Excellent discussion. Building on what’s been said so far:
I think solving liquidity is a nice benefit but doesn’t necessarily warrant the trouble. More importantly I think we only get one shot at this. We don’t want to change the core token structure on the regular. That means we want a top artist and visuals, but I would go one further.
To me we should be solving for strengthening our brand. That means increasing our visibility, but more importantly strengthening our identity. What makes FP stand out in my opinion is the fact that our collecting is based on more than nice looking art. It’s about conceptual work that truly leverages the blockchain’s potential. We should have the same standards when launching a membership NFT.
What could that look like? I think decagons are the most interesting access token this space has seen so far. They combine beautiful generative art with dynamic development and gamified mechanics. Other obvious inspirations are MGS, Gazers, but also Finiliars. I think all of the current membership tokens, like proof, are so boring and web2. I don’t want a static skeumorphic card. I want a dynamic, living representation of my membership. That could mean changing based on:
My interaction with and role in the DAO: basically recording things like voting behavior and roles on committees
The DAOs collection: Can my membership “remember” or “celebrate” when we make a large purchase?
The price (or volume, …) of the token
My own collection?
In my eyes we have succeeded when the token feels so personal that selling it feels as or more emotional than selling your favorite art pieces.
I realize that something like this would take orders of magnitude more effort than a “normal” membership token, but I think it’s worth it to push the DAO and the space forward. If we think it’s not currently possible (e.g. because we want to do more on-chain than is feasible) I would rather wait until we can go big than blow our powder now.
I think we’re solving for liquidity and visibility.
Liquidity is difficult to solve for on ERC20s for a DAO like ours. We’ve been battling this for a while. As an aside, I think the best medium-term solution is some form of automated OTC desk (Airswap have said they’re working on one but this has gone cold recently), but even that’s not ideal.
On visibility, I think the problem is me demonstrating and someone else seeing I’m a Fingerprints member. Both are unarguably an issue if the membership method is ERC20. Yeah, you can go through my wallets on etherscan… but you never will!
I believe moving to an NFT membership model does indeed solve the above. Liquidity is easy for NFTs (and with exciting options like our own marketplace); visibility is simple.
For me, ERC20 == ERC721/1155 on security. Both can be stolen from a member using almost identical methods.
On cost, I’m not expert enough to comment.
Some additional thoughs:
ERC721 is far preferable to ERC1115 in my opinion. Just ‘feels’ more exclusive – and anecdotally they do seem to trade at higher prices.
Agree the NFT itself should be somewhat special, but we can of course evolve this over time
Like some ideas of @Maxorgel that show DAO interactions in the NFT, although tieing it too much to the individual memeber may impact liquidity
Personally I’d prefer the ERC20 > ERC721 move to be one-way. I just think it’s a better option. Actually on refleciton two-way is best as it allows PRINTS to be used as a more flexible fungible token e.g. for payment to group members.
I think using NFTs alo makes the ‘builder’ membership – and other future ‘lower’ tiers – easier to market and understand (just issue additional NFTs for those roles and gate access / votes appropriately rather than faff around with different token levels)
Would be interested to get the views of our investors!
This really stands out to me and it’s exactly how I feel. If we do a membership NFT, it needs to be innovative.
On liquidity: we can solve for liquidity in other ways, so we should probably focus on the merits of having a membership NFT.
I really like the idea of staking PRINTS to get a membership NFT that shows you’re a staking member – and grants you perks over time as @mabot suggested. This would show the commitment of our community and give another reason for people to “lock” their PRINTS.
Perks could be airdrops by the Fingerprints Studio, access, and even simple things like merch.
The recent proposal by @renatoshira also goes to this direction, giving a utility for PRINTS, adding a new feature for the token and the collection.
I would rather add to this utility than deprecating PRINTS in favor of an NFT, as some people suggested. In a few months, as many other NFT communities launch their fungible tokens, we will probably regret having deprecated our own.
Maintaining an interoperability between PRINTS and an NFT would allow us to get creative in how we structure things.
