NFT Project: Community Feedback Requested

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Bio NFT Degen Project: Creative Direction

The Bio NFT Degen team is seeking feedback from the community to help steer the creative direction of the current project. This project intends to represent the VitaDAO community to the world—embodying community culture in an inspiring and exciting medium. This proposal outlines the current options, a bit about the project goals, the moving parts, and closes with a poll by which community members can voice their opinion.

The Concept

This is the initial proposal of a creative concept to help ensure the NFT Degen project proceeds in such a way that resonates with the community. No single artist, developer, or graphic designer can fully capture the spirit of the VitaDAO community. As such, we seek to gain community feedback on the creative direction most representative of the community.

The Goals

The NFT Degen project has three primary goals: funding, awareness, and growth. These goals will support VitaDAO’s mission and this project and this proposal outlines the creative means through which we intend to address each.

The Project

NFTs have quickly become the defacto vehicle by which Crypto-centric communities help raise funding, build awareness, and solidify community support. They serve a multitude of other purposes also, as VitaDAO members are well-aware. The focus of this project is artistic over utility but doesn’t omit consideration for the latter.

The Options

We are currently exploring four broad themes for the NFT project. These will form the basis for the other elements outlined in the project proposal. These are presented here for community consideration and feedback:

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Larger images are available for viewing here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aNWXIoR1Ny74EPk2GqZCqoHZfZ-073Yl97uooMA9kQk/edit#

Poll

The NFT Degen team would like to request that Vitalians interact with this poll to indicate their preference in creative direction.

Note: Option 3 reflects the “VitaDAO Trading Cards” but due to technical limitations, the name could not be updated in the choices below.

  • Option 1: Lab Rats
  • Option 2: Protein Crystal Structures
  • Option 3: Molecular Trading Cards
  • Option 4: Mad Scientists
0 voters

Update: 11/20/2021 - Updated Option 3 name to VitaDAO Trading Cards to clarify this project has no connection the IP NFTs.

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Great idea Bio NFT degen team! And welcome to Discourse @alphazwest. I personally like Option 3 the most. I feel it’s quite distinct of what is being done elsewhere in terms of NFT colectibles (although I’m far from an expert), and I love the gamification aspect!

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Thank you for the warm welcome, I’m happy to be here!

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awesome proposal and love all proposed directions… think molecular trading cards could be cool but confusing out messaging on IP-NFTs, molecule etc… so I think option 2 could be a beautiful one, as well as 4.,. although something similar to option 2 is also explored by http://genenft.art/… so might be worth combining forces because I think it also requires pretty active stewardship of the community and should almost become a standalone community with unique name and purpose (could be non-profit funding of longevity) or have some tight integrations within Vita…

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Thanks for the kind words re: the proposal. The NFT team has definitely been hard at work! The genenft.art came on our radar a while after we had been discussing the protein molecule option. Definitely cool to see how the idea can be explored!

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Hey Vincent, thanks for your kind comments and let me know if you have questions/suggestions regarding the trading card route. If you’re interested, here’s the original pitch and mockup for that one with some additional details on ideas:

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This idea came up when I was trying to wrap my head around the concept of art NFTs, and I was really struggling to understand why anyone would pay money to “own” a JPEG. I had zero interest. But after a few conversations, I realized it’s not so different from the way I obsessively collected Pokemon cards as a child. I still have a binder of these cards, which I treasure deeply despite the fact that they are useless pieces of paper in a binder. I then imagined if my cards were digitized, and I could flip through my collection with a swipe on my iPad instead of turning a page in my binder. Would it be so different? I think not, as long as certain criteria remain: they are buy-able, trade-able, and collectible, with pre-defined rarity (limited edition); and they should be aesthetically pleasing enough to enjoy viewing my collection.

