[Proposal] Use an evolving NFT membership ticket as a means to identify members at the wallet level and give access to value added benefits across the Solana ecosystem

DAO
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1. Proposal Purpose:

Currently the way that membership is calculated by $GRAPE count via LP tokens or wallet tokens is not easily portable and would be hard to use as a means to identify members to expand benefits outside of Grape on the Solana Ecosystem.

  • There is a need to add value to token holders beyond current price speculation and membership benefits to encourage:
  1. Membership growth
  2. Increase benefits / offerings beyond game, grape content and channel access (which are great) .
  3. Pride in Membership with an awesome NFT that only Grape members have

2. Grape Proposal Overview:

Integrations with partners and protocols that want Grape to help promote and/or encourage its user base to participate in should be providing membership benefits to Grape members specific to their platform / protocol.

This could take shape in the following form:

a) % Discounts on Fees (i.e. Grape members get fee swapping / trading discounts on platforms that are partnered with Grape)
b) Mint Discount or Increased Chance for Rare Mints (Just like Stake does with allowing people to bet more for a higher chance to win, no reason why stuff like that will not be coming to the mint marketplace in the future. So in this case Grape users might be given the rare % chance increase for free in a Mint to make it more likely they get a good one.
c) In-game bonuses or features that are available only to grape members (like what Twitch Prime does). This can be applied in so many ways like unique skins, grape themed shoes in a game, etc.
d) Automatic gated beta / whitelisted access to new projects

Essentially we want to leverage Grape’s position with partners to gain access to value added benefits for our members across Solana where it is a win-win for both projects.

As more projects come on-line and the marketplace gets “congested”, the new projects are going to need the help of places like Grape to grow acceptance and adoption and get new users. Instead (or on top) of doing airdrops / ido access, we can negotiate lasting benefits to our members that will not just benefit the current membership (but all who join later).

To make this technically “easy”, our partners need to be able to easily identify Grape members at the wallet level. An evolving NFT ticket seems the perfect way to do this. It could be minted and sent to each active member’s wallet when they sign up to Grape. Each month the system updates / evolves the NFT (like what UNQ is doing in practice) to mark the member as active and a Class C (Bronze) / Class B (Silver) / CLASS A (GOLD) based on the number of tokens detected. If they are no longer a member then the NFT could be marked as expired.

Summary:

By members having an evolving NFT membership ticket, it should be easy to allow partners to offer many value added bonuses to our members by simply checking to see if they are a member. Static NFT gated access is now fairly commonplace with sites like Solrise (Dawn 2), Drift (Alpha) and many more projects using this.

Finally, the class / type of ticket could also allow for different benefit values based on classes to further give incentives for people to want to make it to a higher Grape class to reap better rewards.

Thank you for your time in considering my proposal to help Grape grow.

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Well written proposal. A few questions:

  • Why do you believe there is a need to “add value to token holders beyond current price speculation and membership benefits”?

  • Does Grape explicitly help promote other partners and protocols or is it implicit through things like announcements, AMAs, games, etc? I don’t actually know. Assuming we do, you have some good ideas about how this promotion could be reciprocated. If we don’t, I don’t think it would be appropriate to use our leverage to obtain benefits. My two Grapes.

Thanks for taking the initiative to try to evolve what Grape membership means.

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Thanks a lot for reading my proposal and your questions.

*** Why do you believe there is a need to “add value to token holders beyond current price speculation and membership benefits”?**

As members in Crypto on Solana, I think It is a fair starting point to say we all are looking for ways to maximize our investments and also get the most value for time spent. There has been a lot of discussions about tokens sitting naked in the wallet but I have to admit for me I had to make a decision to back out of Francium (with a very nice return on Grape) to gain access to take part here. It was not a slam dunk of a decision at first despite knowing how great Grape was. That is only one small point that planted the seed to create this proposal.

As the space expands, more competition will emerge. Adding more value to members will be one important factor in retention and expanding the membership. It also makes it more likely members will bring others into the “fold” when they experience how great it is.

