NFTs as a tool for social and environmental change

I'm interested in platforms for change that let us organize society in new ways for a greater good.

Sometimes this just happens, like impromptu communities popping up cross the web. Or belief systems that percolate for years, and then, seemingly overnight, become a new norm.

In my world of tech however, they are often conscious leverage points catapulting off of new capabilities or protocols, tools in the hands of the inspired that start something special.

Maybe this will be true for NFTs, an open standard on the blockchain that allows you to tokenize things, digital or not, in an immutable, secure, transferable way.

With the NFT.NYC event this week, there is much chatter on the topic.

Some are focused on NFTs as a new investable asset class. Some on our natural propensity to collect stuff, that is flattened and enlarged with market potential in the digital realm. Many on how with scarcity and immutableness you can reimagine art originating onchain, or re-plumb a host of things like incentive programs or registration processes.

I care about something different.

I’m interested in how NFTs can be a missing thread in letting us rethink environmental philanthropy and bring to market new ways of thinking at the intersection of conservation, charitable giving, gaming, community, and storytelling.

I’ve touched on a lot of this lately. In my post on the Honu the CryptoKitty charity auction. And my post on reimagining the black box of philanthropic giving.

There are four core pieces of the NFT puzzle that work as conceptual building blocks for me:

Mitigating offline/online friction

We’ve had paired real and virtual worlds for decades, and there is invariably inherent friction between the flow of offline valued things and online communities that support them. A difficult leap of suspended disbelief to overcome.

NFTs with their unique programmable capability to tokenize real things, be it a coral reef or a rare endangered animal, is a leap forward to possibly mollify the friction and make the transformation possible. And more natural.

This is a big deal for philanthropic, community and marketplace design.

Encapsulating real-world value in online tokens

When you create a digital asset, it is not inherently valuable because it is scarce, though its scarcity can hold the value of its possible uniqueness. That is the business model gotcha for online collectables.

With a real world connection, we bring innate visceral value, mirrored within a one-to-one correlation. One rare white Rhino, or one specific coral reef tokenized and naturally emotive with meaning even as a digital icon.

Unlike digital collectibles created online, the asset is not the NFT, it is what is behind it in the real world, along with built in market appreciation emotionally collateralized in a new way.

A meta matrix of real world consequence and importance tagged and shareable online.

Real-time, perpetual annuities of value

The broken work flow of philanthropy is that you labor to create awareness, gather a community then you raise funds one-on-one invariably with high net-worth individuals. The process of economizing support breaks, not congeals, the community.

The goal is to disassemble this black box.

To have a continuous annuity of support flowing back to the cause that perpetually re-ups itself as the flywheel of the model continues forward.

Metadata as the lifeblood of the system

The value of a token is anchored in the narrative of its real world value and uniqueness. That story is the sweep that fuels success in the online world.

But there is often metadata correspondent to the token.

For example, IoT devices showing a video timeline of the reseeding of a coral reef and its growth. Or trackers and cams documenting the life of a sentient thing itself, in effect, a proof point that the results of the economy are sustaining life and the environment.

This informs, reifies, authenticates and supports the narrative of the thing and the token both.

Much of this thinking comes from my learnings on the Honu the CryptoKitty charity experiment. We had success that heartened us most assuredly and overt shortcomings that isolated areas to be explored.

Where we need to start with, not end with the real world objects, staking value at its source where it touches us in our lives.

Where the narrative needs to highlight not just our pathos to the cause but new participatory ways of support and visibility to the impact of our contributions.

Where the data itself as a pulse of a life we are memorializing, reifies the process and can possibly be a creative source of new ways of engagement.

This is a waking dream surely, but one I embrace wholeheartedly as both necessary and inevitable.

A virtuous cycle where the rare and endangered, the wondrous and essential can find a pulse in scalable communities and new economies that take care of their own.

See you at the show if you are in town.

Note that I am on a panel called NFTs for Good: Creating a better world with Michael Casey, David Noble, and Nithin Eapen.