OpenSea and Fair.xyz’s Soulbound ‘Minter Token’ Honors NFT Innovators
The Alpha:
- A Web3 company called Fair.xyz that builds technology to improve smart contract functionality announced a new partnership with OpenSea on Wednesday to launch its new “Minter Token” feature, according to a press release shared with nft now.
- The Minter Token is a soul-bound token that cryptographically proves that a wallet owner has minted an NFT, even if the owner has sold or transferred the digital asset. The tool analyzes a user’s wallet and creates a 3D generative work of art that displays embossed NFT.
- In the future, the Minter Token may be expanded to include other soul-bound token use cases such as proof of ownership of real estate, physical artwork, or even shares in a company.
Why it matters
Since digital assets can change hands so easily, there is no good way to recognize who originally minted a particular project’s NFT (short of digging into someone’s history on the blockchain). Fair.xyz’s Minter Token aims to change that, making it easy for minters to take credit for helping to build NFT communities and potentially allowing them to participate in token-gated community events.
Minter Token is a nod to collectors who were there at the beginning of NFT projects. Soulbound tokens are non-transferable, meaning the feature is more about community recognition and status than flipping or earning anything from NFT.
“We know every NFT platform says this, but we’re really about community first,” Fair.xyz co-founder Isaac Kamlish said in the press release. “That’s why we felt strongly that in order to establish our values as a company and introduce ourselves to the Web3 community, we wanted to build something for the entire Web3 community.”
As an investor in Fair.xyz, OpenSea has supported the feature, amplified it on Twitter and leveraged the audience to showcase the release.
To mint a Minter Token, users go to minter.fair.xyz, connect to their Ethereum-based wallet, and Fair.xyz will automatically display all the NFTs they have ever created. When a user selects an NFT, the feature will generate a 3D rendered artwork of the token, allowing users to stamp the artwork as a 1 of 1 NFT.
What will be next
The concept of soul-bound tokens is still relatively new, even for NFTs. Although some companies claim to have created them, the non-transferable identity and reputation symbols are highly divisive. Bad actors, from hackers to authoritarian regimes, can use them to identify persons of interest for all the wrong reasons. Theft of soul-bound tokens is of equal concern, although some have advocated the social recovery model as a counter to these scenarios.
Regardless, they are a compelling idea in the Web3 world that could change the way society views and interacts with the concept of permanent ownership. Fair.xyz’s Minter Token will be a fascinating window into how Web3 residents choose to value originality, status and innovation in NFT communities when there is no money involved.