To be honest, I am having a hard time coming up reasons why Grape would not want to add value for its members (if it is effectively free to do so).

I first started to look at how things like partner airdrops and other perks were given (which are great) but seem to me to only benefit the membership in isolation and at one time. One of the things that impressed me the most about Grape is how connected it was across the Solana ecosystem. It did not go unnoticed to me that Meanfi picked Grape as it’s first partner. Yes, the 400k airdrop is really great but again it is only a one-time bonus.

Why is it not possible to guide the process for our partners to help provide what the project needs (users, traffic, investments) and also benefit our membership at the same time?

Essentially, what I am proposing is where we seek to create a win-win environment for the partners to easily be able to attract our users to their “shops” with things like discounts on fees for our membership.

The focus being we will (as a group) over time be bringing members to the partner project and in return should get a group discount. Bulk / buying power is what has made firms like Costco so successful in North America.

This is done frequently across all industries and is not something that should be considered novel. This in turn will make it more likely people will want to sign up and become Grape members.

*** Does Grape explicitly help promote other partners and protocols or is it implicit through things like announcements, AMAs, games, etc? I don’t actually know. Assuming we do, you have some good ideas about how this promotion could be reciprocated. If we don’t, I don’t think it would be appropriate to use our leverage to obtain benefits. My two Grapes.**

I am not saying that any of this requires explicit support from Grape per-se, but AMA’s, linkages, public partnerships to other projects is already done and does imply tacit approval of them in the very least.

Again the leverage as a group “sales pitch”, I think should be seen as a positive and not a negative. I am not suggesting here we squeeze projects to pay us for our support. If that came though in my proposal, then it was not my intention.

What I suggest is that each project that wants to partner with us ought to consider that we are a community of members that can by nature of our expertise and size add huge value.

So if we have an easy way to identify members across Solana (Evolving Membership NFT), I believe it is an easy sell to say “Are you interested in incentivizing our members to shop at your project?”

It is happening in already in places like 3commas to FTX/Binance where they give lasting % discounts on fees and not just coupons (which are great too). Why can’t we do it too if it benefits everyone?

Anyhow, I know some of this is probably down the road (like the Mint idea I had), but I thought this was a free and easy way to expand our reach in a positive way.

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Thank you for putting together such a thought provoking idea for discussion and expanding on this in detail. I appreciate the time this took to explain and expand upon the thoughts, and hope some ideas & concepts we’ve been exploring can help to address some ideas posed here, in the near future.

Please don’t view any responses here as preventative, rather consider some of the following, as I add my 2 Grapes :wink:

I initially started with several questions, but will limit them to the following 2:

1.) Would this need to be an NFT and what limitations would there be? (e.g. Today, Grape Membership is explicitly maintained and visible to Grape Community Members, who can distinguish fellow Class C, B, & A members, based on their holdings, which Grape verifies. Would this reveal any information about users outside the protected Grape Community Server? Is that a risk? Also, if there is a cost associated with updating creating & updating NFT metadata, would fees be incurred by the treasury or other entity/entities?)

2.) For points a, b, c, & d - Do you think any of these considerations should be accounted for?

a.) Interesting idea to explore, and potentially complex to implement. Example: There is at least one model I have seen so far where Users with the Native staked/held token amounts are the primary logic for providing an increased discount. The opportunity cost and question on whether to hold GRAPE, Partner Token, or Both, and the dynamics on whether the partner sees the value is both based on how it’s presented & implemented. Any specific view on how to approach in a mutually beneficial way?

b.) In the context of Mints, there have been many developments to prevent bots/users manipulating or gaming the mint process in the ecosystem. I’m very curious to see how this would be proposed or implemented in such a way that it were possible, and more over, accepted. As great partners, it seems unlikely an NFT project would want a group to be able to gain an advantage during a mint which is intended to operate like a lottery, otherwise, it could backfire on the NFT project & Grape simultaneously. Alternatively, it could also attract a decent number of users to the community, as well. Any successful past examples or ways to compliment partners efforts to improve minting fairness & inclusion?

c.) InGame Content - Intriguing idea! Interested to see whether there are partnership opportunities on producing the content with partners too. Any Games or Partners in mind?

d.) Gated Access → I think this exists today in some capacity, but was also being explored further conceptually, however not in the form of a separate NFT. I am not suggesting the NFT is a wrong idea from my perspective, only that it may introduce friction to a process that could be potentially easier for users, in general.

