6 ms·

What Are POAPs and Why Are They Important?

32 points by conanxin 5y ago

thebean11 5y ago
I wish the actually interesting dApp projects got as much traction on HN as the boring stuff does. A POAP could just be a signed message by the event organizer. It barely uses the capabilities of general purpose turing-complete(ish) blockchains.
- theamk 5y ago
  I am still not convinced "actually interesting dApp projects" exist. Everything I have seen is either useful for blockchains only, or would be better off implemented in federated/centralized way.
  - cinquemb 5y ago
    One may never be convinced if they are ok with centralized/federated alternatives at their disposal, esp since "actually interesting dApp projects" is subjective, and that is perfectly ok in my mind. When I had a conversation with someone who traded lehman positions out of administration profitably years after its collapse and the issues that preceded that with JPMs centralized collateral management procedures and their interest in various decentralized analogues in DeFi that could replace it, its good that they are not looking to seek to convince you. When I had a conversation with someone who traded interest rate derivatives for a big bank for 13 years and their take on how DEX liquidity pools could be a serious contender for ways how people from tradfi can hedge various forms of risk on chain (esp when those markets break down in various places around the world for various reasons [not limited to regulatory reasons incentivizing breakdowns of a particular market]), its good that they are not looking to convince you. When I did some work for a nigerian fintech that was able to bypass a lot of crappy local/cross boarder payments infrastructure by leveraging crypto markets in order to help provide access to financing/liquidity and settlement infrastructure for local commodities traders and producers to the global market for their goods, its good that they are not looking to convince you. The great thing about DAGs/blockchains/DLTs is that people don't have to use them for things if they don't want (provided that they have access to centralized/federated alternatives, and actually trust that their incentives are aligned with their own). I don't have to give a shit about random POAPs or NFTs while being able to still use various chains at the same time as others who are only interested in various chains for doing stuff with POAPs or NFTs who dont give a shit about disintermediaton of various things that go overlooked, even by central bankers (especially if they have been relegated to footnotes in various publicly accessable reports that often go unread by the public at large), in tradfi.
    - aspenmayer 5y ago
      How to DeFi? What are the trends, top dApps and sites, Discord servers? How do you follow the meta? It’s hard to find the signal when crypto and DeFi by proxy are already so spammy and noisy. And I say that as someone genuinely curious about this stuff.
      - cinquemb 5y ago
        > How to DeFi? Well, there isn't any particular way, I just started looking at traditional startups on angel list that were making/doing things related to crypto, then quickly became interested in decentralized uncollateralized algorithmic stablecoins and started contributing with pull requests and community discussions. From there I just followed my own interests. > What are the trends, top dApps and sites, Discord servers? You'd cant go wrong familiarizing yourself with things like decentralized exchanges, decentralized lending (that run the gambit from over collateralized to uncollateralized) protocols, stable coins of various designs (decentralized or not) and concepts like staking, yield farming, liquidity pools, oracles, flash loans. With those terms, should be enough for you to DYOR and see if anything interests you to dig deeper (its ok if non of it does). > How do you follow the meta? I don't. I narrow in on the topics that most interest me from my experience working in tradfi and look for analogues in defi, I look for ways defi can make the barriers to do such things accessible to people that don't work on bank desks. >It’s hard to find the signal when crypto and DeFi by proxy are already so spammy and noisy. Yeah, i can understand that may be the case when one is mostly looking for "top" stuff and not topics/communities that may genuinely interest them (i.e. have a particular finance topic in mind) that people are trying to do in a decentralized way.
        aspenmayer 5y ago
        > Yeah, i can understand that may be the case when one is mostly looking for "top" stuff and not topics/communities that may genuinely interest them (i.e. have a particular finance topic in mind) that people are trying to do in a decentralized way. These are not mutually exclusive. I just want to find high-quality projects that interest me, which may or may not be already popular/successful. It’s hard to navigate the spaces sometimes because it’s hard to know the status quo. I can’t even determine the lay of the land because of filter bubbles.
  - thebean11 5y ago
    I think the insurance products being built are pretty interesting, for one.
