POAP
General posts about designing and distributing POAP tokens. I talk about creating commemorative POAPs for trips, events like Tech Connect and interviews with artists behind NFT collections, along with musings on the evolving multi‑chain ecosystem.
- Easy to parse list of upcoming community events
- No more than three relevant links to news about the tech community
- Community Supporter Highlight, randomly share a bio about one of the community supporters each issue
- Project Highlights from Community Supporters to submit and share a project (personal, hobby, business) that they would like to highlight for everyone
- 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.
- 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
- White Label claim page
- Design services, POAP specific look
- Priority support, will hit your deadline
- Assistance with claim code distribution
- Everything in POAP Pro.
- 2 Studio events a year included.
- Would need something more.
- PAOP Pro for free
- 1 Studio events a year
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Money
- DeFi
- Identity
- DAOs
- Hybrid Apps
Isolating Crypto Assets and Access
For the last couple of years I’ve done all of my Ethereum activities using my thingelstad.eth address with the associated identity. I’ve used this for storing value, holding NFTs, collecting POAPs, and everything else. I decided that it was time to create some isolation of access and identity.
I’m still using thingelstad.eth as my primary address and means of authenticating with various services. It also holds a number of my NFTs and crypto assets. But I’ve also now created two activity-specific addresses.
mint.thingelstad.eth is the address that I’m using specifically just to mint NFTs. When you mint NFTs you have to authenticate with a new smart contract and usually provide some form of limited access to your assets. By using a dedicated address just for minting I can limit the risk of a malicious smart contract.
vault.thingelstad.eth is the reverse of the minting address. This address is specifically to hold NFTs or other assets that I have no intent of selling or transferring. This address will never be used to authenticate to any website. All activities here will be done using wallet transfers.
Additionally, I decided to create some specific addresses for applications that I use a lot. This was inspired in part from Vitalik’s conclusion:
That said, it is my view that wallets should start moving toward a more natively multi-address model (eg. creating a new address for each application you interact with could be one option) for other privacy-related reasons as well.
I love the idea of wallets automatically associating a unique address with each application. I do this today by using a masked email addresses with Fastmail and passwords managed by 1Password.
ens.thingelstad.eth is the address I’m using to hold my Ethereum Name Service registrations. ENS has built in capability for one address to register a name, and the control of that name to be delegated. So all of my 21 registered ENS names are now owned by this address, and control of them is delegated to thingelstad.eth. The only app that will ever connect to this address is ENS itself, which protects my name registrations from malicious actors.
POAP.thingelstad.eth is an address I’ve made just for collecting POAP tokens. I currently hold 90 different POAP tokens in this address. This allows me to have a specific identity and address just for POAP usage. Most activity for this address is on Gnosis Chain since that is what POAP uses natively.
niftyink.thingelstad.eth is an address just for using Nifty Ink. I’ve collected 736 “inks” on this site and now I have them isolated into an address that I only use for that purpose. 🤩 This is again a way to limit access from a malicious smart contract.
Technically I also have reddit.thingelstad.eth but was created by necessity since Reddit Vaults are managed differently. However, it serves the same pattern as the other application specific addresses.
Extending the Minnestar Community Supporter Program
In a recent conversation with Minnestar Executive Director Maria Boland Ploessl I was very pleased to hear about the amazing growth of the Minnestar Community Supporter program. Community Supporters were something that we launched when I was on the board of Minnestar to create an opportunity for individuals to support Minnebar and Minnedemo, in addition to companies. It was always significant, even on the first year, but it has grown a lot in recent years. The biggest part of that growth has been the structured year-end giving program which I was happy to be a matching supporter of this year.
The growth is awesome, but the program itself hasn’t changed materially since the launch. The primary benefit of being a Community Supporter is that you are guaranteed a ticket to the highly in-demand events that Minnestar hosts. That is a great benefit, but I’ve always wondered what more could be done for this great group of people that are helping support our technology community. Particularly what could be done outside of events.