Eg. The NFT could be in very limited supply and act almost as a “Premium” membership pass that entitles the holder to value in the form of airdrops or other benefits/perks - holding the NFT could require staking PRINTS, and the amount of which could be determined via an auction system rather than a fixed price, to incentivize the market to determine how many PRINTS need to be locked up.
This is just one idea, but conceptually I think these are the types of things we should be considering.
I’m convinced we should be exploring this further. To tie together various ideas above, I’d suggest as a MVP:
Start with only one NFT for “Full membership” that requires locking up 5,000 $PRINTS
Dual operation of $PRINTS and a membership ERC721 NFT
Bi-directional exchange between the two assets at any time
NFTs have Discord privilidges and Snapshot voting power equial to 5,000 $PRINTS (so no impact on Governance)
This would allow us to test the hypotheses of (a) more liquidity (as memberships can be listed on OpenSea easily) and (b) more visitbility of membership (as memberships will show up in profile pages etc.).
I agree that the NFT itself should be more interesting than a virtual membership card, but I’d argue that’s going beyond MVP. Various ideas when we get there though, including:
commission a (Fingerprints collection?) artist to design a (generative?) work for the cards
– potential for this to change over time, perhaps as a showcase for newer artists?
build some form of member data into the NFT, e.g. time since became a member, something about the member’s NFT collections (only issue here is this may negatively impact liquidity)
Multiple tiers of membership, e.g. a 1k PRINTS associate tier, or a 10k PRINTS executive tier
Gate future Fingerprints Studios drops to those holding membership NFTs
I think we should try the MVP here assuming dev costs are low. There are few risks – we can always deprecate the NFT version at a later date and have those reverted back to $PRINTS.
a simple counter point to your hypotheses (a) - liquidity fragmentation, by adopting opensea as a marketplace for the membership nfts we risk exacerbating the issues around PRINTS token value and liquidity, if the nft is pegged to 5k PRINTS it is likely to create mostly down pressure to the price of both token and nft since there will (always?) be an arbitrage opportunity, if we pair the nft with a PRINTS pool on sudoswap we could kinda mitigate that, but not sure.
On fragmentation, it’s an interesing idea but I’m of the opinion that giving potential members more options to buy & sell is always a positive. Plus I suspect it would be a different crowd buying on opensea versus uniswap = more market mindshare overall.
On arbitrage, you’re right there should be some, but I don’t get why it would be down only – arb requires buying in one marketplace to sell in another. Indeed, arb oppiortunities should increase liquidity (as in traditional markets) which is part of our aim here.
I’m not up enough on sudoswap mechanics to understand the role it could play but happy to explore.
you’re not “giving more options to buy & sell” thought, you’re creating a second product, that in the end competes with the first one for demand and liquidity while the first product is already struggling, hence why the fragmentation is mostly net negative here.
the arbitrage is potentially a down pressure because there is no additional demand (especially at this price point and fingerprints TAM) while there will be additional supply competing for the same demand, and value to be captured between the two.
Sorry don’t understand. Where is the additional supply coming from? If I’m looking to sell 5k PRINTS, I can’t sell it both as OTC / exchange and also as a NFT – I have to lock up my PRINTS into the NFT in order to transact that. There is no additional supply.
People looking to sell 5k PRINTS OTC may choose to instead lock up into a membership NFT and sell that instead. But logically they’ll only do that if there is more demand from buyers for the NFT than the token (which I hypothesise there will be as Opensea is a very liquid exchange and the ‘membership card’ model is understood by a wide number of participants in the space). Surely that’s a positive?
And if it turns out there is no market for the NFTs, only for PRINTS OTC / on Uniswap, it’s a trivial operation to convert back to tokens.
For anyone looking to sell more than 5k prints, you’re now optionally selling both a 5k membership and an arbitrary amount on a DEX, not one or the other, you have both products to supply the market, there is no double the demand and anyone (with brains) looking to buy a membership should, in theory, look for the cheaper trade (membership nft vs 5k prints on a dex)
I personally wouldn’t talk about OTC, or mix it in this discussion, since it is a highly inefficient system that has already caused enough issues and hopefully we are moving away from,
I fail to understand how you consider “trivial” converting back into tokens if we consider the experiment a failure, it will be up to individual wallets to decide that on their own, and we risk not being able to really deprecate something like this once live.
