Chain-Agnostic Utility: Building Bridges; connecting communities

Sherpa expounds on his work with the Memphis Lions Club, and creating utilities for the multi-metaverse.

“Chain-Agnostic Utility: Building Bridges; connecting communities”

Full disclosure: This week’s article is an update on a project that I’m working with, Memphis Lions Club.  You might remember them from my article on fragmentation of metaverses. I realized we’d tackled fragmentation of metaverses, but not fragmentation of metaverse utilities.



I’m working with MLC to solve real problems that we’ve discussed throughout our NFT Back to Basics series, and while I am biased, I’m also very proud of the work the team has put into creating a useful product by launch.



With that out of the way, I’m actually really excited to get into this. If you couldn’t tell from my long-suffering tone as we ventured into the more recent history of NFTs & related utilities, I’ve been sorta at my wits’ end with the irrationality of the market.

“Merch on the roadmap? How original.”

I guess it’s this idea I keep coming back to, that so many projects are spending millions of dollars to create what I’ve been calling, “walled gardens”. That is: games, utilities, tokens, platforms, and even chains & L2s that shoot themselves in the foot with their crypto economic/tokenomic or business models by disincentivizing growth.



Basically they’ve created a secret garden in a remote corner of the world that only a handful of people can potentially access, and so in the end it is a beautiful, expensive, and thoroughly empty garden.

                    “It’s so quiet here.”

Interoperability & chain-agnostic architecture are key to making any of this functional. “[Insert L2 here] was great and all, but once you could bridge from there to anywhere else, it became functional.”



It’s much the same with any of these markets, games, communities, and utilities. I bemoaned the high cost of “whitelisting” utilities in Part Six of our NFT series, because when paired with the limited functionality, creating as many projects as possible was financially incentivized.



Rightclickable, the team creating the Memphis Lions Club, is close to launching a connected multi-metaverse with chain-agnostic brand & community-building utilities that I hope will help us course-correct & interconnect, as we did with bridges & wrapped tokens.



Unlike the issues we discussed last week re: Bridges, the approach is non-custodial & chain-agnostic, with minimal risk as the NFTs are an access pass to the utilities.

Memphis Lions Club: A chain-agnostic, multi-function metaverse

Going back to whitelisting utilities, MLC already has a working v1 of their whitelisting tool that will be available to holders. Now, the problem is that most projects would build that, put a 1Ξ price on minting, and call it a day. Or, even worse? They promise to build it, once minting is finished and they have a few months (or years) to hire & build out.



I don’t like that, and the drive to have a functional MVP of all the utilities before mint is the reason I’m so excited about this project. The goal is to incentivize brand & community development, but also to rethink how we engage with these projects, communities, and brands.



If you’ve been watching NFTs for a while, you know there are a lot of things that end up on a project’s roadmap: whitelist for future drops, maybe physical merch tied to holding or specific traits, a 3D gallery, or possibly even a game or metaverse.



The thing is: those all have to be built. As we’ve discussed in previous articles, there just aren’t enough developers to build 10,000 metaverses or 10,000 markets for the 10,000+ NFT projects that have promised them in their roadmap.



The solution? Standardizing these utilities, and making them easier to access under one roof, for one price. Then letting communities create, gatekeep, and customize as they please from there. With one mint, teams can actualize on their entire roadmap, and connect their community to thousands of others through the MLC Meta Portal.

What’s the Use(case)?

Let’s run through the list of utilities, because that’s my bread & butter. Don’t get me wrong; I love the art of so many NFT projects, but I’m a gem-hunter. I know what it looks like when someone finds a solution to an actual problem. That’s just my niche; I leave the art critiques to folks more knowledgeable on the subject.

• 2D PFP
  
  
  
  Most NFT projects, this is essentially where it ends. They may throw up a teespring store for merch, but the pfp is all you’re promised. Memphis Lions Club is doing that as well, with a beautiful  2D profile picture on Ethereum crafted by a CT-veteran artist, that will be connectable on Twitter for the vanity metric, if you’re so inclined.
  
  
  
  

• 3D Avatar
  
  
  
  For the more gamified aspects of the metaverse, a 3D Avatar on Solana will be freemint for every holder of the pfp. This will be connectable & updatable with stats & skins, which wouldn’t be cost-effective on Ethereum, so a dual mint gives utility on both chains, in addition to the chain-agnostic utilities.
  
  
  
• Metaverse
  
  
  
  Clubhouse, hangout spaces; all of this is already at a v1 before launch, and after launch communities will be able to customize more using skins & design templates to not only create content, but sell it to other users & communities in the multimetaverse & connected shops.
  
  
  
  

• Whitelist Management
  
  
  
  If your NFT community is looking for management tools, it all starts here, with whitelist management available to connect your community to your whitelist.
  
  
  
• NFT Drop Management
  
  
  
• Physical Merch Drop Management
  
  
  
  While building out the functionality for their brand partners, like Memphis Depay Clothing, Red Bull, and their associated trait-based physical ‘drops’, the team opened that same Airship functionality to connected communities.
  
  
  
• NFT Gallery
  
  
  
  This is another common item from NFT project road maps, and oft times they’ll accomplish this with a free or cheap account with Spatial, but this ends up being one of those ‘walled gardens’, where folks might go there to see your gallery once, but without another reason to be there, that’s probably the extent of it.
  
  
  
  The promise of this utility existing in a connected series of metaverses is that it becomes a feature to view while you’re there, rather than just existing in a vacuum.
  
  
  
• Video/Performance Stage
  
  
  
  From live streamed performances to updates and AMAs, your metaverse can tie all of your community & content together under one roof.
  
  

• Games
  
  
  
  I’ve seen a lot of projects that launch with the game as the only use-case, and end up delivering a cheap mobile reskin & promises on a v2 maybe. We’ve already got v1s harkening back to the classics…
  
  
  

…as well as some new favorites.

• Shops/E-Commerce
  
  
  
  This is where you’ll be able to buy & sell physical or digital merch to others in connected metaverses.
  
  
  
• Proof of Engagement Token
  
  
  
  You’ve probably heard of Basic Attention Token, and the idea of both rewarding users for viewing ads, but also letting them choose how often they see ads. With MLC, the engagement token is CLX, which can function as rewards, but also as upvotes & a subtle cue to the algo.
  
  
  
  Rather than focusing on a single end of ‘engagement’ CLX are meant to foment engagement with one another on every level.
  
  
  
  
• Community Organization
  
  
  
  The problem with the current levels of fragmentation in these utilities is that most folks will end up missing so much, unless they’re watching a dozen spaces at once for updates. Connecting all of this streamlines the information & utilities available to your community, which means that more of your content gets seen by the people who care.
  
  
  
  A unique algorithm underlies the multi-metaverse functionality, ensuring that communities you’re connected to by holding show up higher in all universal lists & when traveling through the MetaPortal.
  
  
  

Wen?

We’re looking to mint the first batch of 1,000 lions (out of 10k total) & begin onboarding communities into the Multimetaverse at the end of October (this month!). Price is tentatively set at .08-.10 eth, but we’re trying to make sure the genesis batch gets in at around $100 so we can begin rolling out more features & upgrading the ones we have, and bug-testing new utilities.



In the future, some of the more premium “brand management” utilities may be locked to certain traits or a subscription model, but we wanted the early supporters & initial community to have full features at a fair price, not a bear price.



Follow Memphis Lions Club on Twitter for exact dates & details.