The buzz around non-fungible tokens has risen in 2021, from the art world to gaming to sports. However, as the technology evolves, NFT developers look into using trustworthiness, long-term rewards, and chances for education and collaboration to form communities.
Then followed the boom, when multimillion-dollar artwork sales made headlines worldwide, and early NFT holders became billionaires overnight. But, as a culture of buying and “flipping” NFTs evolved, they were quickly followed by a surge of cash-ins and copycats.
However, the community utility of NFTs may have saved them; when weekly trade volumes on key NFT platforms plummeted last spring, they rebounded with vigor in July and August. The comeback was ascribed in part to the success of NFT artists informing communities around their projects.
Soon, celebrities were proudly flaunting their NFT avatars on social media, symbolizing their membership or sense of belonging to a specific collection.
Community Comes First
“People invest in the community very early on—and they expect to be rewarded for it,” says Elliot Ngai, co-founder of Doge Fight Club, which released its first collection of 6,200 unique Doge Fighter NFTs on November 14.
However, derivative avatar projects are no longer adequate to entice NFT-hungry buyers. Doge Fight Club is part of a new wave of NFT projects that aspire to be more than just a collection of artwork by forming active communities around them to teach, educate, and entertain their users.
Didi Frichti, a member of the Doge Fight Club, said:
“Joining the Doge Fight Club has been the best move I’ve made during my NFT adventure. If you’re new to this, it’s the ideal place to be, whether for trading advice, regular crypto market analysis, or the NFT watchlist. It’s all about helping one another.”
Doge Fighter NFT holders have access to the Fighter’s Corner, a community for like-minded people to meet and talk about their NFTs. They can also vote on the assets and decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) of the community.
The Educational Incentive Program
Many early NFT groups sprang out around their particular projects as an afterthought. At the same time, the first wave of NFT holders rallied around the soaring valuations of crypto ventures such as CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club. As a result, NFT projects are now putting the community first, including incentives and demonstrable value from the start.
Because there is an intense hunger for useful, actionable knowledge among newbies to the crypto sector, Doge Fight Club has turned its Fighter’s Corner into an instructional hub as well as a gathering spot. Doge Fighter owners can get help and advice in the form of trading tips and crypto-lessons here. “As a member of the larger crypto sector, we’re a great entry point. Our roadmap is heavily targeted toward education in its design. Education is utility,” Ngai explains.
To help its community, the project is also creating educational audio and how-to video content and commissioning research reports—something Ngai claims no one else in the NFT field has done to a gold level. Knockout Reward Points ($KRP) – daily prizes earned by staking your NFT – can be used to access these resources.
Members must keep their Doge Fight Club NFT if they wish to access the Fighter’s Corner; this feature fits with customers’ waning interest in merely flipping NFTs for profit. “This is not the community for you if you’re going to flip,” Ngai remarked.
Beyond Opacity: NFTs in the Future
As of May Chau, Doge Fight Club’s Marketing Lead explained, people’s expectations of NFT initiatives also change. “The due diligence you must perform […] raises everyone’s expectations.”
NFT holders have become increasingly suspicious of rug pulls, scams, fraud, or founders simply losing interest and abandoning their projects; therefore, the days of faceless founders and questionable pedigree around NFT initiatives are soon becoming a thing of the past. In addition, regulators are becoming more interested in NFTs as they grow more integrated into the global financial system, which means that full transparency will soon become non-negotiable for NFT start-ups.
To that end, the founders of Doge Fight Club have guaranteed that they’re ahead of the game by doxxing themselves for the sake of accountability. The crew is also proud of its long history in the fintech industry. Ngai, Wister Ng, the other co-founder of Doge Fight Club, and Chau currently work at Knit People, a Canadian cloud payroll and payments company.
That openness should help them develop their initiative; Doge Fight Club wants to build a full-fledged metaverse platform at some point down the road. The idea of shared virtual space has caught on, with everyone from Facebook to Nike putting their stake in the ground—but with Doge Fight Club’s emphasis on community, the NFT project is ideally positioned to ride the metaverse wave. “When we say Metaverse, we don’t mean a video game,” Ngai clarified. “It’s a community, a place where people can come together and chat about subjects they care about.”