I think there’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what I’m proposing here.
You create the NFT “membership card” by locking up 5k PRINTS. So if you have the NFT in your wallet, you don’t have 5k PRINTS in your wallet.
If you supply (list) the NFT to the market you cannot simultaneously supply to a DEX.
If you decide you’d rather have fungible PRINTS instead, burn the NFT and unlock 5k PRINTS from the contract. Now you don’t have the NFT but you do have 5k PRINTS in your wallet.
So you only have one or the other, you can only supply one at a time. You can choose to swap at anytime, but you never hold both products.
Agreed that forcing everyone to convert their NFTs back to PRINTS would be impossible. But let’s say we did decide the experiment was a disaster, we could vote and agree that only PRINTS tokens (not the NFT) now counts for voting. The option to redeem NFT > PRINTS still exists, so nobody loses out. But if someone in this scenario didn’t convert back for many years, who cares?
Of course they can, I don’t see how that changes anything though. As per my message above, this doesn’t replace DEX (or OTC) trading, it augments.
e.g. seller of 6k PRINTS could choose whether to market sell on a DEX, or convert 5k to an NFT and sell the remaining 1k on a DEX. Their decision would likely depend on a combination of liquidity for the NFTs, relative pricing and their desire for speed (not having to wait for a buyer of the NFT). The supply is still 6k PRINTS.
e.g. seller of 1k PRINTS would sell on the DEX. No change there. Supply is still 1k PRINTS.
Buyers similarly have the same options available. Any meaningful price difference will undoubtedly be arb’d out.
I think it’s a good time to get back to this discussion after the subject was brought up in our last Members Spotlight with Andy and after the changes announced by Squiggle DAO yesterday (what are the dos and don’ts?).
I really like this MVP; I wonder if we should have the option to stake more than 5K PRINTS at a time (multiples of 5K only?) to get special NFTs.
From the FP Studio perspective, we have been testing the idea with some prominent artists, and it was well received. They are open to creating something innovative and custom-made for our membership.
A couple of thoughts on what I think we definitely want to have:
An art-based NFT - something that’s compelling to the owner for the art as well as the membership, so that it’s not just a generic membership pass. If the artists are interested, we should try to see if any of them could create some art that’s really interactive and/or creative.
Like @bamboo said I think it’s important that we maintain both $PRINTS and the NFT - that way they can be exchanged both ways and we retain the flexibility of having both
I’m interested in what other interesting features everyone else would like to see?
Could certainly see the opportunity to have higher PRINTS versions. Probably multiples of 5k to keep things simple for propsective buyers – maybe 5k/10k/20k?
Also agree with @glory that a creative and/or interactive NFT would be ideal.
However – I’d suggest both of these ideas risk mission creep. We’ve been dancing around this for quite some time now and it is still, after all, an experiment that my not work out. I’d recommend building the MVP, seeing if it has traction and then extending out with artwork, “premium” versions etc. in time.
I believe we first need to decide whether to create or not the membership NFT, then we can discuss how the execution will take place.
I personally see the creation process of the NFT as a fun subject to engage DAO members. We could choose an artist and openly discuss the possibilities with them on Discourse/Discord. I think we could use some time to create this project, as I don’t see it as time-sensitive. We just have to start…
Considering that we will follow up with a proposal, I wanted to explore it further and advocate for a specific kind of NFT, that could be attached to existing digital identities.
It would not be a pfp, nor art. It’d be a symbol, like the nouns glasses, that could be attached to existing pfps.
FPs pfps would not have enough recognition power to substitute current high end pfps (punks, bayc or nouns) and FP NFTs as art would not help with digital identities.
We could brainstorm about this, but I’m quite sure we would maximize the FP brand exposure if the NFTs are part of existing digital identities.
My suggestion would be something like a virtual tattoo (maybe FP’s logo) that could me attached to pfps (and maybe a visual tool to build the images for social
media)