I went ahead and designed a simple mockup for how these might look, loosely based on Pokemon cards (attached screenshot). My first inclination that this is a good idea is the fact that I actually want one. I also think it would be a really fun way to celebrate milestones in the organization, such as funded projects, and allow people both in and outside the DAO to feel more connected to and invested in these milestones. There’s a lot of flexibility – the “Project” series shown here is the most obvious to me, but I’m sure the community would have plenty of ideas for other auxiliary series. I like the Project series as a starting point / pilot program because the speed of new cards is intrinsically tied to the speed of funding projects, which will be slow and steady, giving a sense of stability to the value of the cards.

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love the idea… but i’m a bit worried it confuses because people won’t own the ip owning the trading card… and we will create fractionalized ip-nft in the future with ownership…

think one related nft effort can be design of our ip-nfts and fractionalized ip-nfts… but having a seperate nft project that is distinguishable from these

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That’s a great point, Vincent. There’s so many different paths we can take with Art NFTs…

  1. “regular” art NFTs sold for profit to the seller
  2. IP-stakeholder NFTs where ownership can yield profit to the buyer
  3. token-gated-access NFTs where ownership confers access to information/channels/data

It seems like you’re saying the Trading Cards: Funded Project Series idea would be best suited to paths 2 or 3 rather than path 1, is that correct? I see the logic there and think it’s an excellent point. If the community votes in favor of the cards, I see a few potential outcomes:

  • Gitcoin Series — Instead of focusing on funded for-profit projects, we could make a series based on the longevity projects we (presumably successfully) raised funds for on Gitcoin. It would be a way to commemorate that achievement. We could even incorporate attributes such as how much funds were raised for each project into the design of the card or “rarity” etc. I think this might solve the problem because people know not to expect returns on investment when the cards represent donations to charitable, non-profit causes.
  • Historical Series — Instead of of focusing on current VitaDAO projects, the first series could be more focused on longevity research history/lore. We could design cards representing important achievements such as when Cynthia Kenyon doubled C elegans lifespan with a single mutation.
  • Convert the project to path 2 or 3 — We could do the “Funded Projects” series mentioned in the original proposal and actually do the work to link the NFTs to benefits like fractionalized IP or special access. This would be more difficult but also really cool.

I don’t think these options are mutually exclusive either, and I’m sure other people can think of even more creative possibilities for series.

At this stage I think we only need to vote on a core aesthetic theme, and then we can do further polls and/or focus groups to narrow the paths further. @alphazwest did such a wonderful job concisely explaining the pros/cons of each of the 4 core themes, which I really appreciate since my writing style is obviously not very concise hahaha…

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Can’t we do them all? I like all of them!

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Aww we appreciate that a lot! I think it’s good to pick one to devote our limited human resources to first. I wouldn’t say the others will be permanently abandoned, just de-prioritized compared to the project that wins the poll. Does that seem reasonable to you?

PS: Some could even make cameos via merging into the core theme. Hard to explain in the abstract, so for example:

  • if Lab Rats was chosen but Mad Scientists was a close second, then there could be a portion of Lab Rats who themselves embody the Mad Scientist spirit with scientist clothes and funky hair.
  • if Trading Cards was chosen but alphafold molecules was a close second, there could be a series of trading cards featuring alphafold molecules.
    Etc.

I think overall we hope the poll will help us gauge the level of interest in these themes so that we can better assess how to move forward. It’s not necessarily a Yes/No binary at this point. But it will tell us a lot if a certain theme gets the vast majority of votes vs. no votes at all vs. some middle ground.

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I love the lab rats idea and it would be awesome if mad scientist features can be integrated as Ariella suggested above. Maybe having some features relating to significant contributions to the field. I’m personally most exited about this idea, but the other options are great as well. I think so far PFP format NFT series have performed the best. They become a part of people’s internet personality so they’re less likely to sell and also indicate belonging to a community.
I think the protein structures could be cool if they are stylized somehow and made into a 3D spinning object, rather then just a regular PyMol kind of structure.

