A new revenue stream for NFT creators, curators, and collectors focused on likes.
This was originally posted on blog.yup.io and has been moved here.
TLDR; With the growth of NFTs and digital art, more and more users spend time browsing and curating NFTs. Currently, NFT creators and owners earn money on sale and resale. Yup proposes a new revenue stream for digital art creators AND curators we're calling NFT Curator Rewards. Curators earn YUP for liking and rating NFTs on their favorite platforms. Some of those rewards go to creators/owners, with on-chain attribution.
NFT (Non-Fungible Token) is an umbrella term for a digital asset that represents whole and unique items, virtual or physical. Unlike bitcoin or ether, they represent things, like art, real estate, in-game assets, limited edition goods like handbags or cassette tapes. They’re often referred to as crypto collectibles and are either used as a representation of a physical item, or a virtual asset.
The NFT Digital Art space is growing
NFTs are not a new idea, but they are now receiving a lot of attention because of the hype and excitement around blockchain.
For collectors, rare digital art could have a real value in a way that physical art just can’t. The “rare” part of the NFT is what makes it valuable. But for artists, the appeal of NFTs is that they might be able to monetize their work in a way that was never possible before. With blockchain, there is an opportunity to democratize art.
It's all happening quite quickly: $8m in NFT total sales on Ethereum this month, Christie's NFT auction, Lil Miquela selling a digital art piece for $82k, and online museums emerging.
Despite this, there is often skepticism regarding the scarce nature of a digital asset that can be copied. Often the larger value proposition is missed entirely: the liquid IP that an NFT represents. This concept is deeply explored in Jake Brukhman's work, which is highly recommended. He states:
In the future, purchasing an NFT will entitle the owner to certain rights related to its content: the right to own and keep; the right to sell, license, and lend; as well as the right to royalties, the right to confer reuse (i.e. “movie rights”), and so on.
Curator rewards will be one of the cash flows associated with visual and audio NFTs, leveraging their function as a right to royalties. Their IP represented in tokens allows for alignment between creators and curators.
Curation is Art
Curation has long been an art form, whether it be for museums or playlists or top 10 lists or stories. The idea of earning from them is not new, but it has yet been applied to NFT art. Additionally, users are starting to spend more time 'window shopping' NFTs rather than just purchasing. The experience resembles something more like Instagram or Pinterest than Ebay. While curators are important to the economy, the often miss out on direct income because of the difficulty of quantifying/renting engagement. We see Yup as a way to bridge this gap.
Introducing YUP Rewards for NFTs
In line with this movement, Yup presents NFT YUP Rewards as an additional incentive to buy, hold, and curate NFTs for the right to a portion of creator/curator rewards distributed through the Yup Protocol. When NFTs that you created, curated, or own earn YUP, you earn YUP.
How it works:
In its current form, the Yup Protocol rewards users in newly-minted YUP based on curation: when someone influential likes a piece of content across the web, the creator and previous curators earn YUP. A Twitter 'like', for example, is weighted based on the liker's influence, given a token value, and distributed to the tweet's author and all the likers that came before. This helps form a robust curator economy. (Learn More)
Benefits
NFT YUP rewards benefit collectors, creators, and curators in a manner that doesn't hinder the existing trading experience but provides an additional revenue stream that should benefit participants and inform collectors. Memes are often used an example where provenance would be a killer use-case. But the real value associated with provenance comes in royalties. With YUP as a recurring revenue stream, NFT creators, curators, and collectors will all be more incentivized and informed on the social value of the token.
NFT features
NFTs in Feeds
Starting this week, NFTs will be in Yup's feeds. Users can curate NFTs on their favorite marketplaces (Rarible, OpenSea, etc.) and see them in their profiles and feeds on Yup. Soon, we plan on adding an NFT-only feed for browsing and curating. Here's
Token Metadata
Currently, the information collected on each NFT is quite limited, but we plan to improve on this over time, adding subgraph ERC-721 metadata such as previous owners and bid price.
Beyond Art
Anything that can be tokenized, can be liked. Anything that can be liked can be rewarded. Other examples of NFTs we may see rate in the future could be in-game collectibles, domain names, or even songs. We're open to hearing any other ideas that the community has as to what we can reward users for rating.
We're looking to launch NFT YUP Rewards as early as Q1 of 2021 with as many credible artists, platforms, and integrations as possible. If you're at all looking to help us with this cause or participate as a contributor, please reach out to us here or join our discord.
A special thanks to Jake Brukhman, Blake Henderson, Alex Masmej, and many others!
Relevant Work: