Create your own POAP

Give out POAPs to celebrate events, product launches, and other memories!

TLDR:

• POAP stands for “Proof of Attendance Protocol” and allows minting and giving away free commemorative NFTs for important moments.

• Creating a POAP is really simple to do. However be warned that since all POAPs go through human curation it’s not automatic and can be quite slow to finalise.

• Many big brands have leveraged POAPs and the ecosystem keeps growing. Read on below to learn how you can create one for your commemorative moments.

This week I decided to have a bit of fun creating a POAP as I thought I could potentially use one as a reward for people who completed the free 30 Days of NFT Tech course.

As I began creating this POAP I decided to share the steps involved so that others could create them for themselves too.

What is a POAP?

Firstly if you’ve not heard the term before you may be asking what is a POAP?

In their own words POAP is short for ‘Proof of Attendance Protocol,’ and “allows you to mint memories as digital mementos”. You can then “give POAPs to people for sharing a memory with you.” As their slogan says they are “boomarks for your life”!

In other words it is basically a simple NFT that can be given away for free to celebrate any specific moment you like. Many people use them as a commemorative digital badge for completing something or attending an event.

The POAP website itself suggests using them for celebrations, product launches, and conferences. And I’ve personally seen them be regularly given out at the end of online events and Twitter/X Spaces.

So if you’re a company or creator looking to connect further with your audience and want to make a specific moment that much more special then they are perfect for you.

How to create your own

Creating your own POAP is mega simple but there is a catch as you’ll see below.

First just open up poap.xyz and login with the top-right button and your email address. Then you’ll be led through a flow for creating a drop.

You’ll need to fill in the title, description, website, start and end date, type of event, platform and channel, and visibility of the POAP (ie. private or public).

Below you can see an example I made that could potentially given out for completing the free 30 Days of NFT Tech course I just recently released with Zen Academy.

Once that’s all filled in you are pretty much done! However to speed up the creation of the POAP they ask you to fill in a few more fields and forms since all POAPs are curated by a human team before being accepted.

You can request a certain number of POAPs to be mintable, in this case I set this to 100. Plus I set a secret to “fox-crystal-30” that would be used on their app to find the mint itself. If you want you can also direct people towards a website to find the mint.

After all this you can find the drop details in the gallery by clicking the “view in gallery” button on the POAP’s page.

Then when the mint period opens anyone can mint the POAP from the mobile app on iOS or Android by typing in the secret code.

Warning

The POAP team made a business decision to have human curation for every drop that they do, in their own words from one of their emails: "we have a Human Curation team, solely curating each drop case by case as to protect the POAP Ecosystem.".

This has the benefit of keeping their ecosystem from being polluted with unsavory NFTs and drops. However, on the flip side since it’s not automated creating a drop is not as simple as just filling in the fields above.

So even after all of the above I received an email with a google form called “POAP Petition Appeal Form” where I had to provide them with more details. And once I’d filled all this out I spent the next day firing emails back and forth in their review process and had to change some of the fields I’d previously set.

Since I was running this as a test they asked me to explicitly write the term “test” on the title of the POAP and said I’d only be able to mint a maximum of 10 POAPs rather than the 100 I’d originally set.

In the end though after about 36 hours, I had this very cool POAP that I could trial as a test to potentially release alongside the completion of the 30 Days course.

Use-Cases

A significant number of companies and creators have made use of POAPs. Even just on their website they give several large companies as examples.

Some notable examples I’ve seen include:

• Adidas who provided a limited number of POAPs to its app users, granting them exclusive access to purchase the brand's "Into the Metaverse" NFTs.

• At the SXSW conference, Fox Entertainment’s NFT studio, Blockchain Creative Labs, gave participants with POAPs at several venues throughout the festival.

• Doodles partnered with Behr paint at their SXSW activation to distribute POAPs featuring artwork and new paint swatches from their collaboration.

• Warner Music Group also used POAPs to create exclusive song drops to connect artists directly with their fans.

• And in Decentraland, brands like Estee Lauder and Lottie London have offered POAPs to visitors of their events.

Why not create your own?

You’ve now seen and know how and why to create your own POAP.

If you are running an event, product launch, or anything that is generally commemorative I certainly recommend creating a POAP considering how easy it is to do and how rewarding it feels for holders to have something to look back on.

It’s not the type of NFT people will trade or ever hold in their personal wallets, but that’s also an advantage because you remove the speculative nature of NFTs and ensure that people will keep hold of them as a memory. Plus it’s backed with the blockchain so it won’t go anywhere!

My only reservation is that unlike creating an NFT with Manifold it’s not fully automatic, so make sure to create it with plenty of time in advance so the POAP team can have it reviewed in time for when you’re drop goes live.