Unlock Guides

Unlock Guides

Simple tips & tutorials for creative communities and the humans who build them

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The Basics

New to Unlock? From how to create a lock to using the Unlock Dashboard and more.

Selling & Distributing

From selling your NFTs to managing memberships and other payment tips.

Plugins & Integrations

Easily integrate Unlock with many different existing platforms and software.

All articles

Guide

Frens Don’t Let Frens Use Luma at ETHDenver

ETHDenver is the largest and longest-running Ethereum event in the world. There will be over 25,000 of us in Denver this year. It’s going to be awesome!

This also means that as members of the broader Ethereum community, we each have the responsibility to walk-the-walk and actually use the tools and solutions we are BUIDLing and telling others they should be using. Here’s how to do it.

Guide

How To Create Subscription Content with Unlock Protocol and Darkblock

Using Unlock Protocol and Darkblock, creators can set up members-only, subscription content in the form of text, podcast episodes, video, or any other digital format. This content can be free or paid, and supports the distribution of members-only visual art, music, ‘zines, paid subscriptions of online video courses, and nearly any other type of digital content.

Guide

How to Delegate Votes in the Unlock DAO

If you want to have a say in the Unlock DAO, but don’t feel you have the time or ability to keep up with ongoing off-chain and onchain proposals and their related conversations and votes, you can delegate your votes to someone who will vote them on your behalf. This guide shows you how to delegate off-chain and onchain voting power using Snapshot and Tally.

Basics

How to Show Proof of Attendance with Unlock Protocol

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) can be used as a mechanism to prove that the person holding the NFT attended a specific conference, community event or participated in a community in some other way at a particular time and/or place. When used in this way, they are referred to as “Attendance NFTs.”

Guide

How To Create Soul-Bound Tokens with Unlock Protocol

Soul-bound tokens (also called soul-bound NFTs and often abbreviated as “SBT”) are a type of non-fungible token. Unlike regular NFTs, which can be bought, sold, or transferred, soul-bound NFTs are linked to a specific wallet.

Basics

How To Airdrop NFTs by Email

Unlock lets you airdrop NFTs by email — even if the recipient doesn’t have a crypto wallet. This guide shows you how.

Basics

Locksmith Lingo

Welcome, Locksmith! Let’s learn a few common terms you’ll see across the Unlock ecosystem.

huddle01 and unlock protocol logo
Guide

Token Gated Meetings on Huddle01

Huddle01 is a web3 video-conferencing platform. This guide teaches you how to create private, access-controlled meetings using Huddle01 and Unlock Protocol.

Basics

How To Use Blockchain Explorers with Unlock Protocol

One of the most critical aspects of web3 is that it decouples the “data and application” from front ends and user interfaces. For example, you can interact with Unlock Protocol smart contracts using blockchain explorers, in addition to the Unlock Dashboard.

Guide

Password Protected NFT Memberships

This guide shows you how you can use the powerful hook mechanism to password-protect your lock so that only users who know the password can purchase memberships from your contract.

Guide

Unlock Discourse plugin

The Unlock Discourse plugin let you lock topics behind the Unlock paywall. Your discourse members have to buy your NFT or receive it via an airdrop to access topics from locked categories.

Plugins & Integrations

Cal.com with Unlock Protocol

Unlock: Create a Lock In the Unlock Creator Dashboard, create a Lock. After naming the Lock, and filling in the duration, quantity, and price fields,

Plugins & Integrations

Decentraland

Unlock + Decentraland Using Unlock, you can create a space in Decentraland that only members with an NFT have access to. Charging for access You

Plugins & Integrations

Drupal Plugin

Drupal has a plugin to integrate Unlock on a site. You can see more info about the plugin on this page. Note: this plugin was

Discord

Discord with Collab.Land

Unlock: Create a Lock In the Unlock Creator Dashboard, create a Lock. After naming the Lock, and filling in the duration, quantity, and price fields,

Discord

Guild.xyz

Guild.xyz is a bot that lets you easily token gate access to your Discord servers. Once your guild has been created, select the right Unlock

Discord

Swordy Bot

Swordy Bot allows you to give access to Discord private channels by assigning a role to a user that has an Unlock Key (NFT). Once installed the plugin communicates via private chat with your server members and sends them to a website where they can verify key ownership.

Basics

Using a custom currency

The UI only offers the choice between DAI and Ether, but any ERC20 can be used. Locks can be configured to be backed by any

Basics

Recurring Memberships

Making your memberships automatically recurring is a critical step to reduce friction for your members while at the same time increase your revenues.