In my opinion, being a Community Supporter of Minnestar should be table stakes for any technology leader in the region. It should be the most direct way to give back to the technology community we are all part of, and provide meaningful value to the supporter individually. I think supporting the events and community is solid, but the only meaningful value to the individual is a guaranteed ticket.
So what more could be done to grow the program? Some ideas…
Create Connection
People that become Community Supporters are a pretty special and fun group. Creating more connection in that group could be incredibly valuable. This could be done with in two phases.
First, launch an every-other week newsletter just for Community Supporters. This newsletter could include:
The newsletter could be the whole thing, but if there is an increase in engagement a forum for Community Supporters could get traction. I specifically do not mean Slack or Discord. Those are far too high engagement. A platform like Discourse seems much better suited to this. I think Minnestar could benefit from a Discourse like platform for everything, with Community Supporters being a member only section.
Membership
There needs to be more ways to show a persons affiliation with Minnestar, and recognize that support. I’ve been a Minnesota Public Radio member since 1995. How do I know that? My member card says it. I’ve been an Electronic Frontier Foundation member since 2010. It’s on my member card.
First step of this should be to issue an actual Minnestar Community Supporter member card. Cards have to be printed, they expire, etc. There is effort to do this but it gives me something to carry with me and show my membership.
This should also be extended into the digital world with POAP tokens. There should be a POAP for each year given to community supporters. Over the years, you collect each yearly POAP.
This would also be an opportunity to highlight the work of a local artist and create a uniquely designed card and token each year that isn’t just membership, but something that people feel like collecting.
I’ve been a Community Supporter member since the program started, but I have no idea how long that has been!
Input & Direction
Community Supporters as a group could be given the opportunity to have input on Minnestar activities. As a group votes could be taken. Thought would have to be given on what the votes are on. There is a Minnestar Board and various committees, and they should continue to do what they do. But there could be decisions that the community supporters are asked to give a vote on.
I had long thought that it would be really great for one of the Minnestar board seats to be a Community Supporter seat. In this case, the Community Supporters would elect amongst themselves one member that would represent them on the board. This could be facilitated via the forum above, with members raising their hands to serve and make their case followed by an official voting period.
This would lend itself exceptionally well to a Minnestar DAO, with membership gated via the Community Supporter POAP that you receive each year.
Ecosystem Benefits
It would be interesting to explore ways that other organizations in the technology community may want to extend benefit to Community Supporters of Minnestar. This is one of the key reasons to create Membership with a card and a token. Perhaps Twin Cities Startup Week would offer some unique opportunity. Or Tech.MN give a discount on membership. Or early access to certain events.
This would require that Minnestar reach out to have conversations around this with other events, and require proof of being a Community Supporter without access to Minnestar resources. I think this could work, and may be welcome from other organizations as well.
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
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
I think you could then have a service to provide a “full service” experience for the issuer.
POAP Studio - $500/event, require Pro subscription
And then you could turn both the Pro and Studio option into a subscription offering.
POAP for Business - $100/mo or $1,000/yr
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
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.
Find Unique Addresses for Multiple POAP Events
How do you get a list of unique addresses that have claimed any set of POAPs?
Each POAP event allows you to download a CSV file that has the addresses that claimed it, along with other data. Download all the CSV files into a directory. Now, assuming you are on Unix-like system, the rest is pretty easy.
First put all the CSVs together in one file. The download from POAP is missing a trailing newline, so loop in the shell.
for file in *.csv; do
for> cat $file >> combined.csv
for> echo "" >> combined.csv
for> done
Now lets spit the second column, the address, into another file. awk does this well.
awk -F "\"*,\"*" '{print $2}' combined.csv > addresses.txt
Now the classic sort and uniq combination will give us what we want.
cat addresses.txt| sort | uniq > addresses-uniq.txt
And you have your list!
