What Are POAPs and Why Are They Important?
one37pm.com
one37pm.com
Emphasis mine.
This sentence made me physically shudder. Sounds like the worst kind of fanatical consumerism and conspicuous consumption. Oh, and you can also sell them - so in what way do they provide any kind of proof of your "journey throughout life"? Sounds like they will mostly provide proof you have money - like most crypto assets.
> The most exciting aspect of POAP for several of us is that it enables social interactions that are otherwise outright impossible.
What these social interactions are is left as an exercise for the reader, I guess.
Edit:
> As a collector, your POAPs are a record of your life's greatest moments and digitized into a collectible and trackable token.
God help me if my life's greatest moments involve attending some kind of conference, scanning QR codes, and "engaging" with "brands". This reads like parody.
So it's neat. I ignore the over the top marketing, and will collect more in the future if it's practically zero extra effort to do so.
If you bought premium tickets to a show, often you would get placed into VIP list with the venue and/or artist. Venue perks included contact with a VIP manager that could help lock in seating pre-sale, occasionally get discounts, if you asked, and other perks.
It's in the venue's interest to KYC and maintain these higher value relationships. And if you don't patronize them for a period they'll stop reaching out or providing access.
'Might still exist, but my experience was prior.
Event organisers could provide attendance proof with their own contract/address and you'd still have a proof of attendance as long as the organization is verifiably linked to the contract/transaction issuer.
You then only need a database (easily shareable) of verified event organizers to be able to verify anyone event attendance history.
All the fluff on top of the attendance verification mechanism provided by this company doesn't depend on the blockchain at all.
> If you have ever saved one of your ticket stubs from an event or perhaps your favorite vacation, then you understand the concept of POAPs.
It's a goddamn memento, why does anyone give a shit about it enough to put it on the blockchain
> Except, POAPs allow you to prove your attendance thanks to blockchain technology and store all your badges in one secure location.
I just, what the fuck? Are people so self-conscious that they have to "prove" they attended a event?
Where I work, you get "badges" - little icons - that show up on your corporate profile for various things you do, writing some number of lines of some language, attending some training, joining some mailing list, etc. Anyone can make a badge and give it to anyone. It's just a big public (inside the company) database. It's all very silly and trivial and nobody "gives a shit" about these badges. And yet they still exist and people still create new ones.
I don't see any reason throwing this same kind of thing on a public blockchain is any more silly than this.
But maybe the criticism is that (as is often the case in the crypto world) this is being presented / talked about / sold as some kind of next huge serious thing. If that's the criticism, then I'm right there with you. But if the criticism is just "this is pretty silly", well, lots of stuff is, so what.
I swear, if all the crypto people would just take a step back and take a good long look at what they are doing, graphics card prices would be back to normal in 4 weeks.
A POAP could just be a signed message by the event organizer. It barely uses the capabilities of general purpose turing-complete(ish) blockchains.
It was extremely difficult to claim (terrible UX), ran on a side chain because it would cost $70 to process on chain, and is currently worth $0.08.
It’s super, super boring. I have zero further interest in this project. I guess you can admire my NFT.
Pretty neat utility concept. I'm currently working with this service to add interactivity with other NFTs.
I did have a poor experience setting up test events, but I think this is on their middle layer and hopefully can get cleaned up. Also annoying that the token points back to their API for full metadata.
This "company" might not be the winner, but the idea of POAP is promising both IRL & metaverse.
I personally have more faith in utility NFT than "art".
Because all blockchain tech is about creating new types of digital assets that can be bought and sold. The specifics vary, but the whole field is about financializing things. Why else would you design POAPs - a supposed proof of life experiences - in a way where they can be bought and sold?
I just found the gravitation to it's value is interesting. With that thinking, does one think about the worth of their ticket stub after spending $70 on concert tickets?
When I had a conversation with someone who traded lehman positions out of administration profitably years after its collapse and the issues that preceded that with JPMs centralized collateral management procedures and their interest in various decentralized analogues in DeFi that could replace it, its good that they are not looking to seek to convince you.
When I had a conversation with someone who traded interest rate derivatives for a big bank for 13 years and their take on how DEX liquidity pools could be a serious contender for ways how people from tradfi can hedge various forms of risk on chain (esp when those markets break down in various places around the world for various reasons [not limited to regulatory reasons incentivizing breakdowns of a particular market]), its good that they are not looking to convince you.
When I did some work for a nigerian fintech that was able to bypass a lot of crappy local/cross boarder payments infrastructure by leveraging crypto markets in order to help provide access to financing/liquidity and settlement infrastructure for local commodities traders and producers to the global market for their goods, its good that they are not looking to convince you.
The great thing about DAGs/blockchains/DLTs is that people don't have to use them for things if they don't want (provided that they have access to centralized/federated alternatives, and actually trust that their incentives are aligned with their own). I don't have to give a shit about random POAPs or NFTs while being able to still use various chains at the same time as others who are only interested in various chains for doing stuff with POAPs or NFTs who dont give a shit about disintermediaton of various things that go overlooked, even by central bankers (especially if they have been relegated to footnotes in various publicly accessable reports that often go unread by the public at large), in tradfi.
For example, traders are OK with centralized companies, but the existing ones are burdened by legacy and regulatory reasons... So a new company which calls itself blockchain-based can evade all those and provide superior experience.
In other words, if you were designing new financial service, and you had the magical power to get regulators off your back and banks to cooperate, what would you choose? Centralized or blockchain based?
Partly (and not really limited to a small team, any one can join a community and contribute to a protocol or build upon it with a protocol of their own with the public abi's of the contracts), but another part missing here is that the financial system as centralized as it is, is still pretty fractured and opaque with various hidden ledgers, hidden risk management systems and hidden counter parties all over the place who don't necessarily trust one another and one doesn't really have any way to get any insight to what risk looks like overall between them (and partly because the entities want to capture the value by being in between the users) from the perspective of the public.