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  I have a POAP. It was for the Ethereum London upgrade. It was extremely difficult to claim (terrible UX), ran on a side chain because it would cost $70 to process on chain, and is currently worth $0.08. It’s super, super boring. I have zero further interest in this project. I guess you can admire my NFT.
  - cdurth 5y ago
    I'm curious. Why did you mention what it's currently worth? Pretty neat utility concept. I'm currently working with this service to add interactivity with other NFTs. I did have a poor experience setting up test events, but I think this is on their middle layer and hopefully can get cleaned up. Also annoying that the token points back to their API for full metadata. This "company" might not be the winner, but the idea of POAP is promising both IRL & metaverse. I personally have more faith in utility NFT than "art".
    - AlexandrB 5y ago
      > I'm curious. Why did you mention what it's currently worth? Because all blockchain tech is about creating new types of digital assets that can be bought and sold. The specifics vary, but the whole field is about financializing things. Why else would you design POAPs - a supposed proof of life experiences - in a way where they can be bought and sold?
      - yokem55 5y ago
        Sure, they could be sold simply because the technical implementation of the token allows it. In practice though, there really is no market for them any more then there is a market for boy scout badges.
        foxylad 5y ago
        Completely off topic, but there ARE fanatical collectors of scout badges, at least here in NZ. They attend scout jamborees, and we had to warn kids that they are brutal negotiators.
cors-fls 5y ago
OK those POAP are on a decentralised blockchain but it seems to be a useless constraint to depend on a specific contract and their creator for this use case. It's like doing centralization on top of decentralization. Event organisers could provide attendance proof with their own contract/address and you'd still have a proof of attendance as long as the organization is verifiably linked to the contract/transaction issuer. You then only need a database (easily shareable) of verified event organizers to be able to verify anyone event attendance history. All the fluff on top of the attendance verification mechanism provided by this company doesn't depend on the blockchain at all.
- sanderjd 5y ago
  Agreed. If any of this stuff is gonna be interesting at all, it's going to be by turning things that previously required a company into an open protocol instead.
AlexandrB 5y ago
> Creators of the POAP badge did not intend for these NFTs to be traded or sold, rather they are a way to prove your dedication to brands and provide a way to prove the journey that you have been on throughout life. Emphasis mine. This sentence made me physically shudder. Sounds like the worst kind of fanatical consumerism and conspicuous consumption. Oh, and you can also sell them - so in what way do they provide any kind of proof of your "journey throughout life"? Sounds like they will mostly provide proof you have money - like most crypto assets. > The most exciting aspect of POAP for several of us is that it enables social interactions that are otherwise outright impossible. What these social interactions are is left as an exercise for the reader, I guess. Edit: > As a collector, your POAPs are a record of your life's greatest moments and digitized into a collectible and trackable token. God help me if my life's greatest moments involve attending some kind of conference, scanning QR codes, and "engaging" with "brands". This reads like parody.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- lucasverra 5y ago
  What if conferences are music venues? Film festival or that wonderful Nadal - Federer tenis Match ? What if having that collectible allows you a rather interesting benefit, like 10% discount next year (but just next year!). Can´t go, resell it for its money worth ^^
  - jimminy 5y ago
    This already kind of existed prior to the pandemic'. If you bought premium tickets to a show, often you would get placed into VIP list with the venue and/or artist. Venue perks included contact with a VIP manager that could help lock in seating pre-sale, occasionally get discounts, if you asked, and other perks. It's in the venue's interest to KYC and maintain these higher value relationships. And if you don't patronize them for a period they'll stop reaching out or providing access. 'Might still exist, but my experience was prior.
- davidmurdoch 5y ago
NikolaeVarius 5y ago
Who the fuck wants this? The article claims to have shown why the are important but it has done nothing of the sort? > If you have ever saved one of your ticket stubs from an event or perhaps your favorite vacation, then you understand the concept of POAPs. It's a goddamn memento, why does anyone give a shit about it enough to put it on the blockchain > Except, POAPs allow you to prove your attendance thanks to blockchain technology and store all your badges in one secure location. I just, what the fuck? Are people so self-conscious that they have to "prove" they attended a event?
- derbOac 5y ago
  I generally have that reaction but could think of one use of this in theory: for continuing education credits for licensed professions. That also makes me cringe but this is a common situation for e.g., physicians wanting CE credits for attending conferences.