I’ve created 27 POAP events that have had 630 tokens claimed from 354 unique addresses. Art for 4 of them from Poapathon. I 💚 POAP! Pretty cool!
PS: I’m planning a fun surprise for those 354 people. 😊🎁
Crypto in Three Words
While driving around on some errands I was yammering about something crypto related with the family. This is when they patiently listen a bit, and then change the subject back to something else when I leave a break in the conversation.
This time though my break was met with a question from my daughter. “Dad, describe crypto in three words or less.” I’m going to ignore the presumed verbosity in limiting me to three words. I decided to embrace the challenge.
I thought for a bit and hit on the three words:
Common Digital Ownership
I suspect that these are not the three words that everyone would come up with. So, let me give some context.
Digital
Let’s start in the middle. It is very clear that the digital world is continuing to grow in significance for our lives. Certainly the amount of time we spend online has increased significantly over the last decade. But that is just the beginning. Nearly every part of our life now involves some form of digital interaction. We do our banking digitally. We watch nearly all of our entertainment and news digitally. We keep track of our favorite sports digitally. We book our restaurant reservations, haircuts, Doctor visits, and everything else digitally.
With every passing day the digital world becomes increasingly important to everything we do. In fact, many of us now have a digital identity that is part of our overall identity.
In short, we need to care and pay attention to our digital experiences.
Ownership
As digital becomes an ever increasing part of our life there are concepts that are obvious in the real world but are very complicated in the digital world. Ownership is one of those.
Since the beginning of computing, technology has made it increasingly cheaper to make perfect copies of anything. In fact, so cheap that we could consider it free. If I have a song or a photo, I can make copies forever for nearly no cost.
In the real world we like to say that “possession is 9/10ths of the law”. Mostly, if I physically have an object, more than likely I own it as well. This is patently not true in the digital world.
I could have an application, an image, a song, or any number of different things that I have gotten digitally but not own any of them. However, ownership is still important, particularly as more of our life happens online.
There have been workarounds. When we buy software now we get a long string of random characters that is a license key for us to use that software. That is a form of asserting ownership. I could embed into the IPTC and EXIF metadata for a photo a copyright statement to assert ownership. But none of these have the same qualities of actually possessing something, like if I have a hammer in my house. It is almost certainly my hammer. Or my neighbor is missing a hammer.
Crypto gives us a means of asserting, verifying, and proving ownership. In fact, enables the first digital asset that cannot be copied at any cost.
This ownership could be of anything. It could prove that you own some Bitcoin or Ethereum. It could prove that you own an NFT that represents the right to use a piece of software. It could be a certificate that proves you have a degree from a certain college. It could be the literal digital file for a song that you have ownership of. It could be a POAP that proves you were at my cabin one summer.
I believe that being able to own things, and transfer that ownership, is an important feature of our digital world.
Common
The first word is last because I want to first establish that the digital world is critically important, and then second that ownership is an important feature of the world that should be represented in that digital world.
It could be argued that we have this feature already. In fact, if I login to the iTunes Store and buy a DRM-free song, I have ownership of that song. Or at least I do as long as iTunes agrees with me. If I buy an eBook on Amazon I think I sort of own that book, although I really don’t since they have recalled books that people have purchased.
I believe it is vitally important that we have a way of owning digital assets that is independent of corporations and governments, relying on something akin to “the commons” as much as possible.
Common wasn’t the first world that came to mind here. First was “decentralized” which I think is a fine word, but it is a how more than a why. Plus it’s a $5 technical word that most people will scratch their heads about. Yes decentralized is important, but more important is that it is decentralized in “the commons”, meaning average people running average infrastructure to make this service work.
The other word I liked was “public”. I think that works well too, but I worry about potential interpretation as a government service. Ownership must be done without corporations, non-profits, the government, or any other finite “entity”.