> regulators off your back and banks to cooperate,
It's more than about just regulators, its about users having a say over how every actor can engage with a system. If one address starts making transactions that abuse its position with a protocol (via governance or excessive risk taking within the protocol), users can fork the code, make needed changes to mitigate against such, and withdraw their capital from one protocol and use another easily with the new changes. The users themselves can capture the value while also using the system.
> what would you choose? Centralized or blockchain based?
With permissionless DLTs, you can see credit build up in real time with all counter parties involved with a protocol in a way you cannot with the existing financial system without the need for regulations, that __may__ serve, at best in the short/medium and long term interest of users/counterparties (most of the time, regulations end up really only enabling incumbents to come up with better ways to hide how risk builds up while stifling other competitors out of the market, even if initially they end up making things transparent for some aspects of the financial system). And because of the lack of trust upfront, most user will not want to use a protocol that does not open source/verify its contracts on chain.
With centralized systems in jurisdictions with lesser regulations (i.e caymans, bahamas, etc), the opposite is the case where you have even more opacity into operations and very little incentive to be open about it with ones users or counter parties (think something like FRAX/DAI/FEI [where one can see collateralization in real time on chain with the various assets and the leverage] vs USDT/USDC [one has to trust them at their word or spend resources threatening legal action that may at best on show a snapshot of what constitutes is collateral at any given time, and they have no incentive to share their code for how the manage their operations and risk]).
In a perfect world, where everyone could trust each other (and the banks) to be open and honest all the time with their dealings while allowing for some semblance of psuedoanonymity for those who want it, allow potentially anyone to use such even if some individuals may not like another for whatever reasons that have nothing to do with the system of transaction themselves, write code and systems that are interoperable and easy to build on by others, I would prefer centralized. But that world is a pipe dream.
Well, there isn't any particular way, I just started looking at traditional startups on angel list that were making/doing things related to crypto, then quickly became interested in decentralized uncollateralized algorithmic stablecoins and started contributing with pull requests and community discussions. From there I just followed my own interests.
> What are the trends, top dApps and sites, Discord servers?
You'd cant go wrong familiarizing yourself with things like decentralized exchanges, decentralized lending (that run the gambit from over collateralized to uncollateralized) protocols, stable coins of various designs (decentralized or not) and concepts like staking, yield farming, liquidity pools, oracles, flash loans. With those terms, should be enough for you to DYOR and see if anything interests you to dig deeper (its ok if non of it does).
> How do you follow the meta?
I don't. I narrow in on the topics that most interest me from my experience working in tradfi and look for analogues in defi, I look for ways defi can make the barriers to do such things accessible to people that don't work on bank desks.
>It’s hard to find the signal when crypto and DeFi by proxy are already so spammy and noisy.
Yeah, i can understand that may be the case when one is mostly looking for "top" stuff and not topics/communities that may genuinely interest them (i.e. have a particular finance topic in mind) that people are trying to do in a decentralized way.
These are not mutually exclusive. I just want to find high-quality projects that interest me, which may or may not be already popular/successful. It’s hard to navigate the spaces sometimes because it’s hard to know the status quo. I can’t even determine the lay of the land because of filter bubbles.
Didn't say they were.
> I just want to find high-quality projects
Of course everyone does, but one won't be able to tell the difference at first, and so its best to jump in on any project related to a particular field of interest, start discussing/asking questions with people in those communities (without trying to allocate any of your financial capital), start analyzing the contracts code, and you'll slowly find out about more projects/ideas/concepts.
> It’s hard to navigate the spaces sometimes because it’s hard to know the status quo.
Well, what the status quo is isn't really important in the exploratory stages, because no matter where you land, people may have different opinions on what that even is and it will be up to you to determine what's the best course of action for yourself.
That's powerful and encourages community members to participate early, rather than buying on secondary market.
First, why make POAPs instead of just making your own NFT? On one hand, what they are doing is just making it really easy to make your "proof I was at this event" NFT, so it's a product play in that sense. The have a pretty good mobile app now that makes it super easy to claim these tokens by scanning QR codes at events or using a secret phrase, among other methods.
But, they also are trying to establish a brand of legitimacy. The idea is POAP is trying to make sure people are actually only getting POAPs for events they actually do attend, which is harder than it sounds.
How are they used? Well, for example, Bankless Podcast (a podcast about crypto finance) started a DAO and distributed a bunch of the initial token supply to fans that have been with them for years. One of the metrics they used for identifying these fans was POAP tokens given to them when they attended certain events or proved they were avid listeners of the podcast.
POAPs are used a decent bit for initial distributions like this, so you can imagine there are whole hoards of people that are "POAP hunters" and literally just scour the internet trying to acquire improperly-secured token drops in hopes of receiving tokens in the future in these distributions (I've experienced these myself for a POAP we did for The DAOly Post newsletter at my company). POAP has recently begun clamping down on this and is being more strict about how these tokens can be claimed, with the idea being you can trust POAP tokens will only be claimed by true fans/attendees.
I hope that clears up confusion on why POAPs vs making your own NFT, and what the use for them is. A good way to think of them is like conference badges: idk about you guys, but I have a whole collection from all the tech conferences I attended. So they are basically trophies, but they can also serve as sort of "markers" to identify fans, or social data in the massive social graph that is the blockchain.
For those using the "this could just be a database, blockchain is pointless" argument, that would take me longer to explain and there's tons of material on that out there. Short version is: it's all about interoperability and composability. Blockchains are just databases that are interoperable by default, so instead of depending on companies being good at building external APIs, or being incentivized to do so, they just have them by default and people can build on top of them.