NFTs, Utility, Marketing

Misc. IRL NFT Utility Challenges — Event NFTs and Access Pass NFTs

A great idea, but it’ll take time to mature.

I’ve had quite a few clients inquire about having me build out generative NFTs that would serve as access to IRL events. For some teams, this was the main utility of the proposed drop. (This is really a tangential expansion on my commentary on roadmap / utility recently.)

To date, I haven’t done a drop for which IRL access was the main utility, but I’ve definitely done some for which the NFT serves as a pass to get into a digital world (e.g., Sandhelm, for which the NFT allows you to play the game in the Sandbox).

In either case, though, one of the primary challenges you’ll want to be aware of if you’re planning such an NFT drop is how to best execute that utility. While it’s easy to say “if you own this NFT, then you can get into this IRL event,” it’s a whole other thing to actually make that work. For example, consider some of these challenges:

• Many people like to purchase NFTs via desktop / laptop computers. But, if they need to show the NFT at the door to get in, how are you going to handle that? It seems sub-optimal, insecure / risky, and wasteful to require them to, say, transfer their NFT to a phone-based wallet so that they can prove ownership at the door of the event.
• Even if you DO try to have a “show your NFT at the door” type authentication, how are you going to guard against people who’ve simply made a screenshot?
• What about various scenarios where the tickets are claimed, but then the person sells or transfers the NFT to another? If ignored, someone could go into the event, transfer the NFT back to a friend outside, and then the friend could also enter.
• If it’s a large-scale event with many hundreds or thousands of holder-attendees, you’re going to need to plan for all kinds of edge-case-type scenarios — different wallets, different devices, different levels of user savviness.

Some of these challenges have rather obvious appropriate approaches, but most point to some sort of integration with web2 KYC-type solutions (or even manual-type verifications, depending on the scale of your event) versus purely possessing said NFTs in one’s wallet (you’ll need to track claimed NFTs, and so forth). Oddly, though, almost none of the clients who’ve come to me initially with ideas about IRL-event-heavy utility have thought of these challenges.

I went to an IRL Budweiser event a few weeks back (been meaning to post some pics and info about that), and they had NFT owners login to a verification site, at which you could verify and claim tickets. So, for example, if you owned NFT ID #123, and #234, you could login with your wallet, the site would detect that you possessed these NFTs, and it would allow you to submit a name for each NFT owned. Then, at the door, you had to show your ID to claim the ticket you’d reserved. And, of course, each NFT could only claim its ticket once.

So, yes, there are old-school workarounds to IRL access-type utility. But I feel like some better solution awaits us in the future, as it kind of goes against the spirit of web3 to have to more or less dox yourself as a token holder. (This goes in direct opposition to my feelings on devs being doxed, btw.) It’d be ideal that one could flash one’s phone (even if you purchased on a desktop) at the door to an event and somehow prove that you’re entitled to entry, all the while safeguarding against some of the exploits and vulnerabilities mentioned above. (Though, thinking on this in legal terms, there could also be very good reason to require full contact information for attendees. So, this consideration also complicates matters.)

Same for digital access to things. One of the frustrations that I’ve found with some of the more valuable NFTs, by the way, is that, on the one hand, it’s clearly a best practice to secure one’s more valuable NFTs via cold storage — and yet with some of these NFT drops need you to login and prove ownership from time to time to receive benefits (airdrops, additional mints, etc.). We all want the benefits and extra mints and various activities, but having to login to the hardware wallet can be a pain. I mean, I try to keep everything locked down no matter where it is as best I can, but for anything worth more than a certain threshold, I personally like to lock it away on a Trezor and not mess with it, you know?

Anyway, the day isn’t here yet for optimally / easily providing access to all holder benefits while allowing holders to stay 100% safe and not have to shuffle NFTs around a bit, but it’ll come sooner or later. In the meantime, if you’re planning out IRL utility for your NFT drop, just keep in mind that there will be tech and administrative challenges beyond simply stating that “owners can access XYZ event.” You and your devs will need to scope out exactly how that functionality will work, and plan for that development.

5/11/22 UPDATE: Very interesting update to share here today! If anything, the above text served as a prediction of a forthcoming “easy button” approach to this entire issue. I wasn’t aware of any readymade solutions at the time of writing this, but have become aware of one just now. I am NOT affiliated with this company, but nevertheless wanted to share, as I believe it’s potentially exactly what I was outlining a need for above (saving tons of development time for teams worldwide). The company / product is called ethpass.xyz. (I don’t have any info on pricing or complete features at this point, but it really looks slick to me.) The bottom line, for me, is that while it was always easy for NFT to claim “IRL events for holders,” the execution of that claim wasn’t always so simple. But now here’s a promising solution. :-)

5/12/22 UPDATE: Steve Brown here on Medium let me know about another solution, tokenproof.xyz. (Again, I’m also not affiliated with tokenproof, but as it looks like a similarly awesome solution to the issues presented in this article, it definitely deserves a mention here.)

Great to see these solutions out there!