To PFP or Not to PFP?
Should a project dedicated to meaningful long term utility create PFPs for the community?
At first glance, PFPs don’t offer much from a utility perspective. Apes, bears, foxes, mutants, vegetables, have all had their day in the profile picture limelight, but as a project dedicated to preserving humanities most meaningful memories should we create one for our community?
To date we’ve resisted the idea, simply because we don’t want to take away from the importance of our primary NFT offering — the blox. The blox are a digital representation of actual places; the locations where lives are lived and memories are made.
In the Beginning…
Like any startup, our initial concept has changed and evolved over the last year — it’s almost hard to believe that it hasn’t even been a year since Jun Loayza and Yu-kai Chou started on their Metablox journey. We began in what was essentially a real estate first position — with blox ownership as the main desired action.
However as we’ve added users and people to the platform, it’s become clear that there is a powerful interest in just the memory side. Some people want to create and preserve memories, but aren’t as passionate about ownership of the blox.
In addition to the natural progression of a company the web3 space has been rapidly evolving as well. Our choice to build on Polygon, is proving to be a well placed bet. Since our adoption, other companies like Meta, Starbucks Coffee, and Disney (among others) have adopted selected Polygon as well.
Community Signals
Communities tend to cluster around a set of shared values and interests. At some point they start to adopt some external representation of their common pursuit — everything from Letterman’s Jackets, to tattoos, to T-shirts.
In web3, that typically takes the form of a PFP.
A PFP is an easy way to signal, share, and see what someone is supporting. This is something we at Metablox do not currently have. We’ve experimented with a couple different templates, but nothing that was an NFT.
Should We?
As we continue to discuss the possibility of a PFP offering, there are a number of possibilities that really intrigue me.
- Dynamic NFTs. This emerging technology gives owners the ability to alter the look or function of one NFT with another. Because we are built on Polygon, gas fees are not a limiting factor. This opens the door to all sort of possibilities
- Additional functionality and leveling for people focused on memories. If we’re able to level individual profiles, similar to blox, that creates another path for more people to be involved.
- More value for our community. For existing blox owners, they could now visually share their passion for memories and also have another asset to own.
- Cross functionality. Imagine owning a PFP that could be leveled up by creating memories and owning blox? What if a blox could earn more metarent because it was owned by someone with a high tier PFP?
The possibilities for value creation are boundless. - Partnerships with artists and projects. Because we’re focused on the platform utility, we could join forces with value aligned projects and artists to created the art and expand functionality.
What’s The Answer?
Ultimately, we don’t yet know if we’ll do a PFP or not. Either way, I’m looking forward to meeting up with Jun and Yu-kai again to attend the first ever NFT Seattle event in a couple days.
While we’re there, we’ll be discussing PFPs and a bunch of other road map related things as we plan for the fourth quarter.
What do you think — should be create a PFP for our community?
