Metaversal is a Bankless newsletter for weekly level-ups on NFTs, virtual worlds, & collectibles
Dear Bankless Nation,
Gift exchanges, where friends and family randomly swap gifts with each other, are a staple of the holidays.
Of course, with blockchain and NFTs it’s straightforward to program an expanded gift exchange where folks from around the world can participate in random gift swapping together.
One project that’s bringing such an NFT gift exchange to life for this holiday season is Santa.FM, a new NFT gift exchange protocol that lets you deposit an NFT in order to receive a new NFT from its gift pool on Christmas Day.
As with all things new in web3, you should approach this app as an experiment! If you try it, do it for fun and only deposit NFTs you’re okay with giving away.
All that said, let’s walk through the basics of Santa.FM and how it works for today’s post!
-WMP
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Santa.FM is a recently launched NFT gift exchange protocol created by the VenturePunk web3 studio, which is spearheaded by Jordan Lyall. You can deposit NFTs into the Santa.FM gift pool up until Dec. 24th, 2022, at 10PM PST, after which you can redeem an equivalent amount of new NFTs from the pool that ensuing Christmas morning starting at 6AM PST.
Since Santa.FM is a decentralized peer-to-peer protocol, it needs a way to exchange Ethereum-based NFTs in verifiably random fashion and without centralized interference or management.
Toward that end, cue in the Chainlink Verifiable Randomness Function (VRF) resource, which allows web3 projects to securely tap into gas-efficient on-chain randomness.
Accordingly, Santa.FM relies on Chainlink VRF to ensure the gifts deposited to its gift pool will be fairly and randomly distributed. As the VenturePunk team has explained:
“The Santa.FM smart contract will only accept the random number input if it has a valid cryptographic proof, and the cryptographic proof can only be generated if the VRF process is tamper-proof. This provides you with automated and verifiable assurances directly on-chain that the NFT gift randomization is provably fair and was not tampered with by the oracle, outside entities, or our VenturePunk team.”
In order to prevent an influx of spam submissions, the Santa.FM pool is only accepting deposits from NFT collections that are verified on OpenSea. The VenturePunk team has kickstarted the pool with a handful of NFTs ranging from collections like Art Blocks to SupDucks, and upon public contributions the pool’s now at +770 NFTs and counting at the time of this post’s writing.
Ahead of the gift exchanges on Christmas Day, you can view all the deposited NFTs that are set to be randomly distributed via the pool’s OpenSea profile page. In my opinion, there’s definitely some cool stuff in here so far!
Got to santa.fm and connect your Ethereum wallet
Click the Open Exchange button
Select the NFT you want to gift and then press Approve Contract and complete the approval transaction with your wallet
Press Add Gift and complete the final deposit transaction
That’s it! If you participate, you can return to this same dashboard on Christmas morning and select the Unopened Presents option to start redeeming your gift claims on a 1:1 basis
Santa.FM is celebratory, communal, experiential, fun, and open. My kind of experiment, in other words. But if you look deeper it’s also a sign of what’s to come. In our increasingly digital world, we bring our old customs online in new ways as we gain more techniques and understandings. Santa.FM does this in light-hearted style for holiday NFT gift exchanging, but it’s also just the tip of the iceberg for all the culture that’s going to be coming on-chain via NFTs in the years ahead. Believe that!
🧑🎄 Check out Santa.FM — just remember that this year’s gift pool closes in four days on the night of Dec. 24th!
🗓️ Read my previous write-up 2022 NFT highlights if you missed it!
William M. Peaster is a professional writer and creator of Metaversal—a Bankless newsletter focused on the emergence of NFTs in the cryptoeconomy. He’s also recently been contributing content to Bankless, JPG, and beyond!
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Not financial or tax advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.
Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here.
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