Putting Provenance on Display
Anyone involved in the NFT space is regrettably familiar with the phrase “right click save as…”
NFTs give artists the tools to sell their authentic work to buyers who can see, empirically, from which contract the piece originates. This publicly documented provenance goes a long way to combatting fraudulent activity in the context of Web 3.0 applications, but does not translate effectively to Web 2.0 and physical spaces.
Cult of Flex is working to visualize the empirical authenticity and ownership, documented on the block chain, for displays outside of Web 3.0. Our mission is to help a wider audience to understand what it means to own an NFT, how digital artwork can be unique and scarce, and give our users a way to flex their digital assets outside of Web 3.0.
Bridging the Gap
Cult of Flex administers ownership badges for emergent artistic media.
We are currently offering two products, with provisions for integrations with NFT collections, designers, physical artists, and printers.
Initiate Badges
Initiate Badges are NFTs that represent a registration of an NFT to a screen name, business, gallery, or a real name. Only the owner of an NFT, originating from a project’s publicly stated contract address, may mint a badge for that NFT.
Users may display their NFTs using any of the ready-for-print templates we design alongside, on top, or in place of, their NFT. With wide spread adoption, our badging alone should tell a broader audience that your NFT physicals are 1/1 statement pieces, and anyone that doubts it can scan the code to see your registration.
The Cult of Flex smart contract accepts a collection, token ID, and personal identifier to create a registration. When a user mints an Initiate Badge, the contract will verify the following on-chain:
1. The contract address given for a target collection is included in a restricted list of approved contracts which have been vetted by our team, and stored on our contract.
2. The account attempting to mint the token owns the token ID originating from one of these approved contract addresses.
An Initiate may easily prove their membership in an NFT community by incorporating a QR code link to their registration, anywhere that they use their NFT. Members incorporating their badges in their profile photos and prints can easily signal their ownership to a casual audience, and prove their investment in a community to their peers.
Users may incorporate their badges in a more central part of an image, or they may choose to leave their badges on the extents of their images where other users will need to expand their profile photo to see the full code. It is our hope that widespread adoption of verification badges will encourage a closer investigation of profiles using high end NFTs without such badging.
Some users may not wish to share their screen names with people they know in real life, nor their actual names with their online circles. We permit users to produce any number of registrations on a single NFT for use in different scenarios. We also feel that this 1:1 ratio of registrations to NFTs affords some additional privacy with regards to transactions a user may not wish to put their name on, for whatever reason.
Apprentice Badges
Apprentice Badges extend on the functionality of the Initiate Badges with an attachment function which provides ongoing value and transient ownership for physicals of the highest-end NFTs.
An interface to mint Apprentice Badges will be made available through our web app as our user-base grows. When a user views an Apprentice Badge on our web app, our application calls an extended version of the tokenURI function that checks the registered owner of an NFT against the current owner. If a registration is eligible for transfer, the contract will transfer the registration to a new owner’s wallet the first time that the item’s page is accessed.
This functionality will provide substantial value for heirloom grade physicals associated with high-end NFTs. Users who may have commissioned hand-crafted physicals for their high-end NFTs will be able to implicitly transfer ownership of those physicals by attaching an apprentice badge to their NFT and physical. This will allow users to price these physicals into their NFT list prices, and facilitate an easier exchange of a complete “package” consisting of both an NFT and a painting, coat, sculpture, or chain.
Relics
Cult of Flex Relics use Web 3.0 tech to provide unquestionable authenticity on high end consumer goods.
One Relic will be forged as a contest reward for every 1,000 Initiate Badges minted. After each millennium consisting of 1,000 new Initiate Badges, the Cult of Flex will obtain a product, worth between 1E and 2E, based on community feedback. Our team will work with designers, artists, printers, and fabricators to develop a custom badge which suits the nature of the product. This badge will link to the Relic’s page on the Cult of Flex app, where users will be able to find documentation of the item’s authenticity. The physical item and it’s associated token will be sent to the millennium contest winner.
Depending on the cult’s interest, we may produce additional relics for surprise auctions at our sole discretion.
It is our hope that our badging will become a highly sought aesthetic feature on streetwear and luxury handbags, much like monograms, holograms, and serial numbers have made crucial design components out of old-school proofs of authenticity.
Roadmap
50% of all proceeds from sales of initiate badges will go to an administration wallet. This wallet will be used to perform housekeeping on invalidated tokens (either burning on transferring badges after a user sells or transfers their underlying NFT), develop proofs of concept for high fashion brands, deploy new functionality, and provide seed capital for other projects which will further the Cult of Flex brand. We will periodically donate to causes which support upcoming artists when we have a surplus in our administration wallet.
Community Verification
Though on-chain provenance means anyone can verify that a piece is “authentic,” the scourge of fraudulent listings continues to get worse every day. Our current platform uses an independently administered whitelist to verify collections which are “authentic,” based on information published on projects’ official websites and social media channels.
The coveted “blue tick” on the biggest marketplaces helps keep buyers safe, but it has also become a powerful tool for large entities to stomp out parody, high quality derivatives, and collections they otherwise deem to be too “similar” to their own. We, as an entity, cannot be immune to litigious players in the space, so we are in the process of designing a voting system to whitelist contract addresses. This system will give our members a mechanism to use their badges to collectively allow and disallow contracts which have drawn the ire of major players in the space.
Integrations
We are currently shopping our service around to businesses manufacturing physicals for NFT owners.
The Cult of Flex contract has provisions to authorize fashion houses to mint Relics, and for select NFT series to mint badges. As our membership grows, we intend to solicit fashion houses, physical media artists, and impeccably managed NFT series to integrate with our service.
Marketplace
Our long term vision for the Cult of Flex brand includes a marketplace when ownership reaches a critical mass. We will impose no additional fees, beyond creator royalties, on sales of products registered with one of our badges.
