Proposal:
To launch a Grape NFT that takes on the role of membership and governance.
Overview:
Recently token emissions, token price and membership structure have all come under scrutiny with several proposals currently being discussed on how to address these issues.
The proposal here is to launch a Grape NFT collection, dubbed ‘Grape Apes’, that would become the proof of membership, that would have a cost in Grape to mint and need to be staked to earn Grape emissions and receive weighted governance voting.
Further Context:
$Grape emissions have been given out to the community for events and skill role emissions as a reward for participating in the community to enable members to have greater share and weight of votes in the running of the community. However in return many of the members have undervalued the token for its intended governance role instead seeing the tokens monetary reward value and in turn have been cashing out and lowering the Grape token’s value in the process. Much discussion has been given to rewards/emission being too generous and thus are being reined in to reduce the token outflow in the hope that membership additions, upgrades and more generally the grape held by community members will outways the sell-off of Grape, with other incentives such as protocol bonded grape liquidity and mango lockups having been launched or in the works to again counter outflow and/or reward holders of Grape more.
Membership Tiers seem a key driver for the purchase and holding of Grape, and while we’re seeing net growth in membership numbers there are still those who move on from the community and choose to sell off their holdings. It’s also been noted that members don’t have the same incentive to hold Grape over and above the membership tiers when it comes to membership emissions and token inflation.
With this in mind I’ve come to the NFT proposal. If you would like to be a Grape member you exchange $Grape tokens for Grape NFTs. With this I can see two options: either the Grape used to mint is burned; or the Grape used in minting be returned to the Grape community treasury. I’d be in favor of the latter, but in either case the circulating token supply should decrease over time providing greater upward pressure on the token.
Having minted a Grape NFT next step being suggested is that the NFT get staked, preferably on Realms, in order to receive a monthly membership emission, which we could consider whether these could be claimable or only redeemable for further NFT’s down the line having reached the necessary threshold of further mints. With this if it were feasible for the NFT to act as the governance token on Realms this would be ideal or alternatively having a staked NFT also release a secondary Governance token could be another solution and either this governance token is locked on realms or alternatively have the governance token go unlisted.
What this could also achieve is an ability to readily scale membership through minting additional NFT’s, with each membership NFT intern earning more staked emissions.
A base case for this proposal could be a single design and single type of NFT, however a random generative collection would give each NFT its own quirk and personality that members could associate more with, and more strongly assocaite with than say X amount of tokens.
Additionally further development of this proposal would be to have the tiered membership classes distinctly mintable and ideally combinable in that you can mint a Gibbon for 1245 Grape (or the future proportional value), a Great Ape for 6,200 grape and have the ability to make a Great Ape through combining, i.e. burning 5 Gibbon NFT’s. Having distinct art for membership tiers clearly displays the exclusivity and status of each and gives the additional benefit of being a badge of honor a PfP that can be displayed internally and externally across the Solana ecosystem advertising grape more, and may more readily allow discord roles to be assigned.
Such a collection of Grape Apes could also be a great way to advertise the Grape Market place by showcasing Grapes own NFT collection for all to see and encourage listing and trading on the Grape Decentralized Marketplace. Although worth noting that having the NFT listed creates an avenue for it to be sold which again then puts a price on the membership and creates a monetary incentive to sell.
Pro’s:
- Reduces circulating supply of Grape to give upward pressure on the token
- Relatable PfP signifying membership
- Less liquid NFT which could retain its value better than the token
- More Fractional Membership that better compound
Con’s
- No longer solely a token based community
- Retained ‘complicated’ tiered membership?
- Would require the discord roles to be assigned
I’d note this is by no means the first time a Grape NFT has been proposed and that @Pavelsan and @rustandmoth have both previously put forward NFT proposals
With Pavelsan’s evolving dynamic NFT proposal and Rustandmoths Gameified dynamic community reward Grape nft proposal.