  - notpachet 5y ago
    But aren't they still transferable? Couldn't I set up easy-physician-ce.com and start hawking these things? People checking the license would need to walk back up the transaction chain to ensure that Dr Bob really did receive his directly from the issuing authority, which.... as another poster said, we're probably better off just having the authority sign a key that says that they're giving it to Dr Bob directly.
- gfodor 5y ago
  People like to have mementos from events and show them off. See also: t-shirts, photographs, commemorative coins, plaques. This is just a digital analog. Not complicated and I’d argue not worth being angry over.
- sanderjd 5y ago
  I think this stuff is very silly / trivial, but this - "why does anyone give a shit about it enough to put it on the blockchain" - suggests that blockchains are somehow only for serious things (things people "give a shit" about) and I don't at all see why that would be the case. Where I work, you get "badges" - little icons - that show up on your corporate profile for various things you do, writing some number of lines of some language, attending some training, joining some mailing list, etc. Anyone can make a badge and give it to anyone. It's just a big public (inside the company) database. It's all very silly and trivial and nobody "gives a shit" about these badges. And yet they still exist and people still create new ones. I don't see any reason throwing this same kind of thing on a public blockchain is any more silly than this. But maybe the criticism is that (as is often the case in the crypto world) this is being presented / talked about / sold as some kind of next huge serious thing. If that's the criticism, then I'm right there with you. But if the criticism is just "this is pretty silly", well, lots of stuff is, so what.
noway421 5y ago
This is great. I think the biggest value prop of POAPs is actually not highlighted in the article - they can be airdropped based on a scan of who owns a particular token. In that case, if you're doing a token sale, you can also airdrop to all the token sale participants POAPs as a collectible memorabilia. While the token can be easily resold, having the POAP in your wallet proves that you've been a 'day one' member. That's powerful and encourages community members to participate early, rather than buying on secondary market.
mavu 5y ago
> tokens that are used to give attendees a way to prove their record of life experiences. I swear, if all the crypto people would just take a step back and take a good long look at what they are doing, graphics card prices would be back to normal in 4 weeks.
carlosdp 5y ago
The comments on this thread are... interesting. I hope I can clear up a little bit about POAPs, why people care about them, and what the point is. First, why make POAPs instead of just making your own NFT? On one hand, what they are doing is just making it really easy to make your "proof I was at this event" NFT, so it's a product play in that sense. The have a pretty good mobile app now that makes it super easy to claim these tokens by scanning QR codes at events or using a secret phrase, among other methods. But, they also are trying to establish a brand of legitimacy. The idea is POAP is trying to make sure people are actually only getting POAPs for events they actually do attend, which is harder than it sounds. How are they used? Well, for example, Bankless Podcast (a podcast about crypto finance) started a DAO and distributed a bunch of the initial token supply to fans that have been with them for years. One of the metrics they used for identifying these fans was POAP tokens given to them when they attended certain events or proved they were avid listeners of the podcast. POAPs are used a decent bit for initial distributions like this, so you can imagine there are whole hoards of people that are "POAP hunters" and literally just scour the internet trying to acquire improperly-secured token drops in hopes of receiving tokens in the future in these distributions (I've experienced these myself for a POAP we did for The DAOly Post newsletter at my company). POAP has recently begun clamping down on this and is being more strict about how these tokens can be claimed, with the idea being you can trust POAP tokens will only be claimed by true fans/attendees. I hope that clears up confusion on why POAPs vs making your own NFT, and what the use for them is. A good way to think of them is like conference badges: idk about you guys, but I have a whole collection from all the tech conferences I attended. So they are basically trophies, but they can also serve as sort of "markers" to identify fans, or social data in the massive social graph that is the blockchain. For those using the "this could just be a database, blockchain is pointless" argument, that would take me longer to explain and there's tons of material on that out there. Short version is: it's all about interoperability and composability. Blockchains are just databases that are interoperable by default, so instead of depending on companies being good at building external APIs, or being incentivized to do so, they just have them by default and people can build on top of them.

