This past year, stories like Zagabond’s and Sifu’s show that anonymous online personas may hide questionable pasts. Meanwhile, projects like VeeFriends and Moonbirds have risen based on the reputations of their real-life founders. Thus, it seems peculiar to me to hear the same voices on Crypto Twitter praising the ability to remain anonymous in web3, while plunging their eth into NFT projects based on the sterling real-life reputations of Gary Vaynerchuk and Kevin Rose.

For as long as NFT projects have been around, a doxxed team has offered signals of trust and investability to buyers. I would assert that such thinking is outdated (or dare I say web2-esque), and that future NFT projects will prevent rugpulls not with real-life reputations, but with incentives and governance. I believe this will allow communities to trust in anonymous builders, and democratize success in this space.

Let me explain this with a set of rough principles that I predict future blue-chip NFTs will follow.

1. Withhold the majority of minting fees and royalties from the builders

   For many projects, the majority of funds earned by builders are received upfront during mint. Thus, if a builder chooses to abandon their project, there’s often little the community can do to recoup their original investments and hold builders accountable.

   I believe that builders should restrict themselves to a limited upfront lump sum of their minting revenues, and a monthly portion of royalties. This should be enough to allow the builders to earn a good wage and hire talent to scale their projects. It should not be the majority of the treasury.

2. Builders should outline when they will get paid before mint

   For builders to receive more of the treasury, they should spell out their roadmap and what percentage of the unpaid treasury they will receive for each deliverable before mint. As investors in the project, the community has the right to review these terms and vote with their eth whether the builder’s terms are fair. The community may choose not to invest in a project that is unnecessarily advantageous for builders.

3. The community should control the treasury

   Community members should have decision-making power over the treasury as early into the project as possible. The community should validate that the work the builders complete is in line with expectations set, and reward builders for a job well done. The community has an incentive to reward builders fairly to incentive them to continue to grow the project. I also believe that the community and builders should come together to revise their partnership as the project grows. The key concept I want to emphasize here is accountability, specifically holding builders accountable to the people who believed and invested in them.

4. The community and builders should be able to terminate a failed project. When this happens, treasuries should be returned to the community.

   Lastly, if builders have consistently failed to deliver on promises or have abandoned the project, the community should have the right to end the project. This means dividing the treasury across all holders of an NFT so that each person recoups some of the upfront investment they made in the team. In the pre-Azuki Zagabond case, for example, I believe the creators had no intent to rug their community. Rather, there wasn’t enough traction or interest to grow the project, so the builders wished simply to start anew. I believe it’s right for the community and the builders to acknowledge that some projects didn’t succeed and to offer some compensation back to the community.

I’ll close by acknowledging I’ve simplified the rules of governance here. Nonetheless, I hope it will inspire builders in the future to think about how they can structure their projects to better align with the people who believe in their work. I also hope it allows anonymous builders to create without feeling the need to dox themselves to build community trust.

Until next time, keep building the dip.