How is a Trib soulbound token different to a POAP?

…what can a Trib soulbound token do that a POAP can’t?

We love POAPs. They’re a great way for your colleagues and community to give out well-deserved kudos or reward participation of any kind, from contributing to a GitHub repo to attending an epic BAYC party….

A POAP (Proof Of Attendance Protocol), is an NFT (Non-Fungible Token) that becomes a unique digital collectible linked to your digital identity. Once gifted or claimed, POAPs are minted on-chain so that your kudos and experiences can travel with you via your wallet through the web3 community and ecosystem.

As you build your collection, POAPs essentially begin to form a gallery of all your top achievements and appearances, which you, your peers and your friends can admire in perpetuity.

It’s a feel-good exchange designed to encourage positivity and enthusiasm. For example, your team leader can gift a POAP to show their appreciation to you for crushing your targets… or perhaps the promise of a POAP might persuade you to make the effort to travel to that awkwardly located conference, knowing you’ll at least have a shiny new NFT to add to your collection at the end of it.

So if POAPs are great, why would I want Tribz?

At Tribz, we’ve looked at contribution tokens a bit differently. While we love the concept of rewarding participation, it’s the skillsets and impact behind a particular contribution that we’re really interested in. That’s why with Tribz tokens, we’ve taken the recognition and reward joyfulness of POAPs and added a layer of detail to fully represent the skills and experience that are so worthy of the praise. 🙌🏼

The metadata coded into a Trib token reveals just how influential you were to a particular project, it proves that you didn’t just show up - you made an impact. It traces and evidences your contribution all the way back to the source of proof, which could be a GitHub commit or a verified attestation from a member of your team.

To dig into the emphasis we put on ‘proof’ a bit deeper… we’ve designed Tribz to be very much aligned with the W3C model of verifiable credential https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-data-model/.

As per this model, the proofs take the form of signed transactions that encapsulate the ‘evidence’ of the contribution,  the claims take the form of relative contribution and skillset and the credential metadata is baked into the NFT so that it is visible, portable and above all… proveable.

So if you’re in a situation where you really want to showcase not just where you were but what you did, (like when you’re competing for your dream web3 role), your Trib tokens become much more than a gallery of participation badges. In sporting analogies, a Trib would confirm you made it to the podium, rather than just showed up to watch. 🏅

Here’s a minted Trib token to show you what we mean:

Alongside the token, you can add an impact statement to get into the detail of your contribution and record your impressive experience in your pseudonymous Tribz profile. If it’s starting to sound a bit like LinkedIn at this point… don’t worry, it’s all stored on a decentralized infrastructure which means you stay in control - no-one can exploit your personal data and no-one benefits from your hard-earned experience except you.

Not only does the baked-in metadata make your Trib token more informative, it also opens up a whole range of opportunities for you to make your reputation work for you. Crucially, the metadata is consistent and composable, so we can build new experiences that read and understand the contents of any Tribz…. this is another big difference to POAPs where any text can be baked into the image but where only event details are consistent.

The metadata locked into your Tribz opens up the potential to share your experience and skill sets with anyone that might be interested, from potential employers to DeFi projects and DAOs looking for participants with your qualities. Again, because of the pseudonymous nature of Tribz, these searches remain completely private and on your terms.

Tribz are soulbound, so what?

As well as the layers of metadata, Tribz also stand apart from POAPs because they’re soulbound. POAPs are transferable NFTs, which means there’s the potential for someone to own a POAP without actually having participated in the related event or project. This gets problematic when you want to use tokens as proof of experience or contribution, wallets might display an impressive variety of POAPs for a whole range of achievements that may not have been earned by the wallet owner. Soulbound tokens are non-transferable and forever linked to the original owner, so whoever’s checking out your Tribz can be confident you deserved them.

So to sum up, if you’ve been wondering what the hype is around soulbound tokens while building up a colourful collection of POAPs, we hope we’ve persuaded you that there is merit in both. If you’re a GitHub contributor, you might already have unclaimed Tribz lined up from one of our recent souldrops - check if you’re eligible here. If not, you can start your Tribz profile by creating tokens from attestations - connect your wallet to get started.