32 points by conanxin 5y ago

I wish the actually interesting dApp projects got as much traction on HN as the boring stuff does. A POAP could just be a signed message by the event organizer. It barely uses the capabilities of general purpose turing-complete(ish) blockchains.

theamk 5y ago
I am still not convinced "actually interesting dApp projects" exist. Everything I have seen is either useful for blockchains only, or would be better off implemented in federated/centralized way.
- cinquemb 5y ago
  One may never be convinced if they are ok with centralized/federated alternatives at their disposal, esp since "actually interesting dApp projects" is subjective, and that is perfectly ok in my mind. When I had a conversation with someone who traded lehman positions out of administration profitably years after its collapse and the issues that preceded that with JPMs centralized collateral management procedures and their interest in various decentralized analogues in DeFi that could replace it, its good that they are not looking to seek to convince you. When I had a conversation with someone who traded interest rate derivatives for a big bank for 13 years and their take on how DEX liquidity pools could be a serious contender for ways how people from tradfi can hedge various forms of risk on chain (esp when those markets break down in various places around the world for various reasons [not limited to regulatory reasons incentivizing breakdowns of a particular market]), its good that they are not looking to convince you. When I did some work for a nigerian fintech that was able to bypass a lot of crappy local/cross boarder payments infrastructure by leveraging crypto markets in order to help provide access to financing/liquidity and settlement infrastructure for local commodities traders and producers to the global market for their goods, its good that they are not looking to convince you. The great thing about DAGs/blockchains/DLTs is that people don't have to use them for things if they don't want (provided that they have access to centralized/federated alternatives, and actually trust that their incentives are aligned with their own). I don't have to give a shit about random POAPs or NFTs while being able to still use various chains at the same time as others who are only interested in various chains for doing stuff with POAPs or NFTs who dont give a shit about disintermediaton of various things that go overlooked, even by central bankers (especially if they have been relegated to footnotes in various publicly accessable reports that often go unread by the public at large), in tradfi.
  - aspenmayer 5y ago
    How to DeFi? What are the trends, top dApps and sites, Discord servers? How do you follow the meta? It’s hard to find the signal when crypto and DeFi by proxy are already so spammy and noisy. And I say that as someone genuinely curious about this stuff.
    - cinquemb 5y ago
      > How to DeFi? Well, there isn't any particular way, I just started looking at traditional startups on angel list that were making/doing things related to crypto, then quickly became interested in decentralized uncollateralized algorithmic stablecoins and started contributing with pull requests and community discussions. From there I just followed my own interests. > What are the trends, top dApps and sites, Discord servers? You'd cant go wrong familiarizing yourself with things like decentralized exchanges, decentralized lending (that run the gambit from over collateralized to uncollateralized) protocols, stable coins of various designs (decentralized or not) and concepts like staking, yield farming, liquidity pools, oracles, flash loans. With those terms, should be enough for you to DYOR and see if anything interests you to dig deeper (its ok if non of it does). > How do you follow the meta? I don't. I narrow in on the topics that most interest me from my experience working in tradfi and look for analogues in defi, I look for ways defi can make the barriers to do such things accessible to people that don't work on bank desks. >It’s hard to find the signal when crypto and DeFi by proxy are already so spammy and noisy. Yeah, i can understand that may be the case when one is mostly looking for "top" stuff and not topics/communities that may genuinely interest them (i.e. have a particular finance topic in mind) that people are trying to do in a decentralized way.
      - aspenmayer 5y ago
        > Yeah, i can understand that may be the case when one is mostly looking for "top" stuff and not topics/communities that may genuinely interest them (i.e. have a particular finance topic in mind) that people are trying to do in a decentralized way. These are not mutually exclusive. I just want to find high-quality projects that interest me, which may or may not be already popular/successful. It’s hard to navigate the spaces sometimes because it’s hard to know the status quo. I can’t even determine the lay of the land because of filter bubbles.
- thebean11 5y ago
  I think the insurance products being built are pretty interesting, for one.
gjsman-1000 5y ago
I have a POAP. It was for the Ethereum London upgrade. It was extremely difficult to claim (terrible UX), ran on a side chain because it would cost $70 to process on chain, and is currently worth $0.08. It’s super, super boring. I have zero further interest in this project. I guess you can admire my NFT.
- cdurth 5y ago
  I'm curious. Why did you mention what it's currently worth? Pretty neat utility concept. I'm currently working with this service to add interactivity with other NFTs. I did have a poor experience setting up test events, but I think this is on their middle layer and hopefully can get cleaned up. Also annoying that the token points back to their API for full metadata. This "company" might not be the winner, but the idea of POAP is promising both IRL & metaverse. I personally have more faith in utility NFT than "art".
  - AlexandrB 5y ago
    > I'm curious. Why did you mention what it's currently worth? Because all blockchain tech is about creating new types of digital assets that can be bought and sold. The specifics vary, but the whole field is about financializing things. Why else would you design POAPs - a supposed proof of life experiences - in a way where they can be bought and sold?
    - yokem55 5y ago
      Sure, they could be sold simply because the technical implementation of the token allows it. In practice though, there really is no market for them any more then there is a market for boy scout badges.
      - foxylad 5y ago
        Completely off topic, but there ARE fanatical collectors of scout badges, at least here in NZ. They attend scout jamborees, and we had to warn kids that they are brutal negotiators.

