Crypto

Forays into blockchain, NFTs and POAPs live here. I write about minting POAP tokens at family events, celebrating Ethereum’s 10‑year anniversary by creating an NFT and even using monitoring services to keep my POAP feeds up and running.

    Art Shanty Projects

    We went to the Art Shanty Projects on Lake Harriet today. Tammy has been to this many times, but it was my first. I do like events like this that make for fun days in the cold of winter. The Shanties themselves were very cool. Notable highlights:

    • re(center)ed which provided an opportunity for people to write a message on a piece of wood and then hang it anonymously on the wall. Every few hours the curator would pull them down and burn them in a “pyre”, releasing the sentiment.
    • Archive of Collective Memory that allowed you to submit a message via the web that was then turned into an audio loop and played through a wooden wall that you had to put your ear against to hear it.
    • Blankets of Ice which had a bedroom set in the middle of the snow with a “quilt” pattern made of colored ice blocks.
    • Chapsicle of Love provided marriage service at the event.
    • Techno From the Sun was a shanty powered only by solar energy with people DJ’ing techno music inside. You could modify and add to the mix by moving levers and dials on the outside of the shanty.

    I was left wanting to have a Shanty next year that distributed a POAP and allowed people to record a memory of the event in some way. 🤔

    Echo Forest Launch

    Today is the launch of Echo Forest. This NFT project has Minneapolis connections being led by Brooks Clifford and Matt Benesch.

    I minted two Wolf Healers, 18 and 19. I really dig the artwork and I’m excited to see how the utility evolves. Plus it is a great opportunity to be involved in a local project.

    POAP Family

    The new POAP Family feature is a cool way to see what POAPs people share between events. I looked at holders of my 50th Birthday POAP and I was surprised to see that there were 7 Cryptog’s HODLER’s who had my birthday POAP. The biggest were 13 of the 34 that also had my 51st Birthday POAP.

    This kind of graph analysis of POAPs is an interesting extension and a way to build connection.

    POAP as a Business

    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

    POAP Extensions

    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.

    Premium Features for POAP Issuers

    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.
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