Dear Bankless Nation,

Uhhh…. What just happened?

Yesterday, we unpacked the CZ/SBF rivalry. Today, Binance has agreed to acquire FTX in a deal that’s shocked even the most veteran of crypto acolytes.

What will this mean for the industry and trust in centralized crypto exchanges?

Ryan and David are going live right now to unpack the news and dig into what this all means. Check out the livestream below, and we’ll have full analysis on Bankless tomorrow.

When you’re finished trying to process what just happened here, check out this tactic from William as he digs into the blooming alternative content NFT ecosystem.

- Bankless team

Tactic Tuesday

Bankless Writer: William M. Peaster, Bankless contributor and Metaversal writer

How to collect content NFTs

Over the past couple of years, the NFT space has experienced an innovation boom.

These tech strides have made it increasingly simple for content creators to release different types of media as NFTs to offer new digital possibilities for their biggest fans.

For this Bankless tactic, let’s walk you through the basics of collecting in this brave new world of content NFTs and the different types around!

• Goal: Learn how to collect content NFTs
• Skill: Beginner
• Effort: 1 hour to get started
• ROI: New types of digital collectibles

Getting started at the frontier of content NFTs

The basics of content NFTs

Art, digital land, game assets, and profile picture (PFP) projects have been some of the dominant use cases for NFTs through the initial rise of the NFT ecosystem.

As time has gone on, we’ve seen newer use cases coming to the fore as more and more explorers experiment and expand the possibilities of NFTs out in all directions.

That said, content NFTs are one of these newer areas that have been gaining ground lately.

Content NFTs are blockchain-based digital collectibles minted by content creators.

These NFTs can be any of the types of digital media that are popular with contemporary audiences today, like articles, music, podcasts, and social media posts.

In other words, if you can publish something online, then chances are you can mint that thing as a content NFT nowadays, too. And this dynamic is leading to new types of economics and new sorts of opportunities for creators and audiences alike!

Why content NFTs matter

NFTs offer content creators a DIY way to cut out middlemen and digitally publish and edition their content into composable collectibles on neutral global infrastructure that’s accessible to anyone.

This kind of capability — making durable digital things that are readily transactable on open infra — has never been available to creators until now.

In the traditional media paradigm, content creators often face huge rent-seeking fees while having little more than superficial control over their creations and the reach and rewards thereof.

With content NFTs, creators can take direct control of — and thus directly benefit from — their own release strategies.

Want to edition your latest blog post into 100 collectibles for your 100 True Fans?

Now you can, all on your own terms and pacing.

Content NFTs are also interesting because as digital collectibles they offer unprecedented functionalities.

They can bring in automated royalties, serve as community access passes, function as fan lists for future content airdrops, facilitate 24/7 markets, provide ways for fans to collect rewards, and much more.

For collectors, content NFTs are a way to directly support awesome creators and partake in these collectibles’ many possible functionalities and upsides, like access to exclusive experiences and, in the case of some creators, rising historical significance.

It’s a way to connect with your favorite creator on a deeper level and show support beyond the status quo.

Popular types of Content NFTs

The content NFT scene has four main sectors that are picking up steam right now. The largest of these genres are music NFTs, followed by social media NFTs, writing NFTs, and lastly — the latest newcomer in the field — podcast NFTs.

Below, let’s walk through each of these categories and show you how you can get started collecting in each ⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️

🎵 Music

Sound provides a suite of tools custom-tailored for musicians in web3.

For its ease of use, the platform has recently become a hotbed of activity for emerging artists exploring music NFTs.

Moreover, the creators of the platform just released Sound Market, a bespoke secondary marketplace that makes it easy for collectors to surf and sweep through new and popular music NFT releases.

As for which tracks to collect, that’s up to your taste! But if you want to go deeper, check out the new “Finding the XCOPY of Music NFTs” guide in Bankless by Coopahtroopa and Lucas Campbell.

It’ll walk you through a thesis for music NFTs, strategies for collecting, and specific artists and tracks to consider.

