Dear Bankless Nation,
Something we hear a lot lately is you can fork Ethereum projects, but you can’t fork the Ethereum community’s soul.
That’s because the Ethereum ecosystem has passionately rallied around a set of shared values and visions, and the ensuing culture building has led to our work being a way of life for many of us.
Against this backdrop, I think the new POAP.art project is really interesting — it’s an NFT-centric digital canvas platform that Ethereans can use to collectively record our shared histories.
This, then, is certainly one way to further build our culture: together, creatively, and by narrating what matters most to us into reality and into our cultural record via collaborative NFTs. So today, let’s talk POAP.art! 🖌️
-WMP
A New Kind of Canvas
POAP.art is a recently launched subproject of POAP, the Proof of Attendance Protocol famous for its attendance-dependent NFT badges.
Described by its builders as a “canvas for everyone” and an “experiment at the intersection of art and tech,” POAP.art provides a platform for Ethereum community members to collectively create cryptoart.
How? By letting these people, namely holders of a particular POAP access token, collaboratively place pixels on a digital canvas at a rate of one pixel per party per second while the creation period is open. Then, the completed canvases are minted as NFTs.
We saw the POAP.art experiment in action for the first time last week when the platform held a celebration of Ethereum’s new Berlin upgrade via its inaugural 256*128px canvas campaign.
For that first campaign, community creators came together to create an artwork replete with a range of imagery from the Ethereum ecosystem, and the resulting piece was auctioned on NFT platform Foundation on behalf of the r/EthStaker subreddit. The NFT raised 7.75 ETH in its primary sale, or ~$18k USD at the time!
And, of course, this is just the beginning. Next up, the POAP.art team has opened a new testing canvas at dev.poap.art so they can keep getting feedback and iterating while the project is so young.
In the meantime, it’s clear that POAP.art already has the makings of a really interesting Web3 project that can come to serve as something of a creative historical record for all sorts of notable happenings around the Ethereum ecosystem and beyond.
As for the next official POAP.art canvas, its rollout is contingent on the team completing a handful of technical upgrades on the platform, which POAP founder Patricio Worthalter said will “hopefully [be] this week” on the project’s Discord channel yesterday.
Whatever happens from here, this interesting new NFT project shows that the collaborative possibilities around Ethereum today are already wide open. Just imagine how much more these possibilities will abound as platforms like POAP.art continue to evolve and as the underlying infrastructure — whether we’re talking about the Ethereum base layer, layer two scaling solutions, etc. — becomes considerably more powerful.
For now, keep this collaborative NFT platform on your radar by following its Twitter account!
Action steps
- 👀 Check out the first POAP.art NFT on Foundation. How many references to Ethereum, DeFi, and NFT projects can you spot?