Really appreciate your thoughts & feedback.

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Thank you my grape brother for your thoughtful reply and I will gladly accept your two grapes and will do my best to keep this short with my replies. Sorry on that front as it is a tad long but I feel worth the time spent investigating it or I would not have raised it in the first place.

To summarize, I am just trying to lay out a vision of what I think will be a very powerful way to drive the platform in the future. It is not the only way but has worked very well in traditional markets where competition to getting users to interact / buy at a shop exists. There is no doubt in my mind this sort of thing will become a reality in some form in the marketplace as long as there is no monopoly that exists on Solana for one particular thing. I have been working on some early conceptual ideas for this NFT style application as a solutions for “real world” projects with tickets so have thought this through a fair amount. I do not presuppose to have all the answers and request feedback / ideas if the DAO appreciates my proposal and considers it worthy to explore more.

1.) Would this need to be an NFT and what limitations would there be

No, not necessarily. I suppose it depends on how easily we want to be able to integrate with outside platforms with the least amount of work on their end. I thought NFTs (that can evolve / change) would be the natural way to implement this capability, but perhaps there is an easier way?

Would this reveal any information about users outside the protected Grape Community Server?

Presuming the same wallet that holds the grape and NFT is connected to the external site then they can easily see (for the naked tokens) that the users is a member and how many tokens are in the wallet. If membership to Grape is a private club thing then this is probably not the best place to pursue here. Would be grateful to hear what the consensus is here on that.

Also, if there is a cost associated with updating creating & updating NFT metadata, would fees be incurred by the treasury or other entity/entities?)

Yes, if the DAO decided to move forward with looking into the feasibility of this proposal, then I think this would be the first thing to nail down. There are fees with any transaction but thankfully Solana is cheap so I hope it is not too much. And, if we are successful in the good work that is being done on the owned liquidity / bond front then this may be peanuts in the grand scheme to the potential benefits we can offer all our members now and ones that join in the future.

Any specific view on how to approach in a mutually beneficial way?

So in its simplest form we are a large community of members and with that can help grow / use / shop at their platform. In consideration for doing so we ask for a community discount to encourage more members to use their system. The specifics would be different for each platform. In my example of 3commans to FTX (providing a trading discount of 5% right away) could easily be applied to any platform that charges transactions / trading fees. But it could be anything. Multi partner collaborations could be possible as well.

Any successful past examples or ways to compliment partners efforts to improve minting fairness & inclusion?

I probably should have left this off as this was Pavelsan from the future speaking on what is happening in 2022. :joy: jk, but I suppose easiest to keep it simple. Many mints are struggling (of the ones I have watched recently, one had 1/2 price for a little time try to sell out and only 5k nfts, one did not sell out and is still open, another closed and burned most of the ones not sold). So, why not give grape members a 5% discount on the mint price? If I was not in Grape but interested in the mint, I would join to get the discount and voila we have a potential new member for the future (and can win them over with how awesome we are). Yes the mint gets a little less but would benefit from the exposure / support and people talking about it.

Any Games or Partners in mind?

Once the infrastructure is in place, every game that promotes their product through us and uses NFTS in the game (to make it functionally easy for them to implement on their side) should want to do it. Cost would be really nothing for them. If I am on the outside of Grape then that would be a reason I might join to be able to get access to limited edition items dropped to Grape members. And the game benefits in a circular way with promotion, users, discussions and possibly events like we are doing already.

