Author: @0x长安, @RealResearchDAO
Foreword
In the Web2 era, data and information are often controlled by centralized platforms. Under big data, users are often labeled.
With the rise of Web3, people realized the importance of data ownership, thus the birth of Project Galaxy.
1. Introduction
Ethereum founder Vitalik proposed a concept this year called “Soulbound”, which is inspired by World of Warcraft. In World of Warcraft, many powerful gears require players to complete complicated tasks or defeat powerful bosses to obtain. To build a more powerful character, players have no other choice but to farm tasks or raid bosses. This mechanism prevents many pay-to-win players from using a large amount of real money to build stronger characters, and also restricts players from accumulating gold coins every day to obtain high-end gears day by day. The Soulbound idea requires players to truly experience the game by themselves, not through pay-to-win.
Vitalik also hopes that Web3, like World of Warcraft, can have the concept of Soulbound, in a form of non-transferable NFTs. In current Web3 models, assets are over-financialized and everything is money oriented. And the current transferable NFT has limitations, for example:
- There is no way to confirm attendance since users can get the attendance certificate through transferable NFTs. From a project’s perspective, they hope that they can gain users that are organic users, rather than users who buy NFTs.
- In terms of allowing the use of private property, transferable NFTs cannot be well suited for this scenario. The owner of a household would give you the NFT to gain access, but it does not mean that the owner of the household wants you to hand over the right of use to other people.
Therefore, we will introduce this project called Project Galaxy, which will build a network of user behavior credential data on-chain and off-chain in the Web3 era. The product is oriented to both the users’ end and the enterprises’ end, which can connect users and enterprises, as a bridge for communication between the two sides. Their products are also divided into transferable NFTs and non-transferable NFTs.
2. Product Analysis
Project Galaxy is just like a Web3 traffic platform. The project parties can publish tasks on the platform. After the users complete the tasks, the NFTs prepared by the project parties can be obtained, and the project parties can also provide customized services through the Galaxy's digital certificate, such as airdrop tokens, etc. And users can see the tasks released by various projects on the platform.
For users, this is undoubtedly a good place to hunt airdrops, participate in community activities, and discover new projects. Now there is also a group of user parties dedicated to Galaxy tasks.
For projects, Project Galaxy can bring active users, as well as an increase of awareness.
For Users
1. Campaigns: This area displays the current marketing activities of various projects and provides detailed guidelines. Users only need to complete the tasks in the guidelines to obtain the NFTs granted by the project parties. This area can be used as a traffic exposure platform. If the project party has activities, it can be published here. It can attract the attention of many users on the Galaxy platform.
2. Space: Displays the collections obtained in Galaxy. After entering Space, you can view the ongoing activities of a project individually. The Space function displays activities in the project’s dimension. In this area, users can select the project they are interested in, and after entering the project’s details page, they can see all the activities held by the project.
3. Credentials: Users can look up here to see if they are eligible to receive NFT credential rewards for a certain project.
4. Galaxy ID: Each user can get a Galaxy ID, which is a collection of the user's identities in Web3. This part consists of transferable NFTs (obtained from the completion of the project's tasks) and non-transferable NFTs (users’ on-chain operational credentials). This is similar to the idea of Soulbound mentioned by Vitalik, which is determined by the user's behavior on the blockchain. The users have the right to know what their label is, thus getting rid of the problem that the users cannot know their personal data in the centralized world, which enables users to truly own their personal data.
Non-transferable NFTs have a very good protection against Sybil attacks. Non-transferable NFTs are like ID cards on-chain. Project Galaxy labels users' on-chain operations, such as: Uniswap V3 Traders, Compound Borrowers, etc. With such labels, the development teams can better target users and conduct airdrop rewards to attract more users. Meanwhile, users need to get as many labels as possible to make their addresses look like a "real person". The increase in cost will also reduce the willingness of users to switch to new accounts, thus preventing Sybil attacks.
And Soulbound also improves capital efficiency. The crypto world controlled by smart contracts is the same for everyone. For example, experienced lending users/institutions have a maximum capital utilization rate of 70% on the lending platform, and that 70% works the same for an average user. The reason is that the crypto world does not have a good mechanism to determine whether a user will violate the regulations, so they can only be treated equally.
However, the Soulbound mechanism can solve this problem very well. The difference between the loan rate of a regular “Compound Borrower”, and a “Compound Borrower” whose loan amount exceeds 100 million US dollars, can be distinguished clearly. If a user uses the platform frequently and never violates any regulations, the platform can reward the user with some bonus services, such as: the platform can appropriately increase his loan rate from 70% to 80%. Of course, the premise is that it has to be non-transferable Soulbound tokens. If the tokens are transferable, it will cause a lot of unavoidable troubles.
For Enterprises
Project Galaxy provides developers with application modules, the oracle engine for credentials, and credentials API to utilize credential data to build better products and communities. Galaxy OAT is a lightweight on-chain credential solution for organizing and distributing NFT badge campaigns based on the Project Galaxy network. With Galaxy OATs, protocol developers can customize community campaigns and reward community members with NFT badges for the purpose of increasing the number of communities and enhancing community vibe. Galaxy OAT (On-Chain Achievement Token) is a digital record of all your achievements in life.
