A Quick Take on Whitelists Today
Whitelists (WLs) have undoubtedly benefited the NFT space. The WL meta however, has evolved into a tedious and unpleasant process that does does not benefit the community, or its individual members. We at Podium want to be true to the original WL concept: build a community that believes in our mission and has fun along the way.
A. Brief History of Whitelists
WLs became popular in mid 2021, they solved two key problems: gas wars, and project awareness. Along the way, they created an engaging system to build communities.
As NFTs grew in popularity, “gas wars” became the norm. Public sales, particularly for desired projects, were a battle. Many people would get gassed out, losing significant amounts of ETH along the way. Projects with less “hype” suffered from lower volumes because of the gas cost associated with their mints.
As more projects appeared, visibility for individual projects decreased. The WL mechanism addressed this issue by helping creators raise awareness. Voltura, in an interview with Zeneca stated “[WLs] Are an exclusive mechanism used to lure influencers and important people.” WLs allowed founders to attract more influential members to projects, by offering a guaranteed NFT in exchange for support.
As the WL concept became more popular, it evolved into project owners reserving a significant majority of mint to WL holders. It was a fun way to engage the community. “The basis of that strategy, that whitelisting approach was people having fun” (Voltura). This birthed the creative era of WLs, with treasure hunts, meme competitions and other activities, which truly engaged the community. Veterans of the space and new-comers alike had opportunities to interact with others in the community in a truly engaging manner. This benefited the individuals, projects and the NFT space more generally: individuals enjoyed the process and got guaranteed access to mints along the way, projects built lasting communities and the space as a whole created camaraderie and real connections around shared beliefs, experiences, and values.
WLs have significantly improved the collective experience in the community, but in recent times they have changed in detrimental ways. WLs offer exclusivity, but when there are fewer spots than people, it introduces a new question: what are they willing to do for it?
B. The dark side
The WL meta must change. To get on WLs is a difficult process many in the space must go through. The “discord grind” adopted by many projects requires members to “contribute” in superficial ways. Some projects require members to reach high levels in their discords by sending thousands of messages in a limited amount of time, while others ask for dozens of referrals to the server. This artificial strategy for “community building” is quite harmful.
The toll this takes on mental health is not insignificant. People burn-out trying to get onto a project’s WL, and even then, aren’t guaranteed one after all the effort they’ve put in. You can’t build a community with genuine relationships if you are forced to always be active, competing in a non-enjoyable way with those you are meant to develop bonds with.
The WL status quo is also harmful to the community as a whole. The grind is a tedious process that can be done by anyone, or even programatically. It has created a secondary market whose sole purpose is WL mining. Fake accounts have begun popping up, with owners utilizing bots and enlisting others to grind for these WL spots on their behalf.
This has diluted real user presence in the space and littered the NFT community with meaningless junk. A mechanism, which had once significantly contributed to the development of the space by engaging communities and forming meaningful bonds, is now instead hurting that same goal.
There are benefits to this approach, as DRXKO mentioned in our discord voice chat “getting WL for difficult projects allowed me to get the lowest possible entries with the highest possible return, which in turn allowed me to go from broke and almost quitting NFTs to being up over 10+ ETH”. But, we at Podium pose the question: what if you can achieve the same result without also perpetuating the toxic and damaging effects that have come along with the current state of WLs?
C. Our philosophy
WLs should be fun, let’s bring that back.
Here is our philosophy: we are building a community of people who understand and believe in the project. As Nahkasan put it “BAG TIME loves giving out WLs […] just need to give him a reason to.”
When you really boil it down, our WL strategy is just another extension of our brand philosophy: grow a community and platform that is built on members investing in the people they believe in.
Our number one priority will always be to distribute the vast majority of our whitelists to those who we believe will make the most of their opportunity and continue to strengthen the culture we are striving to build. When we have games and competitions, we will reward the winners, but we will give even more WLs to those who participate, have fun, and meaningfully engage other members during these events. Our mods are so excited to give out WLs, and we really only have one rule for them: find future members of Podium and show them we’re invested in them.
If you want to learn more, our DMs are open on Twitter: https://twitter.com/NftPodium
The article was written by Bilal on the Podium team, and reviewed by Nahkasan.
