7 Pillars of Creator NFTs
What’s truly important here?
Hello friends! As our NFT landscape blossoms I’d like to share what I believe to be the key factors of a proper non-fungible token and healthy ecosystem for creators and our space.
1. Decentralization & Self-Custody
Think about how ridiculous it would be if people actually just sold JPGs — with literally no NFT?
The reason NFTs are possible is because of decentralized blockchains. The more you relinquish your control and ownership of an NFT to a company, the more issues may arise. There are centralized services that claim to be NFT platforms but do not even allow you to withdraw them to your own wallet. If they get hacked, *poof* it’s gone and you will have to fully trust that they will restore your assets for you.
Be wary and mindful of how centralized something is, because we are all here due to decentralized systems, not the other way around.
2. Asset Permanence
What would happen if an NFT’s artwork or file asset completely disappears? Well, this is quite a possible scenario for ~90%+ of existing tokens and completely defeats the promise of an NFT. Most assets are currently stored on IPFS with no decentralized incentivization to upkeep these files with backups — this is a serious concern.
I encourage all platforms and minting providers to consider using Arweave or the Arweave+IPFS bridge to ensure the NFT’s contents will exist forever.
3. Creator Royalties
Platform and creator fees on NFT resales in perpetuity is perhaps one of the most empowering and fair forms of revenue streams. Currently there is no agreed upon contract code standard for royalties. It is the responsibility of marketplaces and developers to agree upon and implement a standard.
I would like to make a call to action for all marketplaces and developers to inherit this royalty contract for all NFTs.
This standard is already implemented on Rarible, and I’ve gotten word OpenSea intends to as well.
Keeping track of share percentages and creator addresses on-chain is sufficient enough for marketplaces to handle the split and distribution of sale proceeds.
4. Fair Collaboration Splits
The true ethos of blockchain is equal and global opportunity. Our traditional business models across all industries such as music, finance, and art, are often extremely predatory in which an individual and artist’s creative value is completely sucked out into the pockets of rich businesspeople and companies.
We MUST NOT allow this to happen here.
We are seeing quite a few instances of these behaviors happening in our community, and it is infuriating. It’s the creator’s time to fight for fair compensation and it is our duty to combat these broken systems of the past and fight for the people’s empowerment. 50/50 for a collaboration at the minimum please!
If we ever see this type of behavior happening, we must do our best to point them out to the community to protect and preserve our culture and participants.
5. Provenance Origination
The BEST way to verify the authenticity of a token is if the creator minted it themselves, hands down.
Anyone can mint a piece, claim it was made by Beeple, and throw his wallet address into the metadata. Any platform that offers discounted fees, where the NFTs never actually touch the creator’s wallet, is not truly providing the best service from a data integrity standpoint.
In these cases, you have to trust the platform and publisher that it was indeed created by the said author, and that model is what we should be moving away from.
6. Ecosystem & Marketplace Accessibility
A prime reason NFTs may flourish is that blockchains provide a nearly instantaneous globally connected economy. They can be easily exchanged for other forms of value such as crypto currency or other NFTs in a trustless manner.
Any NFTs that are siloed on a fiat system, or a blockchain that lacks developers or financial tools, will not have the compound benefits of a rich ecosystem. A robust blockchain will provide more room and opportunities for innovation, interoperability, and integrations — there is way more than just money to an NFT. Being mindful of which blockchain an NFT exists on is an important consideration to take into account.
7. Consumer Accessibility
Ethereum is the blockchain with this aforementioned rich ecosystem, but the network is currently facing high minting costs and social backlash for its carbon and ecological impact.
In order to fulfill the promise and vision of this movement, various NFTs must be accessible to anybody regardless of spending abilities. Frankly, aside from creator NFTs, most should be free and earned as rewards in my opinion (the future of games is bright).
Both the financial and ecological costs will be reduced and resolved by a factor of ~99% with upcoming improvements and solutions such as EIP-1559, Polygon Network, Optimism, Immutable X, and ETH 2.0.
In the meantime, I do encourage creators to try out other blockchain platforms to get a more holistic understanding of existing options. But in my opinion in the long run, most of our world’s source of truth will eventually be on Ethereum’s base network and security.
Thank you so much for reading my first written thought piece and I hope this was somewhat informative and helpful! I’ve been keeping my thoughts and opinions mostly to myself and it feels great to write it all down here to share, so I hope to do this more in the future :)
Shoutout to j1mmy & the nft42 team for always pioneering and advocating decentralization maximalism
Shoutout to the Sevens community for being the most wonderful group of supporters and people ❤
