“Apes and virtual worlds are all fun and stuff but I don’t see the point of NFTs? Why are you so convinced that NFTs will be disruptive technology in the future?”. A question* that we, at OG Studio, get a lot.

*Ok, I must admit, I reframed the question a little bit, most of the times the question is the following: “Why the hell would someone pay so much for a f*cking JPEG?”.

To pay or not to pay for a JPEG, that’s the question

Excellent remark. As Shakespeare famously put it: “to pay or not to pay for a JPEG, that’s the question.”. What few people know is that Shakespeare addressed the question to the creator of the NFT rather than to the collector. Are you going to launch an NFT project where you want people to pay for your NFTs? Or do you want to distribute your NFTs ‘for free’? NFTs are all about digital ownership, which as a consequence allows you to sell NFTs, but it doesn’t necessarily needs to be that way. In fact a lot of super exciting NFT use-cases are the ones where people don’t have to buy NFTs, but where NFTs are used beyond their speculative, financial, nature.

For example, people receiving NFTs as a proof of their merits and their accomplishments.

Enter the Meritverse

The Meritverse is the convergence of people’s professional identity and reputation where skills, trackrecord, certificates , … live on-chain in an immutable and verifiable way.

Imagine you graduate from University and instead of a paper diploma your university issues an NFT that proves you graduated and has your grade, your majors, and year of graduation as metadata for example (could also be complementary to a paper one off course).

Not only is this potentially much easier for future job applications. You can just authorise potential employers to verify your diploma NFT instead of wasting time digging into some boxes far away, scanning and uploading it etc. It also prevents fraud and cheating by creating a direct link between the issuer (in this case your former university) and the person holding this NFT. Those NFTs could even be non-transferrable so that cheating is totally out of the question. Vitalik calls this soulbound NFTs.

University Diplomas are one example of the Meritverse. Others are NFTs issued after completing certain projects, attending meetings, professional events or trainings. Even your on-chain history and activity could be added to your digital professional identity. For example a label ‘Bitcoin holder since 2017’ or ‘Part of community/project X since 2019’ …

Where does the ‘verse’ come into play?

Meritverse is a derivative from metaverse. By now the ‘merit’ part should be quit clear, what about the ‘verse’ part? How do your merits come to live?

The beauty of NFTs is that they can serve as a base layer where you can build applications on top of. As the ownership is at the users side, companies have to build upon those NFTs (note that in Web2 it is the other way around: you have to build on top of individual platforms where you can not extend to other ecosystems. You can’t import your credits, connections and diplomas from LinkedIn to Facebook).

So for example creatives could build their own, visually appealing, interactive portfolio in a Metaverse environment such as Oncyber where they can showcase the awards they won, their winning campaigns etc.

A Web3 version of LinkedIn could be built where you add degrees and certificates as NFTs. Enormous Alumni networks could be leveraged as you can easily connect with people who hold the same NFT, aka degree.

Experiences for specific professional NFT holders could be created. For example the online course ‘NFTs for professionals: advanced level’ can only be accessed by people who hold the ‘NFTs for professionals: beginner level’ NFT certificate.

As you can see, there are plenty of examples and the future looks bright for the Meritverse, even though those you don’t have to pay for them.

A great application, and potential start of your Meritverse journey, is the POAP protocol. POAP stands for 'proof of attendance protocol'. It's sort of an NFT that proves you were at a certain event, meeting, ... or read a certain article 😉.

Claim your POAP to prove that you know what the Meritverse is all about. Send us [email protected] a message and we’ll provide you a link to claim the POAP.

OG Studio is a full stack, daring Web3 studio. Built by cryptonatives, built for the ownership generation. Web3 is all about enabling digital ownership for everyone. We strongly believe the world will be a better place when everyone has digital ownership over their own business, identity, reputation, data, assets and their digital presence in general.