Going Beyond “Tulip Mania”: Incentive NFTs for Supporting Animal Shelters

TL;DR: a few crypto projects got together to do some charity work in Brazil and used incentive NFTs to do it. They raised $50K in three days.

This seems like a great evolution of the NFT space to distance from accusations of Tulip Mania. What do you think about the future usecases of NFTs?

Full post below:

Before we get to the meat and potatoes:

I need to flag my biases here… I’m a Reddit mod for an altcoin cryptocurrency, however I’m not here to shill! Rather, I’m writing this up to spur a discussion based on some action I’ve been seeing from the community and their partnerships. My rule here is that I will not mention the projects by name in the body of the post, nor will I give poorly veiled hints. We’re doing this above board!

However if you’re interested in checking out the project you can DM for links, or ask in the comments. Cool? Cool.

NFTs are often criticized by the mainstream for being a speculative “tulip mania” market—better known as probably THE most fragile financial bubble of all time. Basically “tulip mania” was this phenomenon back in 1637 where tulip bulbs inexplicably became scarce and went up in price.

For a time, the tulips “market” became highly volatile… and highly lucrative. The bubble eventually burst and ruined a lot of people for a while. Definitely not an ideal situation for speculative investors!

Fast forward to today, whenever there seems to be that strange mix of inexplicable value and an otherwise “valueless” asset, folks start fudding and slapping “tulip mania” on the movement. Perhaps it’s just the standard vitriol that the general public (let’s be honest, the Twitter public) has toward crypto, but in my experience any time there’s huge FUD, there’s something cool happening.

We’ve seen dudes like Beeple make some crazy NFTs, and we’ve also seen just as many non-artists stealing artist’s work to make a quick buck (I realize this may be a dicey discussion to have, so I’m going to skirt it for now), and because only a few people are raking in the big bucks, and a ton of scammers aren’t, it’s being totally written off.

Well, sometimes innovation can be found in unexpected places.

You’ve probably heard of more than a few “charity coins” that are usually just elaborate rugs, yet somehow, a few wholesome projects found each other in the weeds and agreed to do big things through the power of partnership.

They took a long look at what NFTs are typically used for, and figured they could do better. First, they created the incentive: after holding specific NFTs for about a month, the holder is airdropped a certain number of the respective project’s currency—not unlike gaining interest on your initial investment. To be fair, this is hardly new ground being broken.

These projects also had missions they wanted to achieve: helping animals all over the world. The communities seemed generally onboard with donating money to shelters and such, and figured if they pooled their resources they could swing for the fences.

Mixing the incentive with the mission created the perfect catalyst for one of the biggest crypto charity raises in history (so far anyway).

The partners got together to raise money for animal charities and shelters in Brazil—if you’re privy to knowing a little about other countries, you’ll probably know that Brazil has an insane stray animal problem in major cities—because their resources are persistently drained, and a lot of animals are put down every year.

Hell, even a journalist like Glen Greenwald has an animal shelter he helps run in Brazil… It’s really that bad over there (plus he fosters like 20+ doggos; crazy stuff).

ANYWAY.

So far, more than $50,000 have been raised from the charity campaign, over just three days. Odds are the community would have still helped, however the airdrop incentive really seems to inspire immediate action… Proving the overall thesis of this piece:

Pairing NFTs with Mission + Incentives = Results.

I’m of the belief that people often need a reason to do charity work other than the “goodness of their hearts” not because they’re bad people, but because incentive erases scarcity.

So, what do you guys think? Have you seen any interesting ways NFTs have been used? Do you think it’s still “Tulip Mania”, or do you see a future where NFTs have far more impact than we thought possible?

Would love to hear your thoughts 🙂

PS: if you want some proof of the charities check the Rarible link. It's a bit of a list, so I don't wanna dump a bunch of links.

Also, here's one of the Devs if you're interested.