Trust-Based NFTs
The Worm and all its glory
Sharing is caring. Sharing is an essential aspect of human interaction and relationships. It can help us build trust amongst one another and create a sense of community and belonging. It's a simple principle many of us are taught as young kids, “sharing is caring”.
During my time in NFTs sharing has not been a consistent theme, it's mostly been projects looking to raise funds while also trying to build a community, brand or sometimes just to take the money and run. The primary model we’ve seen over and over is a 10k mint (maybe more or maybe less) that's either free to mint with high royalties, or all sold at a fixed price (sometimes low, sometimes high) and maybe a royalty (which doesn’t matter to a lot of traders with the advancements in NFT marketplaces).
Expectations build on the founding team, on roadmap delivery, or the performance art the project keeps creating. Price go up, or maybe price go down.
Blockchains have given us the gift of semi-liquid international 24/7 markets for scarce digital assets, and that has drawn in speculators and opportunists from all across the globe. Some buy into a project expecting a gain in status (eg BAYC), or expecting to 10x the investment quickly. If a project moons early traders and collectors are incentivized to sell and take profits to prevent fully round tripping the investment . If a project dies, the ones that are lucky can dump it and move on.
Most of these projects are not true communities, but rather groups of people united by a desire for financial gain.
The Worm is none of this. There was no 10k mint, there was no whitelist.
To get The Worm, someone has to share it with you, and probably trusted you. They need to believe that you will pass it along to another trustworthy person, who in turn will continue the chain by sharing it with someone else they trust.
There is another option for passing along The Worm where someone can choose to sell The Worm - but it doesn’t start that way and it doesn’t feel in the spirit of The Worm.
If The Worm gets stuck somewhere, the team has created the "Yoink” function which returns it back to the main address to be redistributed.
The team describes The Worm as:
“The Worm is an NFT that you share to mint. Its mission is to visit every wallet on the Ethereum blockchain, including yours!
When you share The Worm, it leaves behind a numbered Hologram of itself as a memento of your beautiful time together.
There’s only one original The Worm NFT. And the only way to get it is for someone else to transfer it to you.
If you get The Worm it will be your turn to find the next wallet for The Worm to visit. You can pick however you’d like. Most people who have had The Worm in their wallet report that once it is there, it speaks to them, letting its intention for where to go next be known.
When you send The Worm along you will find that The Worm mints a “Worm Hologram” (a numbered copy of itself) and leaves it behind in your wallet.
The “Worm Hologram” marks you as having had The Worm. Congratulations, you’ve now joined The Church of The Worm”
That sums it up pretty well, but I’m going to dive into some aspects that I find interesting.
Share-to-mint. In essence, “share-to-mint” is the key technical component of The Worm. It’s the magic that enables a community to grow naturally, through sharing and leaves behind the NFT to the person passing The Worm.
The worm is Soul Bound Tokens (SBTs) mixed with “puff puff pass”. The crypto OG and co-author of this blog Ethdapps (@ethereum_dapps on twitter) wrote a great piece on SBTs. If you’d like a longer deep dive into that check it out here.
For now, I’ll give a quick overview.
SBTs are a type of NFT that has specific rules encoded into the smart contract that make the token bound to a specific owner. They are a special kind of NFT with unique properties that make them non-transferable, or bound, to their owner. The term "soul bound" implies that the item is uniquely connected to its owner and cannot be separated from them.
SBTs come with many benefits and I believe we’ll see more experimentation in this space over the coming years, we’ve also seen Vitalik discuss a number of real world use cases such as identity or accreditation from people or organizations.
SBTs can instill trust and require both the sender and receiver to have a level of trust. When you’ve been blessed by the worm, and then pass that on to someone who you trust enough to keep the worm alive. It seems so small, but that factor of trust is what social fabric is built on and why I believe The Worm has the ability to form unique networks.
There is an alternative where you can sell the worm via accepting a bid or listing it to transfer to the next wallet. This is totally acceptable, and part of the joy in the worm. Especially if the value of being ‘in the club’ gets so high that it becomes worth selling.
There are also some simple rules that govern The Worm that the team lists on the site.
You can read more on The Worm here:
Stories are a way of connecting with one another. How one receives and gives The Worm creates a story. There's who you receive it from (who trusted you), how long I held it for, and who you passed it along to (who you trusted).
apenoun.eth trusted me, and I in turn trusted heee.eth. I held it for 7 minutes. In doing so the next disciple was brought into The Church of The Worm, documented on the Ethereum blockchain. Through this process The Worm was kept alive to continue thriving on its mission to visit every wallet on the Ethereum blockchain.
“When The Worm visits you, it gifts you a copy of itself to cherish forever.” As of writing this piece, just over 1,154 wallets touched the worm, and it is currently with rudxane.eth.
The team has put a lot of creativity and lore into the whole Worm experience. The team has crafted The Worm to have a religious experience theme which can be seen and read about on the website in more detail.
When you receive The Worm, you become a Disciple of The Worm. Every once in a while milestones are hit based on the number of disciples, and The Worm provides a Blessing to all of the disciples. Praise be! (this is their version of Roll Tide!)
The first 100 Worm holders received a Brian Brinkman and Worm collaboration.
As of writing this piece the first 1,000 disciples are waiting patiently for The Worm's second blessing.
The Worm is a breath of fresh air in the NFT space, putting the focus on sharing, trust, and forming real connections. By using a share-to-mint approach and throwing Soul Bound Tokens into the mix, it creates an NFT project where folks trust each other and work together to keep the project alive. This theoretically forms a network of trusted Ethereum wallets that can be used for use cases like artist airdrops, gaming beta whitelists, and many more. This minting method shakes up the typical profit-driven mentality we often see in the NFT world, letting The Worm build a genuine and lively community.
As The Worm keeps on finding its way through every wallet on the Ethereum blockchain, it's a reminder that there's more than one way to create an NFT community outside of a standard mint and build a business. It paves the way for future projects to play around with creative and inclusive models that give more weight to sharing and trust than just making a quick buck and figuring out how to build a brand around it. By continually experimenting with new NFT distributions, we can keep uncovering new ways to build trust, connect with each other even when far away, and craft authentic communities in the digital world.
Praise be!
gbz