I had a conversation with Makoto about how to make the most of NFTs in the space. My proposal is to collaborate with NFT platforms to airdrop an ENS related NFT to all qualifying participants.
Proposal
ENS commissions an artist every X months, and chooses one platform to collaborate. E.g. Nifty Gateway, Foundation, OpenSea, MakersPlace etc⌠to host an ENS drop. Artist creates an ENS related NFT, an animation explainer, a fun ENS nifty like Takoyaki, or graphics. This art should be ENS related, but also good looking so people want to own it.
ENS drop is free (or low cost) and you are only eligible if you have an ENS on that address and have reverse/forward resolution setup.
In this way we get to share the exposure of each NFT platform and they get the advantage of extra coverage and clout from ENS. Because of the desire to own NFTs, we get more users for ENS just so they can collect these ENS related NFTs.
Variations
Use the same artist month after month and create a collection that builds over time (it may make the NFTs more valuable and participation will become more fierce)
Instead of commission the art, it could be a competition. This would allow more grassroot artists to get involved and generate even more art for ENS.
If itâs a competition, allow the grantsDAO to pick winners of the competition.
I think as a start the easiest path of least resistance is to, contact one of the NFT platforms to see if they can integrate this kind of drop on their platform. Commission a good/well known artist directly so we can take advantage of their current user base, some have a lot of followers on twitter/instagram. Announce the snapshot date so some buzz can be created and people will start to get their ENS names setup. If it works out, we can do another round, or create a competition that gets voted on by the grantsDAO and all participants (stage 2)
We should certainly partner with multiple platforms but the easy ones to get started is probably ones in l2, https://nifty.ink on xDAI and https://matic.opensea.io on Matic/Polygon as we can literarily airdrop than writing Merkle airdrop contract. Probably do a small experiment on nifty.ink (prize $100~500 is enough as they need no gas to mint NFTs) then approach to OpenSea with the experiment result.
Nifty.ink just reference to mainnet ENS and they so support reverse record. OpenSea on Matic probably doesnât do that so probably not a good place to do it
Ok, I did some research on platforms which already have some support of ENS and how we could do NFT drops.
Drop methods in general
I researched various platform and afaik there isnât a way to easily airdrop to specific users, or have Merkle airdrop specifically tailored for NFT (except POAP which is on xDAI).
ENS support: Reverse record on a profile page is supported (Example). No search by ENS names
Drop method: The Easiest is to commission an nft from ko artist via creative challenge. Then say all profiles with ens lookup on profile eligible for prize of they reply to tweet.
Then pick x at random and gift the nft.
ENS support: Reverse record on transaction page is supported but not on the profile page. No search by ENS names
Drop method: We ran a competition once to get art from Makersplace community, ENS team pick the winners, turn it into NFT, and give to people who commented on Twitter. We could tweak it to restrict both artists and giveaway to people who set both forward/reverse record
Drop method: Probably best to do something similar to Known Origin and Makersplace. OpenSea currently has Matic version but it does not seem like it has ENS name resolutions. They also recently announced to integrate with Immutable-X which is on Starkware but donât think itâs live yet.
Anyone can suggest their favourite artists to commission an art related to ENS by posting his/her portfolio URL which shows ENS name (eg OpenSea, KnownOrigin, and Nifty.ink are ideal but it could be just artistâs twitter URL which include their ENS name).
ENS team get quotes from these artists to see if we can afford to pay the commission.
Narrow down to 5~10 artists which have ENS name set and we can afford to pay
Decide winning artist with https://snapshot.org voting. Only users who have ENS reverse record set can vote.
Commission the work to the winning artist.
Randomly pick a winner from the people who voted.
I am hoping that this will encourage all artists, platform, and people who want the NFT art to set ENS name to their addresses (maybe mint 3, ens.eth owns one, give one to the person who nominated the artist, then give away one randomly)
The alternative to issuing 2 kinds of NFT is to fractionise using https://www.niftex.org. This way it will be a lot easier to distribute using Merkle drop (Uniswap like claim button) while keeping the original NFT scarce. Itâs similar concept to NFT collective/DAO idea PleasrDAO, $WHALE, $B20 have. Their v2 has some governance feature so I am guessing you can do some interesting governance around the NFT
POAP has been on boarding users to ENS since February 2019. Literally hundreds of people have gotten an ENS just to make the process of getting POAPs smoother.
When people have ENS+reverse the experience of using POAP is nicer. Because of this we are committed to help with this initiative.
On the POAP ecosystem thereâs a platform for raffles, available at http://POAP.fun
For participating in a raffle the users has to have one eligible POAP. Because we donât ask for names, we do inverse resolution to see who is participating.
So what I donât like about fractionalisation, and it could be a semantic thing, but the âfractionsâ get bought so you can eventually redeem the âwholeâ edition. I think it makes it feel like each shard is not the whole piece, which is not the kind of âfeelingâ i want to evoke when someone gets an NFT from our drop. It even says it very clearly in the description where âfractions can be used to claim the underlying NFTâ. I want them to feel like they have a whole NFT and itâs theres to do with as they please. Just like when you own a baseball card that has say 100 prints, it in itself is the product.
Apart from this, I generally thinking ERC721âs are better supported across other platforms are likely to be in the future, e.g. Showtime, zapper, other ERC721/1155 platforms, or even in your wallets (iâm guessing they donât support Niftex just yet and are likely to be behind in this regard)
Edit:
Also this doesnât stop us in the future doing some collab with Niftex and fractionalising say 10 already minted ERC1155 open editions and then turning them into fractions that could then be redeemed for 1 open edition when you have enough tokens. I like the simplicity of the open edition and fractionalising could be done as an experiment, but feels like too much experimentation for something that could be simple (and also could be done as a second drop)
