Thoughts from CIO Matt Quirk
I’m getting discord DM’s regularly on generative NFT projects. Projects are hoping to mimic at least in part the success of Crypto Punks or the meme-based projects like Bored Ape Yacht Club. In their passion for a successful project, founders have started realizing that they need to give value to their users. They have developed legitimate communities that are interested in their content and promised them further utility, using the funding earned in the minting and secondary sales of the NFT to help drive demand for owning project created NFT’s.
Typically, projects offer several benefits to owning and transacting their NFT’s. These use cases are both beneficial to the community and to the overall project. These projects are being creative within the existing limitations of the ecosystem and technology. To list a few:
Contests There are contests for unique NFT and physical prizes that qualify participation by verifying ownership of project NFT’s. Recently I saw an NFT that if burned gives you a new Yamaha motorcycle. There was one winner, but it was an exclusive reward making a real-world benefit very much available.
Access I’ve seen discord setup so that access to specific contest channels in the server require ownership of the NFT. The NFT becomes your pass to exclusive content.
Collect The goal is to buy and complete a set of NFT’s and then as a reward you earn a rare, unique NFT.
Burn and Mint New NFT This takes the collect use case to another level as it allows you to combine two common cards and burn them into a rarer NFT while increasing the scarcity of other instances of the burned NFT’s.
Comic Book Projects are looking to create digital comic series based on the content they have created, improving their brand, creating a backstory, and ideally this would drive NFT demand within their project.
Access to Live Events Projects have begun granting access to live events if you can verify ownership. This type of reward starts to feel like your part of an exclusive club. In some cases, projects will verify a collector score that qualifies you for these more exceptional rewards.
Creators deserve credit for attempting to add utility in such innovative ways. With all of this, it still feels something more is needed from and for these communities. There is still a sense of limitation of what you can do with the tokens. Some NFT’s will stand on their own as simply visual art. Others will make you feel part of an exclusive club. I don’t want to diminish these cases, but they tend towards exclusivity. While the sense of belonging to an exclusive club is super exciting, in many cases it is also unobtainable for the average NFT collector. Only the most savvy, lucky and early adopters have achieved this status. It all becomes more accessible when using NFT’s is fun, social and that enable massive interactions. Some projects have begun promising a game with the content that is created and investing in the development. I think this is one of the ultimate use cases. However, it is not a simple task. There is great opportunity for new gaming innovation in tandem with the great content being released. Dapper Labs with their licensed NBA Topshot product has promised such a product, and they certainly have the funding to deliver. Smaller projects will be more challenged, and we hope to meet this need through a customizable metaverse that is first a game, and second a 3D environment for NFT’s.
Metaverse
In one of our recent discussions internally developing Genesis, Jen Dalby, COO at GAME Credits, mentioned the use case of making our Genesis worlds available to these communities and offering them their own metaverse. We had always centered on a very democratized approach to this metaverse. We envisioned anyone or any project would be enabled to create a world of their own, and any individual could join one or more communities that had their own metaverses. But this time, when Jen mentioned it, the possibilities clicked for me even further, probably because I was dabbling in buying these generative NFTs while in the back of my mind evaluating what I get out of ownership. For each community, our intent and hope is that creating this metaverse will be as simple and streamlined as starting a new Discord server. It can be configured and setup the way you want it to support your gaming and social goals. Using quests, events, land ownership and having it scale to the size of your project. On top of that, the possibility of world-to-world interactions, partnerships and events is quite exciting. For example, maybe in the future we setup a world-spanning Olympics where community members from many different projects come and participate in fun party or sports games. The generative NFT’s in combination with a fully functional and customizable metaverse, creates endless possibilities of new social games, where these NFT’s maintain their current use cases, while adding another dimension enabling them to be in-game content.
In considering this, some questions might arise about the process, how do you get your Genesis world started. It’s early on, but we are setting up the economics for this very thing. We encourage you to get involved and be a part. Some of you might remember what it was like when Ethereum caught on and the number of new projects and ideas that erupted was staggering. We see Genesis as the Ethereum of metaverses in the sense that anyone can bring their content and community and begin to develop a social game that is tailored to the goals of their community. Our goal with the genesis token is to essentially fund and drive the development of individual worlds. World share sales will help fund global development of tools, the basic questing system, and 3D clients on multiple platforms. Land sales for an individual world will help drive specific world development and customization (similar to how Ethereum allowed you to mint a custom ERC20 token and start your own project, we are allowing communities to take advantage of land sales to help fund and develop their own metaverse).
