POAP: Record your life track with NFT

Last week, I issued a lifetime membership NFT through the POAP service, and more than half of the lifetime members have already received it. I also received several replies, some people want to know how to issue NFTs with POAP, and some people are curious about where these NFTs can be displayed, and why there is no need to pay miner fees to receive NFTs on the chain?

This article describes the origins of POAP and its specific uses. If you are going to hold an event recently, you might as well issue NFTs with POAP to refresh the participants.

proof of attendance

Many people have a certificate book in their homes, which collects awards obtained as children, certificates of summer camp participation, or transcripts from different periods. Every time I open the thick folder, I will accidentally fall into the whirlpool of memories, remembering the various experiences of that year. There are also some friends or couples who will share their growth process through the certificate book.

But as I get older, although I participate in more and more activities, I receive fewer and fewer certificates. After all, when most people grow up, they do not have the habit of collecting certificates. For reasons of environmental protection, the organizer simply does not issue certificates. But if the certificate is a digital token that neither takes up space nor has environmental problems, would you want to resume the habit of collecting certificates?

In 2016, Piper Merriam, the core developer of the Ethereum Foundation, tried to issue Devcon2 tokens, the event participation vouchers on the Ethereum's annual event Devcon 2. At that time, participants had to find Piper Merriam himself at the scene to receive it. Or like the participant in the picture below, take a selfie with the admission voucher, attach the Ethereum address, and email the information to his mailbox to receive it.

Although the process is quite primitive, more than half of the event participants (43 people) still received the token in the end. According to Piper Merriam :

This Devcon2 token was issued at the Devcon2 conference in Shanghai, and the deadline for issuance is September 22, 2016 at 8:00 am Shanghai time. Devcon2 is an ERC20 token, and each eligible address will receive one token. It's an experiment, and I want to see how people will use it and what apps will be built on it.

Coincidentally, I have also issued HTC coins, IT Seed coins or NCCU coins on different speech occasions since 2018, and gave them away as souvenirs for free. But many people will ask if these coins can be exchanged for "real money", and then I changed to send BTC, ETH or BNB.

NFTs were not popular at the time, and there were no easy distribution tools to use. The cryptocurrency I issue at each event is an ERC20 token, and the amount received by each person may vary.

Until 2019, the POAP development team came to the fore at a hackathon event. This is a set of NFT issuance, collection and display tools specially designed for event organizers, and it has become a standard practice for issuing proof of participation in events on the chain in the future.

POAP

The full name of POAP is Proof of Attendance Protocol, and Chinese is Proof of Attendance Protocol. It is like a printing press for digital certificates. Anyone can upload the image file to POAP for free , cast it into NFT and send it to the event participants.

According to POAP :

Each POAP is an ERC-721 NFT token. Publishers of POAPs are usually event organizers. This person is like an oracle, proving that someone has participated in the event and did not obtain POAP tokens by improper means. After a few events, people soon had a unique set of POAPs.

When people own a certain amount of POAP tokens, each POAP can show its unique value. Because this collection will only be exclusive to specific people. It can be said that POAP collections are a digital way for people to express their unique self without having to rely on name, gender, nationality or passport number to tell the difference between you and me.

Everyone has different apps installed on their mobile phones. Sometimes, just by looking at other people’s mobile apps, you can guess his interests or even his occupation. In the same way, if people can receive a POAP every time they participate in an event, maybe they can guess their preferences by looking at the POAPs in the other party's wallet in the future.

The picture below is the POAP collection of Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin . He has participated in the Devcon Ethereum Developers Conference every year since 2015, and he is a core participant of Ethereum just by looking at POAP.

As long as the organizer fills in some necessary information in the POAP background and passes the review, an NFT can be issued. Participants can also browse past events through the POAP gallery . Each received POAP can be found on the personal page or RSS3 page .

These POAPs are not issued on Ethereum, but on an independent blockchain called xDai. The advantage is that the fee is much cheaper than Ethereum (and POAP is fully subsidized), but the disadvantage is that it cannot be seen in mainstream wallets such as MetaMask that do not support the xDai blockchain.

If you want the NFT to appear in the MetaMask wallet, you have to additionally transfer the NFT from the xDai chain to Ethereum through the built-in cross-chain transfer function of POAP.

This is a temporary measure in response to high Ethereum fees. In theory, in the future, everyone can issue NFT directly on Ethereum, instead of using another blockchain to issue NFT in order to save handling fees, and then transfer it back across the chain.

However, POAP does not just turn the physical world's paper certificates into NFTs, but also represents the certificates that people receive when they participate in activities in the purely digital metaverse. In the future, these credentials will not only become your participation resume, but also prove that you are not a robot.

Purpose of the certificate

The picture below is the digital showroom of Sotheby's, an internationally renowned auction house, in Decentraland 1 . In addition to displaying digital paintings, Sotheby's has also placed POAP pick-up machines in the showroom.

Many museums or heritage parks have commemorative stamps for visitors to collect. Sotheby's regards POAP as a digital seal, and can also limit the number of releases, while supplies last. Participants only need to click in front of the machine to collect, and they will receive a commemorative badge issued by Sotheby's in their wallets, proving that they have visited Sotheby's digital showroom.

In addition to personal commemorations, these POAPs can also be used to solve the age-old problem of the online world - proving that you are not a fake account created by a robot.

There are traces of the activity records of real accounts, but the activity records of fake accounts are often blank. The most common example is Facebook. Fake accounts usually have no likes and no posts, just with the same name as the real fanzine.

There is also the issue of fake accounts on the blockchain. Crowdfunding platform Gitcoin Grants recently asked proposers to verify their personal identities in a number of ways to reduce donations for "zombie proposals." Among them, whether the user's wallet holds POAP NFT has become one of the many indicators to increase the credibility of the account. After all, people who will participate in physical activities or "sightsee" in the metaverse are less likely to be robots.

Looking back, many people lived quite richly in the physical world, but their experience of living in the digital world may have been a blank slate. If people build virtual kingdoms in the digital world in the future, or even hold public representative elections, the most trusted candidates will likely be those who are now starting to accumulate digital resumes with POAP.

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