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 m

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.