Minting NFTs has always been risky; everyone has heard of contracts that drain your wallet, or has been affected by one. And yet, NFT markets are still massively popular, with tens of thousands of people rushing to mint every shiny new hyped project.

Not everyone is able to do their due diligence, and when one second of hesitance can decide whether you get the NFT or not, it is easy for the "Set Approval For All" function to go unnoticed. To avoid this trap you can buy on marketplaces post-mint, oftentimes at higher prices. However, this does not eliminate other issues. The NFT you are purchasing may not be hosted on IPFS (and thus not 100% owned by you), or there may be copyright infringement. Both of these have the potential to turn an expensive PFP worthless.

Enter 360° Club.

With 360° Club, we will take steps toward addressing these problems while simultaneously creating value for the NFT community. Here's how:

We will run collaborations with creators of upcoming NFT collections, wherein they will create a single, special NFT for each collection that features the 360° Club, which we will reserve for a raffle among our club members. This special NFT will be an extremely rare 1/1 (a “Grail”) and will act as a membership token to the 360° Club, granting access to future raffles in our gated Discord channels. In turn, we will do the due diligence and inspire confidence in hundreds to thousands of potential minters by decorating the NFT collection with our “stamp of approval”.

The simple presence of this 360° Club reference* in these collections will do more than just inspire confidence; it will create a rift in NFT markets, slicing through multiple collections and creating a market of its own. As such, we will see two markets — one that's created by the new NFT collections themselves, and one that is made by those wishing to become members of the 360° Club. The cost to collaborating NFT artists is simply the addition of one unique token that incorporates either our logo (WIP) or a reference to "the 360 Degrees”.

Here's how 360° Club members will benefit:

1. Club members will be able to partake in raffles** and, in case of a win, have the ability to choose between holding their newly awarded Membership NFT and selling their domain, or selling it for profit and continuing to use the domain. This is important because ENS domains have to be renewed just like their web2 counterparts, thus incurring regular fees, while NFTs do not. 360° Club members who win a raffle and choose to sell their domain can thus retain access to the club by holding their Membership NFT.
2. In case the price of 360° domains skyrockets due to market effects, a person who wants to be a member of the club will not have to buy an ENS domain for an enormous price in order to take part in raffles and other community activities, but instead will have the opportunity to buy a (potentially) cheaper NFT.
3. Members of 360° Club will have a variety of PFPs they can sport online to signify they're part of the club.
4. Our members will be able to rest assured that NFT creators we collaborate with do not infringe any copyright and host their collections on IPFS, which ensures that the NFTs cannot be deleted.
5. We will ensure that 360° raffle winners either receive their NFTs as airdrops from the creators, or have the opportunity to mint in a non-competitive environment, thus giving ample opportunity to mint in low-gas conditions and to check contracts for potential malicious code (or simply to read the prompts with no rush).***

Here's how collaborating NFT artists will benefit:

1. Our Discord and Twitter collaboration announcements will allow the collections to be seen by a vibrant community, which at the moment of publishing include members of such well-known groups as EVMavericks and Mirror.
2. The inclusion of the 360° Club NFT will inspire confidence in buyers from the general public that the project is sound, with honest artists and developers behind it.
3. The unique 360° Club NFT will increase the overall collection value through the addition of a single rare, coveted token that also has value outside of the context of the collection.
4. The NFT artist (if they so desire) will have the opportunity to promote their work even further by leveraging our token-gated community raffles and thereby increase distribution and excitement for the project.

The additional 360° Club Membership NFTs will create a steady, controlled stream of new members that will not overwhelm the club. As has been proven by r/ethfinance, gradual inflow allows a community to maintain its identity and weed out those that do not align with its ethos. At the same time, this increase will bring high-value activity to the club and will not let it stagnate, as well as grow the amount of active participants that NFT creators can bank on, for it has always been a great strategy to raffle out some mints to draw attention to an NFT collection and increase the potential for success.

There are only 360 domains available, so the odds of winning 360° Club raffles are high – much higher than raffles on crypto twitter.

Our current target for Membership NFT emissions is low — we will start with one raffle per week and will be slowly working our way towards a few per week, so the financial interests of those holding 360° domains will not be diluted in any significant way.

Of course, we will not stop looking into other ways of creating utility for our club. But this is a sneak peek of what’s to come. Once we’re happy with the things we’ve jump-started, we (the current leadership) will work toward delegating club activities to the community and taking a back seat.

If you have not gotten your degree yet, right now is a great time! To honor those who join us before our first collaboration (to be announced very soon!), we will be rewarding every address that holds a degree and joins our discord (link) with a POAP. The snapshot will be taken 24 hours from now, July 15th at 9 AM PT / 12:00 ET / 16:00 UTC.

For the list of domains, visit our ens.vision collection. Remember, only the degrees listed there (001°-360°) will be eligible. And if you are an NFT artist and wish to collaborate, give us a shout on discord or twitter. Let's go!

* Anyone may be able to put a reference to 360° Club in one of their NFTs, so it's imperative that every potential minter of an NFT follows announcements in our discord or twitter.

** Additional degrees/NFTs will not increase the odds of winning.

*** It is important to remember that it will still NOT be possible for us to vet the contracts before they launch, due to the simple fact that a clean-looking contract can be swapped for a malicious one just mere seconds before going live. However, we will make sure to vet the creators themselves.