ideal if the smart contract knew what artists had submitted art for the contest, and could even handle distributing governance tokens rewarding them for participating. The contest requester could then select the winners from a list of participating artists.

This would require development efforts that may go beyond the scope of volunteer engagement. If so, the DAO treasury could be used to fund the development of this.

Other Stuff

Focus on just POAPs. The POAPathon website suggests a variety of design services via contest (PFP, Logos), but POAP is right there in the name and focusing on just that use case may create more opportunity.

Email newsletter. Discord is great, but is only useful for very engaged community members. A newsletter that highlights the contests, selected artists, and more could be very compelling. This is a way to stay connected and broaden the reach of POAPathon. POAP has This week in POAP for example.

Give out more POAPs. POAPathon distributes a POAP for each Community Call. It would be cool to give a POAP for submitting a contest, and winning contests. I’ve created five contests now but there is no record of that outside of Discord history. I’d love to have a POAP from POAPathon showing that.

Closer connection with POAP itself. POAPathon could be part of the POAP process. There seems to be no mention of POAPathon on the POAP website that I could easily find. Getting in this flow of requests would help make sure there are enough contests to have a thriving community.