cors-fls 5y ago

OK those POAP are on a decentralised blockchain but it seems to be a useless constraint to depend on a specific contract and their creator for this use case. It's like doing centralization on top of decentralization. Event organisers could provide attendance proof with their own contract/address and you'd still have a proof of attendance as long as the organization is verifiably linked to the contract/transaction issuer. You then only need a database (easily shareable) of verified event organizers to be able to verify anyone event attendance history. All the fluff on top of the attendance verification mechanism provided by this company doesn't depend on the blockchain at all.

sanderjd 5y ago
Agreed. If any of this stuff is gonna be interesting at all, it's going to be by turning things that previously required a company into an open protocol instead.

AlexandrB 5y ago

> Creators of the POAP badge did not intend for these NFTs to be traded or sold, rather they are a way to prove your dedication to brands and provide a way to prove the journey that you have been on throughout life. Emphasis mine. This sentence made me physically shudder. Sounds like the worst kind of fanatical consumerism and conspicuous consumption. Oh, and you can also sell them - so in what way do they provide any kind of proof of your "journey throughout life"? Sounds like they will mostly provide proof you have money - like most crypto assets. > The most exciting aspect of POAP for several of us is that it enables social interactions that are otherwise outright impossible. What these social interactions are is left as an exercise for the reader, I guess. Edit: > As a collector, your POAPs are a record of your life's greatest moments and digitized into a collectible and trackable token. God help me if my life's greatest moments involve attending some kind of conference, scanning QR codes, and "engaging" with "brands". This reads like parody.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
lucasverra 5y ago
What if conferences are music venues? Film festival or that wonderful Nadal - Federer tenis Match ? What if having that collectible allows you a rather interesting benefit, like 10% discount next year (but just next year!). Can´t go, resell it for its money worth ^^
- jimminy 5y ago
  This already kind of existed prior to the pandemic'. If you bought premium tickets to a show, often you would get placed into VIP list with the venue and/or artist. Venue perks included contact with a VIP manager that could help lock in seating pre-sale, occasionally get discounts, if you asked, and other perks. It's in the venue's interest to KYC and maintain these higher value relationships. And if you don't patronize them for a period they'll stop reaching out or providing access. 'Might still exist, but my experience was prior.
davidmurdoch 5y ago

NikolaeVarius 5y ago

Who the fuck wants this? The article claims to have shown why the are important but it has done nothing of the sort? > If you have ever saved one of your ticket stubs from an event or perhaps your favorite vacation, then you understand the concept of POAPs. It's a goddamn memento, why does anyone give a shit about it enough to put it on the blockchain > Except, POAPs allow you to prove your attendance thanks to blockchain technology and store all your badges in one secure location. I just, what the fuck? Are people so self-conscious that they have to "prove" they attended a event?

