Thread by @World_Smyth

The Emerging Value of Customization in NFTs

OR

“What can you do with 8 letters?”
🧵

Disclosure: this 🧵 uses a specific project as an example - @METAKAWS. Among the many innovative ways they’re building the community, they hold community content challenges for pre-mint list access. This 🧵 is my contribution to their latest challenge. #WeAreMETAKAWS.

Let’s go

“wen utility?”

If you haven’t heard that meme before, you’re going to start running into it more and more in 2022. Pretty pics are great, but as the market gets more & more saturated, a nice pic won’t be enough to entice a community to ape into a project.

One way to increase the utility of an NFT is to make it customizable - you empower the collector to influence / invent use cases for the token.

Let’s take that a step further & make a bold claim about NFTs: “What can it do?” will be much bigger than “What does it look like?”

Let’s look @METAKAWS. They're launching a 100% on-chain pfp token w/ a curious composable visual element - you get 8️⃣ letters that you can customize at your leisure.

“Great - so I can, what, name the token..?”

Sure, but that barely scratches the surface. Here's 3️⃣ examples 👇

1️⃣. The Games We Play

Eeerrybody loves games.

When you tally up all the 8️⃣ to 1️⃣ letter words, you get ~550k words in the English language alone. Sources differ on the amount of 6️⃣ letter words, but it hardly matters when you add to that the use of abbreviations.

All in total, you end up w/ around half of the words in the English language.

(Naturally the 8️⃣ letters aren't limited to English, it's just an obvious example for all things online.)

Quite a sizable set of potential, even w/ the 8️⃣ letter limit...

Think puzzles, treasure hunts, organizing into teams/guilds, composing a narrative (although w/ a steep economy of words-challenge), etc...

I predict a lot of community innovation happening in this area.

2️⃣. Voting

In these early days of Web3 community organization, voting is seen as the backbone of, if not community decision making, than at least “decision guidance”.

(SideNote: Early phase development of a Web3 project can often use a good dose of central team decision making. Think of it as the initial acceleration where the idea is tested on its merits & the commitment of the builders. This is also why always #DYOR)

The 8️⃣ letters could function as a direct voting mechanism, governed by the project smart contract. No need to use a bot on discord or any other outside platform.

The team could send out a proposal w/ a voting time-window, and the community, if they choose to participate in open ballot voting, could cast their vote through the token.

3️⃣. A Digital Billboard.

Say you want broadcast a signal out into the world. Going for reach will lead you to a digitally transmitted signal. In Web2 it's a platform such as this one right here. I do not own this account, you don't own yours.

You can, however, own an NFT...

The 8️⃣ customizable letters has an obvious use case for social signaling & memes, but I’m curious to see what happens when the first big brand name w/ < 8️⃣ letters in their name offers to pay a @METAKAWS holder to put the brand name on their token for a set duration.

Owning a “digital billboard” could become a revenue stream for the token holder.

Other use cases will undoubtedly emerge from within the community. That’s what makes this project so intriguing to me. That and the way they’ve incentivized the organic growth of the community. If this peaked your interest, head over to @METAKAWS & metakaws.com

As they would say: “It’s not too late to play…”

Caveat Emptor:

when you #DYOR, the chances of #WGMI go up.