The main financial engine of a web2 social app is its ad network; scrolling through your feed is free because multiple brands have paid for ad space. At the same time traditional social media platforms fail to compensate the content creators that bring engagement to their platforms. Creators aren’t compensated for their banger tweets, IG posts, or videos. These platforms harvest user data and make ad revenue off the backs of creators.
Web3 makes this model obsolete. Utilizing open social graphs and programmable tokens, we can democratize access to ad revenue, paying content creators their fair share of the attention they bring to platforms.
The technologies involved make this drop pretty much the first of its kind. Using zero-knowledge proofs (zkSync
) for token minting, Chainlink VRF
for raffle drawing, and Storj
for decentralized storage - there's not much more we could've done to make this more web3. And putting it all together in under 4 days is a personal feat of mine :sunglasses:
I'd like to expand on each component of this procedure to highlight some technical features and hopefully inspire others to try minting their NFTs in this fashion.
Although some ideas from the 2017 ICO craze faded into the background, some have taken main stage in 2021. DAOs are an innovative way to organize money and people, and NFTs went from headlines about record-breaking sales (a cheeky $69 million) to being the new backbone for hundreds if not thousands of web3 projects. Under the hood, NFTs are an ERC721
smart contract - a program that codifies all the rules behind the digital asset. The most basic of NFTs simply allow you to transfer the token to another wallet; the more interesting ones are just around the corner.
If we take a look at the smart contract that represents a bored ape, we can actually see what functionality it supports. It’s a basic ERC721
with some business logic to handle the initial sale/distribution. In some cases an upgradable smart contract is used, meaning more functionality can be added later - although this design pattern is more meant for potential bug fixes, not so much additive features. In any case, new contracts could be later deployed that interact with the original ERC721
contract.
What more functionality would we want? Well, we could make it such that every future sale of the NFT would distribute royalty fees to the original creator (the person that minted the token) or all previous owners - automatically. No need to have them visit a webpage and claim their money. The transfer/sale of the token itself would trigger the routing of value from the buyer’s ETH wallet to the recipients’ ETH wallets. This kind of automatic value routing is only now possible on the internet via blockchain networks; it feels like the internet finally has a native payments protocol.