A blue check-mark NFT
Locks are the core of the Unlock protocol. They are smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum chain which lets your community become members by purchasing keys to your lock.
Twitter's blue checkmark has generated a lot of attention over the years. This week, Ethereum's Vitalik Buterin rightfully noted that the blue checkmark was a status symbol. Last week-end, Dani Grant released a fun Chrome extension which will show a Twitter users' NFT on their twitter profile.
Yesterday, we deployed a lock which lets anyone purchase a Blue Checkmark. Get yours now. It's cheap: 0.01 ether and we'll donate the proceeds to SHE256. Also, Dani was kind enough to merge a pull request on her extension so that if someone owns the NFT blue checkmark, it will actually show on their Twitter profile ;)
At Unlock, we believe that Non Fungible Tokens can be badges to show "membership", and yes, the Twitter Checkmark is an identifier for, as Vitalik calls it the blue checkmark class.
It turns out that Twitter's system is very much broken right now. Nobody knows what it really means to have a checkmark but we can't argue that in the days of deep fakes, having some kind of "labels" on the social web is a very useful pattern to identify people (or bots!) based on their affiliations for example.
Our Blue Checkmark Lock is obviously a joke and a fun experiment, but it shows the power of NFT which exist "outside" of the space for which they're created. Using Non Fungible Tokens, rather than records on Twitter's databases means that other applications could re-use these labels and maybe expand them. For example, wouldn't it be useful for Github to show some of the tags from StackOverflow? I'd love my RSS creds to be visible on my Github profile!
What other kinds of memberships would you want to see represented as Non Fungible Tokens?