If you decide you’re ready to dive in, the act of collecting on Sound is straightforward. You would:

1. Go to market.sound.xyz and connect your Ethereum wallet
2. Search available secondary listings via artist, release name, or the available filters (Newest, Highest Volume, Lowest Price)
3. Listen and add songs you like to your cart or press the Buy Now button to immediately check out
4. Press Purchase (or Checkout if you did the Buy Now option) and use your wallet to complete the buy
5. Now you can connect your wallet to Spinamp to browse and enjoy your growing library of music NFTs!

💬 Social media

Based on Polygon, Lens Protocol is a decentralized social graph.

The idea? To create a system that third-party builders could readily create web3 social media apps around so that more and more users can own their own content and data going forward.

On Lens, everything — from profiles to posts — is minted as NFTs.

This process brings an interesting in-built collectibility dynamic to all content shared on Lens projects, whether the content is art, memes, videos, or beyond.

Lens is still in beta so the creators have initially allowlisted only a handful of communities, including Aavegotchi, Boys Club, Developer DAO, Lobster DAO, PoolyNFT holders, and Zerion DNA NFT holders.

You can go to lens.xyz to see if you can claim your handle, but if not just hold tight and follow Lens updates as the protocol steadily opens further.

Once you do have a handle, e.g. wmpea.lens, you can head over to lenster.xyz, which is the most popular social media app built on Lens right now, and set up your profile to start posting and collecting posts like the one seen below.

Just remember: before you get started you’ll need to go into the Allowance section of your Lenster settings and allow the collection modules you want approved for your profile.

📝 Writing

For Metaversal I recently wrote an introduction to writing NFTs. In that post, I explained of Mirror:

“Mirror is a web3 publishing platform for writers that handles accounts through Ethereum, data storage through Arweave, and writing NFT mints through the Optimism layer-two (L2) scaling solution. This minting approach lets writers create writing NFTs for free, and the NFTs are affordable to interact with because they’re on an L2.”

That said, Mirror is the leading platform for writing NFTs right now, so it’s a great place to get started for collectors looking to support their favorite projects.

By now you’ve probably seen more than a few people sharing around mirror.xyz posts, and now these posts are readily collectible on Mirror like the one seen below.

Interested in collecting your first articles, blogs, creative writings, and beyond? You could:

1. Head to a mirror.xyz post that you enjoy
2. Press the Collect button at the top of the page or the Collect Entry button at the bottom of the page
3. Connect your wallet and when prompted switch over to the Optimism network
4. Press Collect Entry again, confirm the transaction in your wallet, and voila! You’re the new owner of a writing NFT
5. You’ll be able to track your collection as it grows through projects like Zapper, which supports Optimism NFTs

🎧 Podcasts

We haven’t seen long-form podcast content come on-chain yet, but we have started to see podcast creators experiment with releasing short audio/video clips as NFTs.

For example, Adam Levy of the Mint podcast recently released a highlight clip from an episode with Gaby Goldberg as an edition of 25 NFTs using Zora.

Not only were the NFTs themselves collectible, but they also offered holders early token-gated access to the full episode.

There aren’t many other examples like this out there yet since the podcast NFT scene is still just beginning to come together, but participating as a collector is as simple as buying these content NFTs during public mints or on secondary markets, e.g. the Zora Marketplace.

A Journey Towards Web3 Media

Content NFTs are a powerful new resource in the toolbox of content creators.

Now creators and their audiences have new ways to explore community and self-sovereignty, so I suspect we’ll see a tremendous amount of innovation around these NFTs in the years ahead as more and more creators experiment with them.

I wonder who could be a good creator to experiment with these new forms of media NFTs…

Expect to hear more from us on that front soon™️

Action steps

🙇 Check out content NFTs:

• Music + Podcasts on Sound
• Social media posts on Lenster
• Writings on Mirror
• 🔍 Also check out our previous tactic 5 must have crypto analytics tools