Are you part of a PFP community? Perhaps sporting an Ape or Doodle as your profile picture on Twitter? While PFPs foster community, with few exceptions the NFTs themselves haven’t offered much in the way of utility—unless you consider status a utility.
Using Darkblock, project creators who have dropped PFP collections can upgrade those NFTs with unlockable content (even long after they’re minted and sold), essentially turning them into delivery channels for exclusive content as a reward to holders. That content could be whatever makes sense for your project—metaverse-ready, 3D versions of their PFPs; movies, comics, or stories that build out the world those PFPs inhabit; podcast episodes or music playlists; or any other form of digital content you can think of.
To consume that content, project creators can use Darkblock’s NPM packages to seamlessly integrate the Darkblock Viewer into their website, meaning your community stays engaged with your site longer and returns as often as you add content to their NFTs.
Creators can upgrade single NFTs, entire collections, or event subsets of collections using Darkblock’s trait-targeting tool. To do so, creators can use the Darkblock app to upload their content, which our protocol then encrypts, stores on Arweave (the only decentralized and permanent storage solution out there), and immutably ties to the NFT. Access controls also allow creators to determine whether your NFT collectors can download the content or not—and eventually whether they can rent out the content or not (more on that below).
Because Darkblock allows for an unlimited amount of content to be uploaded and attached to an NFT, creators can continue to reward diamond-handed collectors by uploading new assets to their PFPs. The longer you hold an asset, the more you are rewarded. The opportunities are endless.
Darkblock will also open up new monetization opportunities for artists and NFT project creators. On the protocol’s roadmap is giving creators the ability to explore new monetization opportunities, including content rental, which in this use case could look like a PFP holder being able to rent out access to the project’s exclusive unlockable content (maybe it’s a comic book or film?) to people who can’t afford the NFT itself. If your holders become distribution channels for the content, a portion of that rental income flows back to the creator as a royalty on consumption.
We hope that PFP creators and collectors will utilize the power of unlockables to strengthen their communities and encourage others to experience the power of the blockchain and NFTs.
