OpenSea and Fair.xyz’s Soulbound ‘Minter Token’ Honors NFT Innovators

The Alpha:

• A Web3 enterprise called Fair.xyz that builds tech to improve smart contract functionality announced a new partnership with OpenSea on Wednesday to release its new “Minter Token” feature, according to a press release shared with nft now.

• The Minter Token is a soulbound token that cryptographically proves that a wallet owner minted an NFT, even if the owner has sold or transferred the digital asset. The tool analyzes a user’s wallet and creates a 3D generative artwork that displays the minted NFT.

• In the future, the Minter Token could expand to include other soulbound token use cases like proof of ownership of property, physical works of art, or even shares in a company.

Why it matters

Since digital assets can change hands so easily, there’s no great way of recognizing who originally minted a particular project’s NFT (short of digging into someone’s history on the blockchain). Fair.xyz’s Minter Token aims to change that, making it easy for minters to take credit for helping to build NFT communities and potentially letting them partake in token-gated community events.

The Minter Token is a nod to collectors who were there at the beginning of NFT projects. Soulbound tokens are non-transferable, which means the feature is more about community recognition and status than flipping or making any profit on the NFT.

“We know every NFT platform says this, but we truly are about community first,” said Fair.xyz Co-Founder Isaac Kamlish in the press release. “That’s why we felt strongly that to establish our values as a company and introduce ourselves to the Web3 community, we wanted to build something for the entire Web3 community.”

As an investor in Fair.xyz, OpenSea has been supportive of the feature, amplifying it on Twitter and leveraging its audience to help showcase the release.

To mint a Minter Token, users go to minter.fair.xyz, connect their Ethereum-based wallet, and Fair.xyz will automatically display all the NFTs they’ve ever minted. Once a user selects an NFT, the feature will generate a 3D-rendered artwork of the token, and allows users to mint the artwork as a 1 of 1 NFT.

What’s next

The concept of soulbound tokens is still a relatively new one, even for NFTs. Though some companies claim to have created them, the non-transferrable identity and reputation tokens are highly divisive. Bad actors, ranging from hackers to authoritarian regimes, could use them to identify persons of interest for all the wrong reasons. Theft of soulbound tokens is just as concerning, although some have advocated the social recovery model as a counter to those scenarios.

Regardless, they are a compelling idea in the Web3 world that could change the way society views and interacts with the concept of permanent ownership. Fair.xyz’s Minter Token will be a fascinating window into how Web3 denizens choose to value originality, status, and innovation in NFT communities when there’s no money involved.

But wait! There’s more: