I loved playing with legos growing up (let’s be honest I still do). When I started learning about blockchain and web3, my love of legos made the idea of composability click with me instantly. Composability is the ability for components built on the blockchain to serve as building blocks that seamlessly interact with each other. As a16z puts it, “composability allows anyone in a network to take existing programs and adapt or build on top of them”.

Put simply, composability enables software to work like legos. My co-founder Nik and I began to get curious about how users’ digital identities can be composable inside of web3, particularly in NFTs. In the spirit of building in public, I want to share our thoughts around a concept we are calling “user composability”. User composability is when users own their digital identity and can derive value from it, controlling how, where, when, and for what purpose it is used.

If you have thoughts on user composability, join our discord and connect with us.

Currently, the NFT projects I come across tend to have three types of composability (lets chat if you have thoughts on these or ideas for others!):

• Backwards composability: after a project is released it begins to incorporate composable features. The most famous example is the Mutant Ape Yacht Club — when an Ape owner combines their ape with a mutant serum, it creates a mutant ape.
• Intra-project composability: when assets inside of a project are composable with each other, such as breeding axie’s in Axie Infinity, burning shapeshifters into a mega shapeshifter in Cold Blooded Creepz, and wolves’ ability to capture sheep in Wolf Game.
• Inter-project composability: when a project’s assets are composable with other projects. A famous example here is CryptoBatz. Each bat has one “bite” of another NFT in a holder’s collection that can then create a mutant bat that resembles the bitten NFT.

As we looked at the space, the missing piece of composability was what seems like the most obvious: user composability. How might a user compose themselves into a project’s narrative? We had a feeling that people wanted to incorporate their identity into their NFT projects or liked NFT projects that they related to. So we conducted a survey of NFT holders and found that many greatly prefer profile picture NFTs that resemble themselves. At that point, we knew we were onto something and began thinking about how we could enable user composability in web3.

As we see it, the first step towards user composability is owning some basics of your digital identity and then having the opportunity to generate utility from it. Today we are opening up our discord for a project taking that step. We are calling it “PortTraits”. PortTraits will use computer vision and AI to allow you to upload a picture that stores the surface level of your digital identity on-chain: basic data about your facial features (i.e. hair color, eye color, hair style). The AI will use those features to build a PortTrait that is consistently cool, but uniquely you. Our art team is designing a set of traits that the AI can use to build a NFT PFP that looks like you. You’ll also get a set of accessories of varying degrees of rarity that you can eventually trade on the open market with other PortTrait owners. Owning your PortTrait is owning your digital identity and controlling how it is used.

Your PortTrait also has a second incredibly valuable utility: it is a portal between you and any NFT narrative. Once your PortTrait is on-chain, it is then composable with other projects. If a project wants to allow its users to “upload” themselves into their narrative, they can deploy their art teams to build a library of traits and layer masks that align with the properties of the PortTrait. Users who own PortTraits can then mint NFTs that look like them, but in the artistic style of their favorite NFT for projects that choose to offer this.

We are just getting started and are excited to see how far user composability can go. If you want to learn more, share thoughts on the idea of user composability, help shape the future of PortTraits, or just get early access to your PortTrait, join our discord: https://discord.gg/rMdsqR87pc. We’re excited to build together!