At the beginning stage of a project, e.g. projects like Sushi and X2Y2, who airdrop tokens to Uniswap and OpenSea users, can make good use of Galaxy to attract active users. Originally, users who have used other projects can get airdrop rewards. However, with the help of Galaxy, you can use the Galaxy labels to conduct targeted airdrops to “Uniswap Traders” “Uniswap trading volume of $100,000” and etc., to help project parties quantify users' on-chain behaviors, and use targeted rewards to attract early users of the project.
Galaxy is also very helpful in managing the communities. Usually, it takes a long time for a project to be released. How to keep users' attention to the product continuously requires not only the quality of the product, but also the operational ability of the team. Regular distribution of rewards is very helpful for maintaining the community. For example, the project party regularly holds AMAs, and the participating users can get the attendance certificate NFT reward prepared by the project party. With NFT rewards, users will be attracted to participate in the construction of the community and stay active.
3. Competitors
At present, the competitor products of Project Galaxy include Rabbithole and POAP, which is similar to Galaxy’s products. Users also like to use these two products to compare with Galaxy.
Rabbithole: By completing tasks on the platform, you can get NFT rewards provided by the platform. Compared to Galaxy, Rabbithole is more like a Web3 university where some on-chain operations can be learned on the platform. In the process of completing tasks, users have a chance to get airdrop rewards of the project. But the platform often goes down, and the frequency of updating tasks is relatively slow.
POAP: POAP, short for "Proof of Attendance Protocol", is a platform and infrastructure that enables POAP publishers and POAP collectors to create and collect memories. Compared with Galaxy, the application of POAP is relatively simple. POAP is currently only oriented to the user side, and POAP certificates are all tradable and transferale. In terms of proofs of attendance, I agree more with Vitalik's point of view, POAP should not be tradable, thus Galaxy will have more use cases than POAP.
Charles, the founder of Project Galaxy, also said in the interview: “I think the NFT infrastructure of Project Galaxy itself is much stronger than POAP, such as supporting NFT mystery boxes, merging NFTs, payment and other distribution methods, using NFTs for community voting, exchanging souvenirs, unlocking content, and we have a better user experience for both the project parties and the users.
In fact, not only Web2 products need to compete for traffic, Web3 products also do. The Web3 platform that controls the traffic can attract more high-quality projects. The platform also needs to meet the requirements of a project party. In providing community maintenance, Galaxy has taken the lead.
Of course, Galaxy also has its shortcomings. The establishment of a big data platform takes a long time. In a bear market, the decrease of users will have a relatively large impact on its business.
4. Realization of Values
In Project Galaxys’ white paper, it is detailed that many projects have achieved good results through Galaxy. In the process of helping projects to grow, the realization of Galaxy's self-values has been completed. The following details showed how the two projects achieved business growth through Galaxy. .
4.1 Hashflow is a new decentralized exchange. It has experienced doubts from the early community members because there was no token issued in the early days. Most of the early users tend to be skeptical about the advantages of being an early user even months before the alpha product is released. Thus Hashflow introduced Project Galaxy to incentivize and reward early community members with NFTs such as:
- Reward the winner of the HashMatic trading competition
- A special Hashbot art reward has been released for the most loyal Hashgang members on Halloween
- Hashflow’s monthly volume surged from $19.8 million in August to $673 million in October following the Galaxy event.
4.2 In July 2021, Polygon launched its blockchain game and NFT studio. Polygon studio launched a campaign in partnership with Project Galaxy to promote the use of the Polygon network.
4.2.1 Create an NFT on OpenSea via Polygon Network
4.2.2 Buying NFTs on OpenSea via the Polygon Network
4.2.3 Selling NFTs on OpenSea via the Polygon Network
The result was a total of 131,074 Mystery Box NFTs were minted. Over 9060 unique users minted all four mystery box NFTs and minted 14,977 higher level NFTs: Polygon Genesis Creator. The campaign has promoted the increase in the volume of NFT transactions on the Polygon network on OpenSea.
Project Galaxy helps many projects build, maintains a good community, and also helps the project's business grow. In fact, it is also well understood that people are driven by interests. Just like airdrop projects, many people will register a large number of accounts to experience the business of a certain project in order to obtain possible airdrops. And Galaxy is a brand that gives you NFT rewards. Naturally, many users will participate in community building and experience projects for NFT rewards.
5. Conclusion
High-quality projects will be the Great Wall for the Project Galaxy. If a high-quality project party launches campaigns on Project galaxy, it will attract more users who are not familiar with Galaxy to do the task. At this moment, Galaxy has already controlled a large amount of traffic, which will attract more people. Many small project parties are more willing to work with the platform, because they can gain a large number of high-quality users and public exposure, so that the platforms will be easy to flywheel. I think the focus on the development of the platform mainly depends on how many big projects are staying, and this will be a key factor.
I think the credential network is not limited to the project’s event plans on blockchains, but can also be widely used in the real world. You can imagine: when you act in web2, you’ll be getting some proofs stored in the form of NFTs. Let’s say, if you attended a certain concert or took a certain flight. These tickets and notes also exist in real life, however paper is easily oxidized, so NFTization will be a very good paradigm shift.
Therefore, in fact, whether it is Web2 or Web3, Galaxy can be used to maintain communities and build projects, and Galaxy has good application scenarios as well. As Galaxy slowly builds its brand image and attracts high-quality projects, there is still a long way to go.
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