We are launching our Founder NFT on Unlock Protocol in such a way that there is no smart contract level enforcement of our target 1000 quantity. Within the contract, the owner can still just create another NFT at will. So I think we should hear from the community about how we should proceed.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with NFTs and the tradeoffs at play here, I’ll summarize as best I can. People who view the purchase of a Founder NFT as an investment that they’ll be able to sell later on as a valuable collectible do not want it to be possible for the quantity to suddenly go up arbitrarily. That could mean that just as their NFT is gaining in value, JournoDAO makes more and floods the market which drives the price of their NFT down.
So, if we care about fostering this NFT as a potential collectible via its scarcity, we may want to consider a few options.
1. Move the smart contract to a DAO controlled multi-sig.
We’ll probably do this no matter what, since right now we’re all putting in our trust in @ericcmack for all journodao.eth transactions. While he’s very trustworthy, we earnestly want to follow an aggressive path to decentralization.
A collector of the Founder NFT could then see that more NFTs could only be created if a majority signed the transaction on the multi-sig, offering some protection depending on who is on the multi-sig and their perceived agendas.
2. Upgrade the smart contract
Fortunately the contract deployed through the Unlock Protocol is upgradeable, so we can remove the ability to create more NFTs entirely. This is probably as much of a permanent mitigation as you can get, though that which can be taken away can be put back via the same mechanism.
Personally I’d advise moving in this direction. It does take some development effort but could probably be done in less than a day. Ideally this would be done by the multi-sig that’s already been created to require a majority signing to upgrade the contract again in the future.
3. Do nothing
If this just isn’t a big deal to anyone at this time, we can cool our heels and wait for someone to complain or spearhead this effort in one direction or another. We have not sold or created any NFTs at the time of this writing so the problem could be months away from having any real impact.