Thanks again for considering my proposal and I hope I have not added too many grapes to this :wink:. I understand there are a bunch of things to figure out. Forgive me if I did not provide concrete examples to the above questions as I believe that – with the setup in place – most (if not all projects) will grab the chance at this opportunity. As the marketplace gets totally crammed with projects in the near future this membership infrastructure could easily motivate projects to want to make these synergistic connections to help them to survive.

And I suppose, if it totally flops and my vision of the future of Solana was ultimately meant for a different blockchain, then at the very least we can all walk around with pride over the amazing grape NFT membership cards we carry around with us virtually. :pray:

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What about an option with partners of grape when they are launching say a new NFT collection or a new coin/token that grape gets an allocation for whitelist? Holding a specific amount of grape gets you into that whitelist by default?

I deff think there needs to be more utility to the GRAPE token to encourage more organic demand, this is normally the death of most coins or projects to sustain descent price or even enter price discovery is utility.
It needs to be something that people WILL want to use

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Great idea my grape brother and I concur with your two grapes shared. Auto whitelisting would be an amazing added bonus feature for members.

And what you said about utility is exactly why I brought up my proposal.

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I’m not sure how far the networking and connections go in the GRAPE team but would it be possible to introduce an incubator style system, where new projects could submit entries to the DAO and we can have a team filter through the entrants, conduct interviews, research etc.
If they are a solid project we could then connect them to the right people to help with marketing, tokenomics, developers etc etc to get the project really moving in the right direction and in exchange GRAPE gets an allocation to offer our A class members in a funding round.
This would encourage more people to at least purchase and hold the requirement for A class.

If the right negotiations where made during the process we could even secure some extra tokens to offer maybe a lottery style for C and B class based on some simple requirements like engagement in the Discord?

The other option is to breath some life into the community to make the services in the discord so god damn good that people just want to be apart of those higher classes?
I noticed that GRAPE is very much focused on the fundamental aspects of the SOL network (which is great) but why not on the technical trading side?
Why don’t we offer some more technical trading education or even a deeper look into finance strategies utilising the SOL ecosystem and the various protocols around?

Sol has some of the best DEFI protocols I have ever seen and with the low transaction costs it makes for the ideal system to compound, why aren’t we teaching people how to use these tools?

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Merch line, discounts for GRAPE holders (% change based on membership class)
Allow members to purchase using GRAPE, this not only creates demand for the token but is another revenue stream to fund further production or fund the team.

the discussion around NFT’s etc at the moment why not find an artist willing to create some cool NFT’s to launch that come with a special use case in the community but also something members can be proud to have as there PFP to get some social marketing happening.

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We’d be happy to help implement the evolution system!

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That is amazing Alex. Would be great to connect to see how complicated it is to implement on this very limited basis (as I have a few potential use cases I would love to investigate for the future). Lets see if the DAO determines this is worthwhile to investigate but really appreciate you mentioning that. :pray:

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I agree that it would be nice for a focus on technical trading education, especially with the growing number of dapps coming to fruition in the Solana ecosystem such as Drift and Zeta paired with existing options such as Mango and PsyOptions. Utilizing these applications effectively requires more than an understanding of fundamentals. Perhaps that’s a discussion for another proposal.

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Here is an updated revised set of specifications on this NFT solana member pass based on my research. A big thanks to @Alex_M_UNQ.club for his time in helping point me in the right direction. It is still work in progress, so I would be grateful for any points of correction and feedback to make it better. Thanks :grapes: :grapes:

Goal: Create a scalable & evolving NFT membership card for Grape and Partners to use for gated access and membership benefits across Solana

1) Task: Handle Transfers/Sales of Cards:

Detect trading of NFT card to unauthorized wallet and invalidate the membership card
Purpose is to stop the selling, reduce potential gaming the membership system and lower overall server/network requirements.

