Dear Community,

Since the summer 2021, I’ve been in love with the NFT space and its developments. During that time, I also joined the KOIOS Blockchain & Cryptocurrencies minor (30 ECTS), I developed a proof of concept for the Titan NFT. KOIOS was interested in bringing me on board, so I quickly joined their tech team.

NFTs are, in my opinion, a great way to start and keep a community engaged with the project. So in this post, I’ll share my idea to bring the KOIOS platform to a new level with the involvement of NFTs.

1. Backstory & Thesis

Since early May, I have been doing my thesis at KOIOS with success. I’ve received positive outlooks from my thesis examiner, mentors and parts of the community.

1.1 Thesis subject

My thesis involves bringing use cases to the KOIOS platform that uses blockchain technology. The primary goal of the thesis and KOIOS is to grow more engagement in the community.

As KOIOS states:

“KOIOS aims to become a worldwide community with a platform where talent can learn, earn and return. The focus is on the community."

1.2 Thesis progress

I've been researching NFTs and their use cases, especially some thriving NFT communities. I also analyzed their on-chain statistics using Nansen.

Projects I researched:

• Bored Ape Yacht Club
• CloneX - X Takashi Murakami
• Proof Collective / Moonbirds
• Nanopass / Phantom Network

I found some interesting similarities and innovations to attain and engage a community.

“Utility is king”

The utility is a crucial factor for an NFT because people want to be able to use the NFT. Art only is not enough for a community-centric NFT. Forms of utility that successfully worked are:

• IP Ownership
• Exclusive access
• Gamification

So to conclude, an NFT needs utility to attain interest from the community.

2. The proposal

For my thesis, I need to gather as much input from the community. Nor are we longer a centralized group of people. Your input matters here. Feel free to DM me on discord if you have any additions or ideas:

PauwCrypto#9387

2.1 The idea

The general idea is to develop an NFT extension to the KOIOS platform. The extension would allow new students that follow the minor to claim a blank NFT at the beginning of their journey. This can also be expanded to old students or non-students.

Learners can shape their NFT by adding other layers or upgrading existent ones. This blank NFT is dynamic, meaning you can evolve its look during your journey. A customizable NFT following your learning journey. How cool would that be?! An achievement system, but in the form of NFTs.

2.2 An example

John Doe is a student at The Hague University of Applied Sciences and chooses to follow the 30 ECTS minor in Blockchain & Cryptocurrencies. He has 0 knowledge of blockchains.

During the onboarding of the new students, they are required to create a MetaMask wallet and register their public key with the tutors. Since the existence of MetaMask, this has been done for every minor so far. 

After wallets are submitted to the platform, John can go to the website, connect his wallet and press a claim NFT button. This will give John a blank NFT. The image can be seen below. DON’T WORRY THIS IS NOT THE FINAL ART, JUST A QUICK SIMPLE DRAFT 😅

John is happy with his first NFT but wants to make it prettier. By successfully passing Level 1 of the blockchain program, John can claim another NFT. The NFT acts as a sort of skin for his NFT (passing level 1 gives you the ability to claim a bronze skin). Using the web interface, John can request an upgrade for his NFT. The system checks if John has the skin and updates the image for John's blank NFT.

This was one example of an upgradable NFT, but much more could be added. For example, we could have separate NFTs that can only be attained by contributing to the community or the platform, not just for passing the minor. In addition, we could attach specific statistics in terms of NFT Power to each trait (like Pokémon). The further you evolve your NFT, the higher on a future leaderboard you sit.

What I've explained above could be seen as gamification of the minor and platform to gain more engagement. It increases the learning experience for students, adds more fun, and could also lead to more contributions to the KOIOS community during or after students finish their courses. This will help and grow the community but also teaches new students how certain things work when interacting with smart contracts and wallets through a web UI.

3. Raw information

This section will go over some raw information regarding building this out.

3.1 Technical details NFT

• We use ERC-721 for the blank NFT (Your blank NFT that you start with is soulbound and unique to you)
• We will use ERC-1155 for the upgrades (for example, 100 students could own the "passed minor certificate NFT")
• NFTs will be non-transferable (it's an achievement for you, the student only). Perhaps in time, transferable and tradeable components could be added.

3.2 Costs

A critical factor of a DAO is determining costs for development. Developing and deploying costs (creation costs) and the costs to the mint for community members (usage costs).

• The launch of the NFTs will be on Polygon. This is an alternative EVM-compatible side-chain where transactions only cost cents.
• There will be a faucet that generous community members have filled with donations (or could be filled with some DAO funds). This allows first-time blockchain users to claim their first $MATIC for transactional purposes.
• Regarding development costs, I'll do this for free in terms of $. It's for my thesis assignment as I'm graduating in Software Engineering 😎. However, I want to propose a reward for developing the concept (as discussed with other Titans). Since we are a DAO with its own token, $TITAN tokens seem like a good reward 🤭. I have been told by other community members that 10 $TITAN tokens per month are reasonable. So to conclude, I would ask for a total reward of 40 $TITAN tokens. Payments are to be made in blocks of 25% / 10 $TITAN per month, as long as I show progress to the community.

3.3 Timeline

Developing this use case will require some time. Still, it is possible to have a minimum viable product up and running by the beginning of October. So, I will start this assignment in early July. After initial research.

3.4 Wireframes

In this section I will be showing some wireframes of the extension that will be developed (these are raw wireframes and are not final). They are meant to give you, the reader, a glance at whats going to be developed.

Profile page / Home

This is what the user sees first when they are connected with their web3 enabled wallet.

Achievements

This is the achievements page, where the connected user is able to see all his/her erc-1155 tokens from the collection, a.k.a. achievements.

Claims

This is where the connected user is able to claim pending achievements as NFTs.

Evolve

This is where the connected user is able to change the looks of their ERC-721 NFT using owned ERC-1155 assets.

Pressing evolve will require the user to sign a message that gets verified on the back-end. The back-end will check whether the user owns their ERC-721 and ERC-1155 assets.