Please describe your proposed solution.
What is Proof of Attendance Protocol?
Proof of Attendance Protocol (POAP) is a protocol that uses blockchain technology to create badges or collectibles to mark the attendance at an event. It is proven to be of great adoption in the majority of the EVM compatible blockchains, with more than 6.5M POAPs already minted. Believe it or not, this is only 2M less than the ENTIRE NFT ecosystem in Cardano!
How does a POAP work?
When you attend an event or achieve a milestone for which there are POAP badges, you’ll receive one. It’s as simple as that. You can also use it to access a major event or an exclusive online group.
POAPs work a lot like other NFTs, as each of them is unique.
They were first created for official POAP smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain. To lower transaction costs, POAPs have since migrated to the Gnosis chain (formerly xDai), a cheaper and faster Ethereum side chain.
Just about anyone can make a POAP to mark a special moment. But there are three conditions for a POAP NFT:
- It must be minted via the official POAP smart contract
- It must hold metadata related to a specific date or period for up to a year
- It must contain an image associated with the specific event
You can only mint one POAP for an event on a single wallet. That’s because each one represents attendance — and you can’t attend the same unique event twice. There aren’t any set rules that dictate which events can have POAP badges, or how big an event needs to be to have one. Some major events can even have multiple POAPs. As long as you can create them and get them approved, you can have POAP NFTs for your virtual or in-person events. You can then invite people to mint them and win gifts.
What problem do we solve and why this is important to Cardano?
As the name suggest, a POAP is a non-fungible token (NFT) that proves you’ve attended an event, either virtual or in-person. The events can be a ceremony, private function, game, concert or something similar. You can consider these as digital badges or stickers for your wallet, as a reward for your attendance in these events. POAPs can also be proof of your achievements, such as your engagement in an online or offline community.
Right now in Cardano, if you wanted to reward all attendees of an in-person event or a Twitter space, you would need to give a new NFT for every single participant. Due to the min ada value protocol parameter in Cardano, you need to give at least 1 ADA to each user along with their NFT. You can partially get around this issue if the user cooperates by having them give back the 1 ADA after they've received the NFT (which you can do by having the user to claim the NFT using a DApp), but this has a few downsides:
- You need to create a DApp for this which increases complexity of rewarding users with an NFT
- The user now needs to be involved in the process, which limits usability (you can't just collect a list of user addresses and then drop the NFTs after the fact)
- If you mint 10,000 NFTs this is still more expensive than just updating existing NFTs
As you may see, one of the main blockers for more widespread adoption of commemorative NFTs is the business cost of repeat customers.
If you think of commemorative NFTs as a marketing cost, then you want to spend the least amount of money on hardcore fans and maximize the amount spent towards new user acquisition. If you host a Twitter space weekly and you have to spend 1 ADA every week for a hardcore user that joins every time, this drains your marketing budget that otherwise would be better spent on new user conversion. To make commemorative NFTs as a marketing strategy scale, you need the cost of recurring users to be relatively small compared to new user acquisition.
Additionally, it is not possible to make soulbound NFTs directly on the Cardano L1, despite most POAPs being purposefully distributed as soulbound tokens to avoid them being traded on the open market
Another problem we want to address here is the gap that exists between the physical and the crypto worlds, by linking your off-chain (or real-life) physical attendance to your on-chain presence. In a way, POAPs add a touch of humanity to the crypto world — and create a reliable record of your activities in both worlds. We want to show that you are not only a Cardano address!
This problem is important for Cardano adoption as we are seeing that the majority of the protocols adoption POAP are EVM blockchain based. This has to change by showing the world that there are other options for minting POAPs outside the Ethereum ecosystem.
How will we tackle this?
Paima Engine is a framework for creating onchain gamification. It achieves this using a system called Stateful NFTs where user NFTs can evolve over time based on user interactions. This is perfect to solve the problem as it means that new users get a single NFT (a single upfront cost), and recurring users have a lower cost (simply adding new data to their existing NFT).
More concretely, users would receive a single Stateful Proof of Attendance NFT (SPOAP NFT) that starts out blank, and every time they participate in an event, they would get a new commemorative NFT embedded inside their SPoA. If they've ever received a single SPoA in their entire lifetime, event organizers will not have to mint them a new one which means the more users participate in the protocol, the cheaper it will get to distribute NFTs.
Additionally, to enable building soulbound NFTs, these NFTs will be minted on Milkomeda (Cardano sidechain). This has the added benefit that transaction fees are also significantly cheaper than the Cardano L1, allowing for much larger and more regular drops and also bypasses the min UTxO issue. Thanks to the Milkomeda's work on wrapped smart contracts, it's still possible for Cardano users to fully control their SPoA directly from any Cardano wallet (Nami/Eternl/Flint/etc) and will not require any new wallets to be installed for neither event organizers nor regular participants
Who will benefit from our solution and what is unique about it?
AdaSouls is an open platform that any Cardano user or project can use. Whether it is a DAO, a NFT project or a DeFi protocol, anyone is welcome to mint POAPs for their users, so they can start measuring on-chain user base attendance.
In addition to this, we believe that your attendance should not be transferable. This is why, unlike the POAPs offered in Ethereum, we will give our users the option of issuing Soulbound SPOAPs. These are POAPs that are not transferable and are linked to your wallet only. This will unlock a great number of new use cases such as digital IDs and memberships, loyalty programs, marketing campaigns, proof of professional skills, credit history and reputation indicator.