Research of the NFT powered voting

--- title: 'Research of the NFT powered voting' disqus: hackmd --- NFT Powered Voting === At first look NFT powered voting doesn't make much sense. NFT is supposed to be a unique, one of its kind token, which may be a piece of art or a representation of some specific physical object, like cars or housing. There are also proposals to use NFTs to manage the logistic chains, like grains, or meat[1]. ## Table of Contents [TOC] ## NFT usage in the cryptospace There are a lot of different applications of the NFTs in the modern blockchain space, even though most of them are used as an art token. ERC721[2] standart is used in a lot of different projects today and governance/voting projects are also a part of them. To be honest, info on existing NFT voting is pretty hidden, there are examples here and there, but they don't have that clear of a specification and usually doesn't provide a code source. NFT uniqueness serving the voting --- > Divide et impera. [name=Machiavelli] NFT is not a usual token, it has very important specifics. Each NFT can carry a Metadata, which stores info about each certain token we have. This way we can set unique permissions for each token, unique weights this way they can be used as a personal identity which allow to participate somewhere[3,7]. Another approach is to use each NFT as a unique ballot with its number and owner, this way vote is simply traceable, because we can connect each voted token with its owner address.[4] Third way is when an NFT is a unique set of rights, and each vote participant is assigned with certain NFT, which grants this exact set of rights. Haven't found this one though and possibly it's overengineering, it can be done by a simple contract and mapping of `address:uint8`(depending on the amount of different rights set). I'll describe each of the ways below. NFT as a governance identity --- There are few different applications of that idea and descriptions of how this works. One great example is APE DAO REMIX. This project minted 5550 NFTs which grant the right to participate in the APE DAO. So basically the token works as a permission to participate in the governance. Yet it is unclear the exact mechanisms of the voting itself. There may be possibly a shared(fractional) ovnership of some NFT, which will automatically allow you to participate in the DAO voting attached to some certain token. > In theory, NFT fractional ownership would unlock the possibility to do things like own a piece of a Picasso. You would become a shareholder in a Picasso NFT, meaning you would have a say in things like revenue sharing. It's very likely that one day soon owning a fraction of an NFT will enter you into a decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO) for managing that asset.[name=ethereum.org] NFT Ballots --- For example we have 100 participants in a dao and a proposal. We generate 100 NFTs and distribute them between each distinct address, we may also provide those NFTs with specific weights and rights, but they may be used just for a single vote, and after the vote they are being burned. NFT rights --- This seems as an overkill. But for example we have a lot of unique sets of permissions. We may mint an NFT for each set of permissions and distribute them between users, few users may own the same NFT in a fractional ownership and it will provide all of its users with the set of rights described in the metadata of current token. Reason why it is an overkill is that we can describe set of rights with a unique ids(bytes or integer) describing each set of rights, and then create a mapping of DAO participants addresses to each id. Overall --- After looking on the weekends it seems to me that creating a DAO governance is definitely an interesting experiment, but I haven't found any well-developed examples except APE DAO. Even bigger problem is to find a code of those solutions, which means that we'll need to create smth on our own, tbh it's a plus and a PR opportunity, as a `unique NFT voting system`. Overall I think that NFT voting may be applicable, but there are a lot of other solutions, which are a lot more suitable in the case of PrimeDAO, the main plus of `NFT voting` in our case is a hype train. ## References 1. NFT for supply chains. https://blog.flexis.com/what-are-nfts-what-does-it-mean-for-supply-chains 2. http://erc721.org 3. https://medium.com/mintbase/first-ever-nft-based-voting-app-try-it-out-now-787aa5e3ef10 4. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/one-person-voteone-nft-ted-prince/ 5. https://apenft.io/book/APENFT%20White%20Paper.pdf 6. https://opensea.io/assets/0x7d7dff3454547ed77dea2676eb5011272de5563b/1 7. https://www.apedaoremix.com/