WNFT (Website NFT) is a technology for involving the community in .eth websites.
Examples:
- Are you building a .eth blogging platform? Do you need users to have accounts for their blogs? WNFT is for you.
- Can we use WNFT in our .eth search engine, esteroids.eth? Sure, here’s how. Each search result page has an infobox, and we are going to use WNFT to give members the ability to own those infoboxes and decide which content is shown there.
WNFTs is going to be a core technology of .eth websites. We’re sure of it. It enables .eth websites to use the user participation concept from wEB 2.0 — but in a much better way.
In this article, we release a new WNFT web app (to complement the smart contract we released in January). But first, let's go deeper into the concept of WNFTs.
WNFT vs. Web 2.0 accounts
The essence of Web 2.0 is user participation, which seemed for a while to be outside the reach of the .eth web. This was an issue. User participation is a way of empowering users, right? So how can the .eth web be fairer if it doesn’t have anything equivalent to it?
Enter WNFT.
With WNFTs you don’t only unlock user participation in .eth websites, but you do it much better than Web 2.0.
Using WNFTs people can actually get a part of the website. They literally own it, the crypto way.
If you implement user accounts with WNFTs, then these accounts can’t be shut down by the operator. If you use WNFTs to give people their own space on a .eth website, then they can do whatever they want with this space.
We are getting excited here, really! Here are some advantages of WNFTs over Web 2.0 accounts.
- Ownership is real. If you own something on a .eth website with a WNFT token, then the operators of the website can’t take it away from you. Crypto style.
- WNFTs tokens are tradable. Just like you can sell your assets in the real world, you can sell your WNFT tokens.
- WNFT is autonomous. The Creation and management of WNFT accounts are done in interaction with the smart contract alone. The .eth website stays out of it.
WNFTs are everything that Web 2.0 wanted to be but never was, it’s about empowering the members of the .eth web.
Use-cases for WNFTs
Let’s focus on some use-cases we already mentioned before.
Giving members parts of the websites
This may sound odd, so we’ll explain it with an example
Each search result page in esteroids.eth has an empty infobox. These infoboxes are going to be controlled by WNFT tokens.
Each WNFT token in esteroids.eth will have a keyword associated to it. The holder of the WNFT token controls the infobox of the search result page corresponding to the keyword.
So — if you hold the WNFT token for the keyword ‘DAO’, you can show whatever you want in the WNFT box in the search results page for ‘DAO’.
What can WNFT tokens holders do with their infoboxes? Whatever they want! They can present there an NFTs gallery, or show some information about the keyword. They can even build their own business on top of these boxes! The imagination is their limit.
User accounts
You can implement user accounts in .eth websites with WNFTs.
For example, we are working now on a .eth blogging platform called Citadef.
In Citadef, in order to open a blog, users need to buy a WNFT token. Then the whole blog is controlled by this token.
Not only that we cannot shut down the blog now, or take it away from the owners, but they can even import the blog really easily to another .eth platform if the platform supports WNFTs.
This is so much more empowering for users than classical Web 2.0 accounts.
Memberships
If you read our past articles you know that our future vision for the .eth web is of community websites. By this, we mean websites that are belonged and are controlled by the community.
Each member on this website is a bit different, so the best way to represent members' profiles is with WNFT.
This especially becomes a powerful use case when combined with ENS subdomains. But we leave this discussion to a future article.
The WNFT App
Back in January, we released the WNFT smart contract (github). Today we release the WNFT App to use this WNFT contract.
You can play with the app in wnft.esteroids.eth.
To try the app out you need an address of a deployed WNFT contract. You can use the one we deployed, ‘’.
If you want to connect the web app to your Metamask, make sure it’s set to Goerli testnet.
The WNFT app has three parts.
- Owners screens. Screens where the data can only be changed by the owners of the contract, but everyone can view it. Recall, an owner of a contract can also be a DAO, so this is not centralized.
- Minting and browsing WNFT tokens screens. This is meant for all users since you don’t need to own the contract in order to mint a new WNFT for yourself.
- The token view screen. It’s basically a profile page for each token, giving all the relevant info about it. Since WNFT tokens are often kind of the identity or power of the members in the .eth website, this screen is what they can send others to show what they got in the .eth website.
How to use
In the “general information” screen, insert an address of a WNFT Ethereum contract. Right now the app points to Goerli testnet, so the WNFT contract needs to be minted there. You can use an address of a contract that we minted, 0xD17D95B20ef169459f55C5102463BC052340C463.
Press on ‘Fetch’, wait a second for the information to be fetched.
…. and Voilà! All is ready to use. Easy, right?
What’s next?
There are two big things coming up on our WNFT sleeve soon.
One is Citadef, an experiment of a .eth blogging platform with WNFT accounts. This experiment is completely wacky because we had fun doing that. It already exists locally for us, and we’re looking for people to be first testers and give feedback. Please contact us if interested.
But the other is the BIG one, integrating WNFTs into esteorids.eth search engine. This means you could rent or buy WNFTs that correspond to search words, and then get an area on the search results page. This is coming in Q2 2022, but we don’t have a release date yet. Stay tuned!