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Great work @alphazwest, @Ariella and rest of the NFT team. Options 2 and 3 are my favorite. I agree with the others that we have to work on preventing misunderstandings regarding IP ownership if we go the trading card route.

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yes, love all!! my only focus of feedback was to make sure we don’t make vitadao even more complicated for outsiders to grasp… already a lot of effort to properly and briefly explain ip-nfts to outsiders, so we need to make sure to avoid more confusion :slight_smile:

but i love the ideas here and think option 1 and 4 would avoid confusions the most, while 2 and 3 might be confusing because the actual ip-nfts might also contain a protein structure or trading card like features…

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Vincent, thanks for the feedback. You raise a very good point regarding the possibility to confuse this project with the IP-NFT work. I would guess larger investors of IP-related NFTs would not likely be confused, but more casual members of the public, being only vaguely familiar with VitaDAO, might see these as access to the IP-related tokens. That could certainly cause some issues.

However, If the community voices strong support for options 2 and 3, I think the NFT Degen team could come up with some update iterations with that concern in mind to get feedback on whether they would be adequately differentiated from the IP project’s visual presentation. I only mention that so as not to turn others off from the general idea of the molecules or trading cards as an initial concept to build on.

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I’m obsessed with the Mad Scientist one. I like Lab Rats too. The others are really cool as well, but I’d probably be less excited to own them than the more PFP style.

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great point… pfp that is connected to science could make a lot of sense.

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The purposes behind NFTs and IPNFTs are somewhat different although they can both be combined with an artistic element to boost their value.

I understand the purpose of IPNFTs is to allow fractionalised ownership rights to IP (such as RCT data and patent rights generated by a particular project), and provide the owner with rights to receive outcome or royalty payments proportional to their ownership.

I had envisioned using artwork NFTs as a crowdfunding mechanism to raise a “public good” / longevity generic drug repurposing fund under a pay for success contract proposed in VDP-17: VDP-17: CrowdFundedCures.org Partnership Proposal - Generic Drug Repurposing Social Impact Bond. The amount paid for the NFT would represent what someone would pay for an off-patent longevity intervention that has been shown to work in Phase 2 or 3 RCTs. Ideally, there would be a royalty paid into the generic drug repurposing fund every time the NFT is sold (e.g. 10-20%).

Both IPNFTs and off-patent NFTs could be combined with artwork to boost their value, but this way, their value is also tied an investment in longevity R&D. It would be great to try and see if this would work with our proposed PFS model outlined in VDP-17 and also perhaps use the funds raised to support a Gitcoin round and leverage the quadratic funding to boost the amounts available in the longevity public good / generic drug repurposing fund. Of course, for this specific project, it might be a bit complicated and easier just to keep them as plain artwork NFTs / collectables.

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I’m a bit late to the party on this one, but I’m just getting in to VitaDAO and the community here. When I read the goal of funding, growth and awareness my mind trends toward the “regular” pfp NFTs such as option 1 or option 4. This is simply the most popular within the culture and will absolutely gain the most funding, awareness and growth. This group has a ton of brainpower and will be able to weave the complexity of web3 into NFTs in unique and creative ways in the future, but for the first NFT project I think art as the primary driver would be best. This coming from the guy who just showed up! Hahah, excited to learn and grow more with the community!

I say lab rats with mad scientist flavors.

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agree, that PFPs that look awesome and which fund research would be awesome. One idea could be for them to fund the matching pool for Gitcoin quadratic longevity and open science donation rounds?

Projects for inspirations: Gitcoin did Moonshotbots to fund public goods: https://bots.moonshotcollective.space/ … love how they approached it, but could be visually more distinct from each other

The Greatest LARP: Anon Vs Moloch - also nft project by gitcoin getting started… we could prob colab if it would fund longevity, open science gitcoin rounds

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Think this should start as going fully towards donations… and being fairly limited, maybe to 100 Profile-Pic-NFTs

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