Basics

Organizing a vote by members

Unlock memberships are represented as NFT (using the ERC721 standard) which means they’re compatible with any tool which can leverage NFT, including the Snapshot governance application!

Distributing

How to make keys non-transferrable

The contract for any lock can be interfaced with directly using Etherscan (or similar block explorers). Using this method, it is easy for creators to make the NFT keys for their lock contract be non-transferrable.

Basics

Customizing Locks on OpenSea

OpenSea is a large NFT marketplace. It is fairly centralized but will accept your locks and could even render them nicely if you follow the steps below!

Enable credit card for NFT lock
Distributing

Enabling Credit Cards

Purchasing keys to a lock can also be performed with a credit card payment. Here is how to enable credit cards payments for any lock.

Guide

How to Sell Membership NFTs

Introduction Once your lock has been deployed, Unlock makes it easy to sell memberships in the form of an NFT. There are multiple ways to

NFT-event
Basics

How to Sell NFT Tickets for an Event

A ticket to a conference, a concert or a meetup is a membership to that event. With Unlock, you can easily set up ticketing for conferences, events or meetups you organize.

create NFT lock
Basics

How to Create a Lock

The first step to using Unlock as a creator is to deploy your own lock so you can sell memberships to your own content! Each membership is a Non Fungible Token which you can customize easily.

FAQs

Resale royalties are usually specified at the collection level through the platforms like OpenSea where the resale might be done (e.g. https://support.opensea.io/hc/en-us/articles/1500009575482-How-do-royalties-work-on-OpenSea-).

Since the memberships are ERC721s, they automatically show up on OpenSea and other marketplace platforms pretty much as soon as they are minted (e.g. https://opensea.io/collection/eth-portland-mintgate-x-unlock).

You’ll probably need to reach out to OpenSea to get royalty editing turned on for your collection, as noted in the Handling Common Issues section of this article. The article notes:

“By default, the storefront editor page (https://opensea.io/category//edit) is accessible to the contract’s Ownable __ owner . If your contract doesn’t implement Ownable, or if it does but the owner address is not accessible, or if it’s just not working, [OpenSea] can fix that manually. Send an email to [email protected] introducing yourself, providing the contract address, and providing the address that you’d like authorized to edit the storefront. OpenSea will confirm your ownership, then make the authorization.”

Note: There is a great conversation with Unlock community member @littlefortunes in the Unlock Discord where she shares her experiences with setting up royalties and NFT collection information on OpenSea.

 

 

Unlock supports automatic renewals & subscriptions. You can learn more here on how to implement recurring memberships and subscriptions using Unlock.

If you want to customize the NFT image for the keys for a lock, it can be done right through the Unlock dashboard. Here is a tutorial on how to change the image for Unlock keys.

By default, all the keys to a particular lock have the same image. If you want to create unique metadata (including unique images) for keys for a particular lock, there is a great tutorial by community member Croissant on how to specify individual images and NFT metadata.

As a creator, you may want to share the ownership of your lock with other people (other creators, employees, partners… etc). For this, you should leverage the “lock manager” role. You can grant this role using a block explorer.

Unlock lets you pick the price, but also the currency used by your membership. This means that you can, for example, use a stable coin such as DAI or USDC to have a price-stable in $.


Alternatively, you can change the price of your lock at any point if you need to maintain relative stability, but make sure you do not choose a highly volatile currency.


Finally, you could also leverage your lock’s “hook” capabilities to alter the price of the key, but that is generally considered a lot harder to implement (and would require the help of a developer).

If you enable credit card payments for your lock, your members will usually be charged a higher amount than the amount for your lock. We convert the token amount using Coinbase’s API and will use the resulting price to charge cards (we recommend using stable coins for credit card enabled locks). We use Stripe Connect and we add 10% of the price in order to cover the costs of Stripe, gas and our own developments costs.

All of Unlock’s contract are open source and should be visible. Since version 9 (January 2022), the locks are upgradable (by any of their lock managers). Unfortunately that means that block explorers like Etherscan (or equivalent on the respective chains) are not showing them as verified by default. However, verifying them is trivial. From the Dashboard, click on the block explorer icon, then click on the Contract tab, then look for the More Options button on the right of the screen and select Is this a Proxy?. Click Verify , Save and you should be good!

 

Absolutely! Unlock’s PublicLock contract (the membership contract) includes a delegation mechanism that would let you point to any other on-chain contract to determine if an address is considered to be a “valid” member. Check “Using an existing NFT contract” for more details.