Recurring Daily Randomized Cron Bot:

  • Use Metaboss to pull current holders of the nft cards and compare with active membership. Burn any cards that are not owned by valid owners (based on approved wallet list). Detect new members without a card and initiate a process to instruct them to mint one

  • Possible additional membership penalties are given to people that trade their cards (read and record who sold the card)

Cost per transaction is 0.00001 SOL. Assuming we can package 30 cards into one transaction Cost is 0.000000333~ SOL or $0.00008 usdc cents per card update (for $250 usdc SOL). Cost for 100,000 updates is $8.33 usdc

2) Task: Periodic Maintain Membership levels

*Hook into Grape tools for membership management to evolve the card based on class level changes and any additional partner connections. Recurring Weekly / Epoch Cron Job Bot as a crawler / process on the changes to server/network spread load.

Use Metaboss to push the updates:

  • Evolve NFT if the class changed (3 designs for grape, class sets the design)
  • Add a data flag (1/0) for each partner that member has connected and is authorized on the card.
  • Potential for Partner Branded Card as the main display
  • Limited record set to only cards that need to be updated

Cost per transaction is 0.00001 SOL.
Assuming we can package 30 cards into one transaction
Cost is 0.000000333~ SOL or $0.00008 usdc cents per card update
Cost for 100,000 updates is $8.33 usdc
(for $250 usdc SOL)

3) Task: Mint Cards

Mint each member card as cheap as possible,

  • Member pays the mint cost that includes minimal setup fee to cover the cost and estimated yearly update costs for the card.
  • Grape remains the owner of the card and the user is renting it by keeping current membership in Grape (or Partner membership for specific cards that are based on partner protocols)
  • Bonus badge / rarity displayed of the card for governance voter(s) in Grape.
  • Cost could be in the range of 0.04 SOL or $10 usdc
    (for $250 usdc SOL)

References:

NFT Membership Card - Jan 11 2021-1_Page_1
NFT Membership Card - Jan 11 2021-1_Page_11700Ă—2200 78.7 KB

NFT Membership Card - Jan 11 2021-1_Page_2
NFT Membership Card - Jan 11 2021-1_Page_21700Ă—2200 50.6 KB

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i think it would also be great if the owners of this NFT were automatically in the wheitlist or access to beta versions of games in all projects of grape partners. for many people this point is much much more valuable than being in airdrops/giveaway of partners.

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@Pavelsan and I discussed this some in the GROMs discord. I think this is an incredibly complex undertaking. The costs associated are significant but IMO would pale in comparison to the cost of development and maintaining.

I’m not up to date with our available development resources. But this is not a one and done contractor job. If UNQclub can build it will they also be able to maintain the system?

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The costs associated are significant but IMO would pale in comparison to the cost of development and maintaining.

Thanks for your two grapes Adam. I don’t see it that way at all but I guess that can be hashed out. I believe this will actually reduce costs overall and make Grape way MORE scalable in the future. The server requirements (and costs for those) will only be growing and potentially other related costs for RPC calls if they get too numerous. As the community expands – in hopefully an exponential way – these are sure to grow. Solana is the perfect chain to do this sort of thing on. It also opens us up to massive opportunity. I firmly believe if we don’t do it then Grape will miss out on so many great things…

Hope others can add their thoughts as well. :pray::grapes: :grapes:

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I guess it would help me make a more informed judgement if development and maintenance costs were estimated not just in regards to storage, gas and server costs but in developer man hours. I believe that is where it gets expensive and potentially prohibitive.

I would personally recommend an mvp proposal, maybe a two month trial run with a 3rd party project willing to work with us, that was done manually to ensure the cost benefit analysis could be understood for both parties involved.

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I think it’s an interest proposal, getting grape membership(class based) whitelisting spot will be a huge boost. looking forward to see how this get implemented.

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@adamdelsol - I am more aligned with your assessment and find this approach both sobering and constructively supportive of exploration, if found to be a worthwhile endeavor.

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and @Pavelsan perhaps this something we can explore in the form of a grant.
@Whale_s_Friend what do you think ?

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