Important to “common” is the legitimacy that comes along with it. There is a common argument that critics of crypto make, that blockchains are just a database, and a bad one at that. Blockchain isn’t a database, because it has legitimacy as a feature. A database only gets legitimacy from the organization that runs it, companies or governments. For us to have ownership that is more akin to the hammer being in my house, it needs to be legitimate and owned as a common capability.
✧✧✧
Common Digital Ownership
This is the foundational argument that I would make for crypto. There are a near infinite number of things that can be built on Common Digital Ownership, but the core is simple. We shouldn’t rely on corporations or governments granting us the right to own digital things. We need to be able to create, own, share, transfer, and sell things completely on our own in the digital space. Just like we can in real life right now.
What in Ethereum ecosystem excites me
This was originally published in Weekly Thing #237 as the featured link, but I’m also publishing it here for easy reference.
As the creator of Ethereum I was very interested in reading about Vitalik Buterin’s take on what he is excited about in the space. While obviously being a promoter of Ethereum, Vitalik is also a reasonable critic and has a track record of highlighting problems or limitations. He starts with that…
We’ve also come closer to identifying fundamental limits of the space. Many DAOs have had a fair chance with an enthusiastic audience willing to participate in them despite the inconveniences and fees, and many have underperformed. Industrial supply-chain applications have not gone anywhere. Decentralized Amazon on the blockchain has not happened. But it’s also a world where we have seen genuine and growing adoption of a few key applications that are meeting people’s real needs - and those are the applications that we need to focus on.
Hence my change in perspective: my excitement about Ethereum is now no longer based in the potential for undiscovered unknowns, but rather in a few specific categories of applications that are proving themselves already, and are only getting stronger.
Many people (including me!) have said that blockchain is a solution looking for a problem. I think that was a fair assessment a number of years ago. The space has evolved in significant ways, which is partly why I prefer to refer to the solution space as “crypto”, and not blockchain. I tend to not love the Web3 term either, as it is often placed in opposition to Web2 which is incorrect in my opinion. My own “tinkering” in the space has been to be a user, a builder, and see what I can do with it in my own hands.
Summary of Buterin’s list:
My list would be the same, but I would probably change the order with Identity being on the top.
Some thoughts of mine using Vitalik’s list:
Money
Money will be digital. I think we are well beyond the tipping point on this. I don’t think paper money should disappear, but having digital cash is too powerful to ignore. The innovation here will continue to happen in smaller and less developed economies, but will come everywhere.
Unlike wealthy countries like the United States, where financial transactions are easy to make and 8% inflation is considered extreme, in Argentina and many other countries around the world, links to global financial systems are more limited and extreme inflation is a reality every day.
I think bound to this future is a multi-currency world. Something that will be new as well to wealthy countries. The power to be able to move a variety of currencies directly wherever I want is huge. Simple stuff, like paying for a designer directly with a designer in another country by sending USD Coin with no intermediary is incredible. Stablecoins are also a critical unlock here to allow for more average, everyday transactions. Vitalik’s overview of different types of stablecoins was interesting to me and got me looking at RAI closer.
My hope and belief here is that this is all additive. It isn’t a replacement, but in addition to. Will credit cards go away? No, they provide a debt tool and protection against fraud since the funds move slowly.
Blending fiat and digital, along with a variety of stablecoins as well as traded currencies, will allow people to use different tools for different jobs, and give more freedom and choice to how we transact with others.
DeFi
An observation about finance that isn’t limited to crypto. It tends to get wildly complex and have hidden leverage that results in unsustainable returns, that eventually blowup. We’ve seen this in DeFi, we’ve also seen it in traditional finance. We’ve also seen a ton of fraud in DeFi, which we’ve also seen in traditional finance.
The use cases Vitalik lists here are interesting. I would add to them that access to simple financial capabilities, particularly debt, via smart contracts is a boring but very powerful tool.