derbOac 5y ago
I generally have that reaction but could think of one use of this in theory: for continuing education credits for licensed professions. That also makes me cringe but this is a common situation for e.g., physicians wanting CE credits for attending conferences.
- notpachet 5y ago
  But aren't they still transferable? Couldn't I set up easy-physician-ce.com and start hawking these things? People checking the license would need to walk back up the transaction chain to ensure that Dr Bob really did receive his directly from the issuing authority, which.... as another poster said, we're probably better off just having the authority sign a key that says that they're giving it to Dr Bob directly.
gfodor 5y ago
People like to have mementos from events and show them off. See also: t-shirts, photographs, commemorative coins, plaques. This is just a digital analog. Not complicated and I’d argue not worth being angry over.
sanderjd 5y ago
I think this stuff is very silly / trivial, but this - "why does anyone give a shit about it enough to put it on the blockchain" - suggests that blockchains are somehow only for serious things (things people "give a shit" about) and I don't at all see why that would be the case. Where I work, you get "badges" - little icons - that show up on your corporate profile for various things you do, writing some number of lines of some language, attending some training, joining some mailing list, etc. Anyone can make a badge and give it to anyone. It's just a big public (inside the company) database. It's all very silly and trivial and nobody "gives a shit" about these badges. And yet they still exist and people still create new ones. I don't see any reason throwing this same kind of thing on a public blockchain is any more silly than this. But maybe the criticism is that (as is often the case in the crypto world) this is being presented / talked about / sold as some kind of next huge serious thing. If that's the criticism, then I'm right there with you. But if the criticism is just "this is pretty silly", well, lots of stuff is, so what.

noway421 5y ago

This is great. I think the biggest value prop of POAPs is actually not highlighted in the article - they can be airdropped based on a scan of who owns a particular token. In that case, if you're doing a token sale, you can also airdrop to all the token sale participants POAPs as a collectible memorabilia. While the token can be easily resold, having the POAP in your wallet proves that you've been a 'day one' member. That's powerful and encourages community members to participate early, rather than buying on secondary market.

mavu 5y ago

> tokens that are used to give attendees a way to prove their record of life experiences. I swear, if all the crypto people would just take a step back and take a good long look at what they are doing, graphics card prices would be back to normal in 4 weeks.

carlosdp 5y ago

The comments on this thread are... interesting. I hope I can clear up a little bit about POAPs, why people care about them, and what the point is. First, why make POAPs instead of just making your own NFT? On one hand, what they are doing is just making it really easy to make your "proof I was at this event" NFT, so it's a product play in that sense. The have a pretty good mobile app now that makes it super easy to claim these tokens by scanning QR codes at events or using a secret phrase, among other methods. But, they also are trying to establish a brand of legitimacy. The idea is POAP is trying to make sure people are actually only getting POAPs for events they actually do attend, which is harder than it sounds. How are they used? Well, for example, Bankless Podcast (a podcast about crypto finance) started a DAO and distributed a bunch of the initial token supply to fans that have been with them for years. One of the metrics they used for identifying these fans was POAP tokens given to them when they attended certain events or proved they were avid listeners of the podcast. POAPs are used a decent bit for initial distributions like this, so you can imagine there are whole hoards of people that are "POAP hunters" and literally just scour the internet trying to acquire improperly-secured token drops in hopes of receiving tokens in the future in these distributions (I've experienced these myself for a POAP we did for The DAOly Post newsletter at my company). POAP has recently begun clamping down on this and is being more strict about how these tokens can be claimed, with the idea being you can trust POAP tokens will only be claimed by true fans/attendees. I hope that clears up confusion on why POAPs vs making your own NFT, and what the use for them is. A good way to think of them is like conference badges: idk about you guys, but I have a whole collection from all the tech conferences I attended. So they are basically trophies, but they can also serve as sort of "markers" to identify fans, or social data in the massive social graph that is the blockchain. For those using the "this could just be a database, blockchain is pointless" argument, that would take me longer to explain and there's tons of material on that out there. Short version is: it's all about interoperability and composability. Blockchains are just databases that are interoperable by default, so instead of depending on companies being good at building external APIs, or being incentivized to do so, they just have them by default and people can build on top of them.