061. The NFT Issue 🖼️ *Part I*
Didn’t we promise you things were about to get more lit in here 😉. With @diamondhands laying out a comprehensive plan (plus plenty of teasers) for NFTs on BitClout today, we can feel the energy positively brimmin’ in the community. Today? We’re gonna take a warranted deep dive into everything we know about NFTs so far. By Wednesday? Maybe we’ll be buying and selling the finest art, rarest collectibles, and dankest memes on BitClout 🌙.
Cover artwork by: @jay_dee
Bits on the menu today:
BuzzClout: Exclusive updates from @bitcloutsignal and @bithunt ⚡️
Ubiquitous UX drops: The NFT launch plan materializes 🚀
Overview
Functionality
Vision & Expansion
Questions & Open Items
Hype & Opportunities
Yup … we’re goin deep on NFTs today! We’ll break that section into five distinct parts.
Diamondhands’ drops 💎
#1 BuzzClout
New week, new creators making big moves. Thanks to @bitcloutsignal for the stats, here. As a note that came up yesterday, $clout purchase volumes are of creator coins on BitClout, not volume on exchanges like @blockchain.
New week, new action in the community projects landscape, too. @bithunt’s got us covered with a vantage point of that universe:
#2 Ubiquitous UX drops: The NFT launch plan materializes 🚀
Overview
In case you’ve been on an all-day hike in nature with no cell service (we’re only a bit jealous 🥾), then let us be the first to tell you that @diamondhands dropped some big NFT news this a.m. in the form of an “official proposal”:
For those of us who have been in the weeds since info started trickling re: NFTs on BitClout, there’s not a ton of new updates in here. That said, it helps to have all the info in one place. To make sure we’re all on the same page, here’s the highlights. To read in full, you can see @diamondhands doc here.
Functionality
One major innovation is that BitClout NFTs will allow proceeds from NFT sales to accrue to artists’ creator coins. Rather than pay this out in $clout directly to investors (which could trigger classification of creator coins as ‘securities’), proceeds will be locked in the artists’ creator coin, raising the value of investors’ positions in the creator coin 💸.
This makes NFTs and their proceeds one of the foremost tangible use cases for creator coins so far — beyond the ingenious schemes creators have come up with to monetize their coins, the NFT profit proceed → creator coin flow is a more formal apparatus for value sharing between creators and investors.
Here’s the money quote on the above from @diamondhands:
Thus, in some sense, tying cashflows to creator coins makes owning them analogous to owning a percentage of every sale of every piece of work the creator has or will ever produce on BitClout. Could you imagine if Picasso had a creator coin linked to all of his works?
Other fun deets from the @diamondhands doc? We’ll all have an NFT tab on our profiles, where we get to show off NFTs we’ve bought and won in auctions. Apparently we will also be able to pin them to our main feeds.
Further, in what we covered yesterday as “drops,” @diamondhands repositioned the idea of collective NFT releases as “showcases” — node operators will be able to create collections of NFTs that are released all at once. Here’s another top tier quote from the full doc:
This, in some sense, allows node operators to serve as the curators of their own digital galleries, with each drop introducing a new exhibition.
Vision & Expansion
What else is innovative about NFTs on BitClout? BitClout has a chance to become the premier social-forward NFT blockchain. There’s a ton of other NFT marketplaces (e.g. OpenSea); they’re just not optimized for social yet. The importance of this as far as integrated promotion & network effects can’t be understated; in a perfect storm, there’s a powerful flywheel that forms between NFTs, social promotion, and creator coin growth 🔁.
While we’re on the topic of marketplaces, it’s important to note that much in the same way that bitclout.com isn’t … the sexiest thing of all time 👠, we shouldn’t expect a glitz and glam marketplace to come from the core dev team either. It’ll be up to the community to create pages, products, or nodes that provide an amazing NFT shopping experience. In edition 055 we wrote:
@diamondhands and co. continue to reiterate they aren’t focused on developing the frontend of BitClout. It’ll likely be up to the community to build the NFT marketplace we want.
Well, it looks like there’s no shortage of teams taking up the call 📞. With one of the better handles we could imagine for an NFT marketplace, @minted has started sharing mock-ups of what their solution might will like:
Questions & Open Items
One thing that wasn’t super clear from @diamondhands doc? Whether and what types of fees will be associated with minting NFTs on BitClout.
@paulburke followed up this post with another, in which he clarified where the fees come from, with input from @tijn:
So apparently this is more cleverly deceitful marketing. There ARE, in fact, fees for selling an NFT, and they are set by the node operator. (see here)
So while @diamondhands doc mentioned no minting fees, that likely only pertains to bitclout.com; other node operators will have discretion to set fees for minting on their nodes. So, depending on which node you’re on, your minting screen may look like the above, where there is still a service fee to mint. This may mean some NFT focused nodes become more exclusive, which could actually be a good thing, as they’ll be less saturated with every user minting all of their posts as NFTs 💡.
Meanwhile, in the of land community feedback, it looks like @diamondhands and co. also opened up a CIP for feedback on their NFT proposals:
While this might stall launch for a few more days or even weeks, we agree with @HPaulson on the importance here; if NFTs are to become the third major disruption in BitClout history (after creator coins themselves and diamonds 💎), then we might as well take the time to get it right. Now that the team’s proposal is public, let’s let the community weigh in 🗳️.
And the proposals are already pouring in (albeit some in the public feed that might need transposing into the appropriate format in the CIP repo):
Hype & Opportunities
As you can imagine, the community is pretty fired up as NFTs on BitClout keep chugging along from dreams into reality. It’s not just artists who are preppin’ their dopest assets for launch either 👀🚀
Now … what to do while we wait for NFTs to drop? Twiddle your thumbs? You could do that, sure, but you could also throw your spiciest memes in the ring for an inaugural multi-asset drop launch alongside NFTs bitclout.com:
That’s right, the first NFT showcase is gonna be a community-driven affair on BitClout. Gonna be lit af 🔥🔥🔥. And it’s pretty much exactly as we hypothesized in @BitsTODAY edition 060 last night:
Perhaps the core team is working on a special set of NFTs in partnership with new artists / creators they’re onboarding that will ‘drop’ on day 0 when NFTs go live?
The difference? Working with the entire community to compile this “showcase” is *chef’s kiss* as far as aligning to the decentralized ethos of BitClout is concerned 👌.
How’d we do today, fam? Feeling caught up on all the NFT news? We’re glad to hear it 🤗. Anything we missed? We’d love to hear from you.
Now, all systems are go for launch. @lazynina, will you do the honors and count us down? 3… 2…
Much love,