I’ve been lending for 15 years on Kiva and have ben part of 258 loans so far. I’m a fan of Kiva and the basic thesis of microlending. However, it is a complete and total black box. I have to trust Kiva, and their field partners, and just cross my fingers that this all works. This entire thing could be rebuilt in so many better ways.
Another good example here is Endaoment which I used to create a donor advised fund on-chain and fund in minutes using my browser.
The key with this space is to keep it boring and simple.
Identity
How the crypto ecosystem has approached identity is surprisingly one of my very favorite things. It is important to note that in crypto identity is often aligned with a wallet, and you can have any number of wallets. I love the fact that you can build up multiple identities and could even bind those all to one person. The ecosystem is the win here.
When I log on to Blockscan chat, I sign in with Ethereum. This means that I am immediately visible as vitalik.eth (my ENS name) to anyone I chat with. In the future, to fight spam, Blockscan chat could “verify” accounts by looking at on-chain activity or POAPs. The lowest tier would simply be to verify that the account has sent or been the recipient in at least one on-chain transaction (as that requires paying fees). A higher level of verification could involve checking for balances of specific tokens, ownership of specific POAPs, a proof-of-personhood profile, or a meta-aggregator like Gitcoin Passport.
I like what Reddit is doing here as well. Reddit is slowly moving avatars and their own reputation system into crypto, and doing it with either a wallet that they manage for you or you can provide your own.
You can see reputation forming here with a combination of systems like Reddit Karma, and then layering on POAP tokens as well.
If you take a look at the POAPs that I have it gives you a clear sense of me, at least in some dimensions of my life.
I agree with Vitalik’s assertion that Privacy is a key issue that has to be addressed here. However, I would put user experience even higher, which isn’t on his list. This stuff is wonderful for geeks, but is far too difficult for average users to pull off. I think Rainbow is ahead of the pack here. Using Rainbow you can buy an ENS name right in your wallet and manage your profile, in addition to seeing your various POAPs.
Additional to identity, I think we are going to see attestation added here through signing and other cryptographic proof. How do you know that the text you are reading was actually written by me? Well, you can trust that nobody was in the middle. But if I digitally sign it with my thingelstad.eth wallet, and you can attest that wallet is me, you can know for sure.
DAOs
I think there is a lot of potential in DAOs. I’ve described them as a means of organization collective action. Vitalik’s definition is more specific.
Most generally, a DAO is a smart contract that is meant to represent a structure of ownership or control over some asset or process.
I’m a token-holder in multiple DAOs, mostly in the Noun ecosystem but also in Ukraine DAO, Elf DAO, and others. For me DAOs have been filled with as much disappointment as excitement, but I still think there is a huge potential here.
Vitalik’s thoughts on DAOs are much deeper than my own. I would like to consider small DAOs and how that could enable new things.
My favorite DAO example would be a neighborhood solar collector. Using a DAO you could remove much of the trust and governance requirements. if 80% of the households in a neighborhood wanted to collectively setup a solar collector, a DAO could be created to hold the treasury, pay for the installation, provide maintenance, take votes on improvements and changes, and pay the members out as needed. That could be a big enabler of “collective action”.
My bad taste with DAOs today is that nearly all of them vote with tokens, and that means that many DAOs are controlled by a small number of mega token holders. LilNouns DAO, which I have 2 of, is dominated by a handful of people that hold large collections and they effectively control the votes. Governance models need to evolve greatly for DAOs.
Hybrid Apps
Using crypto technology to solve just part of the solution for an existing service is a great use case. I think these will lag though as they need significant adoption of crypto via primary use cases to power these secondary ones.
In conclusion, this list is what makes me excited about the Ethereum landscape. There are other valuable things happening in crypto, but these use cases have a lot of potential, and are not easily solved using other approaches.
I love that This Week in POAP highlighted our Things 4 Good Fall Fundraiser POAP in the Nov 15 edition! ❤️
“POAPs for good: a POAP at a family fundraiser.”