🗝️ NFTs as Access - TokenSmart NFT Humpday Report #32
Welcome to the 32nd issue of the NFT Humpday Report, a weekly column covering and providing embedded analysis on the NFT economy’s biggest topics du jour. Brought to you by WIP meetup collaborators and nft42 community hub TokenSmart.
NFTs are blank canvases, i.e. they can be created and used in seemingly an endless amount of ways — some already imagined, and many not yet.
That said, one utility the NFT ecosystem is increasingly seeing experimentation around lately is NFTs used as keys for access. This access can take a variety of shapes and forms, and because of the many open possibilities here that have only just begun to be unlocked, pun intended, this trend of “NFTs as access” is poised to boom much further in the years ahead.
The big picture: Via on-chain proof of ownership, access NFTs grant holders the ability to take advantage of a unique benefit or experience.
As such, NFTs can explicitly be made to provide direct access to something, like how the newly announced Metakey project’s NFTs are aimed at granting holders special digi-physical perks indefinitely. Conversely, NFTs can indirectly access benefits if projects build around them or drop rewards to their holders.
We’ve seen this latter dynamic play out recently with CryptoPunks, insofar as Punk holders gained access to a free mint of an unofficial PunkBody earlier this year and then this week gained access to claiming a free NFT from Meebits, a new official avatar project from CryptoPunks creators Larva Labs.
VeeFriends a New Example: Today, May 5th, entrepreneur and investor Gary Vaynerchuk released VeeFriends, the latest access-centric NFT project whose tokens are divided into three types: admission tokens, gift goats, and access tokens. Notably, all three types of tokens grant holders three-year admission rights to VeeCon, a “super-conference” to be curated annually by Vaynerchuk. This may be the first major access token project of its kind, but it most certainly won’t be the last!
Other examples: In the nascent NFT ecosystem, we’ve already seen a range of other NFT access token use cases come to life. These use cases include:
NFTs as access to yield multipliers.
NFTs as access to exclusive Discord chats.
NFTs as access to collector drawings.
NFTs as access to own/preview a film.
NFTs as access to 3D model asset packs.
NFTs as access to virtual curriculum.
NFTs as access to unique social prestige.
NFTs as access to limited-edition NFT drops.
NFTs as access to subscriptions.
NFTs as access to commercial rights for IP.
NFTs as access to unique real-world experiences.
NFTs as access to permissioned gateways, e.g. the POAP.art canvas.
NFTs as access to perks like high-profile shoutouts.
NFTs as access to in-world memberships, e.g. The Bored Ape Yacht Club.
NFTs as access to a DAO, e.g. SquiggleDAO.
NFTs as access to NFT backup storage.
NFTs as access to identity.
Zooming out: In the future, it may come to be that we use NFTs as digital keys as routinely as we use physical keys in our day-to-day lives now! The implications of this are obviously far ranging, as programmable on-chain access NFTs open up tons of possibilities, many of which still remain unexplored considering how early things are relatively speaking.
Thanks for reading the 32nd NFT Humpday Report! Check back this time next week for more excellent NFT ecosystem coverage! Cheers 🌠