A year ago (exactly!) I shared my POAP Wishlist which included three areas that I felt would be great additions to POAP. It is a year later and I still think POAP is a wonderful product, and I continue to issue and collect these proof of attendance tokens.

One of the areas that I called out was Web2/3 Onboarding. Specifically I noted that while token claim codes could be used to reserve a POAP (not minting it), the reservations themselves weren’t actionable. There was no email engagement to encourage the person that reserved it to mint the token. I also highlighted that POAP should make it easier for people that do not otherwise have an Ethereum wallet, and create a non-custodial wallet for them to use instead.

A couple weeks ago I noticed that POAP had a new beta onboarding process so I requested to be part of it, and they activated it for my 52nd Birthday drop. I gave it a try myself and I was excited to see that they had addressed everything I had wished for in this process!

Let’s take a look at the new process!

New Onboarding

Just as before, when you get a claim code you are presented with the option to get the token and you can provide a wallet address or Ethereum Name Service (ENS) name to directly mint it. You can also provide an email address to reserve the token to mint in the future.

With the new onboarding process when you provide an email address to reserve the token you get an email informing you of the next steps. Critically it presents options for you to act on!

Smartly they use language that people should easily identify with. Rather than saying “I don’t have a wallet” instead saying “Create an account”. To give this a test I chose to Create an account.

After clicking on this you are presented with a page where you can setup your account, which really means you are creating a brand new wallet address. I love that you can even specify an ENS name. I created thingelstad.onpoap.eth which got a brand new address 0xb81B…2056.

Behind the scenes this is powered by Privy to create an embedded wallet. The flow worked really well. After creating my new wallet I was then able to easily mint my POAP directly into that new wallet. Magic! 🪄

So this is great, and for a lot of people that only collect POAPs and do nothing else with crypto this is probably all that they ever need to do. But now that this wallet exists, I wanted to get access to it directly. After creating the wallet POAP send another email and this one includes those steps, and even points you to downloading Rainbow if you don’t know where to start.

I followed the directions, copied my private key, and was able to easily add the new wallet that POAP had created for me into Rainbow. 🌈

Conclusion

I’m incredibly happy about this new onboarding process. I’ve created 58 POAPs and most of my events are distributed to people that have never done anything with Ethereum before. I even created my own how to claim a POAP instructions to give people.

However, even with that it has proven too difficult for most people. With this new process, people will be able to claim and mint POAPs with nothing other than an email address! This is a big deal! I also think there are many crypto native people that may choose to do this as well. I isolate by crypto assets so I keep all my POAPs in an address just for them. Having POAP manage the wallet for me would be an even easier way to do that.

I’m eager for this new onboarding process to be the default and I think I can get rid of my “how to” page and simplify POAP distribution significantly. With this new process, POAP ease-of-use is much improved!