Are you currently building or participating in an NFT project community? Besides the valuable networking, connections and other perks members can get from being part of large communities. There’s a simple way you can get people to benefit even more from being part of it.
Validators are an easy way to make the whole community more satisfied and involved by being able to earn passive income by staking their tokens. In this post, we will explain the relation between NFTs and Validators, how you can use a Validator to boost an NFT project and also get your community and the chain to gain from this.
Back to basics: why are NFT projects important?
There has never been a better time in human history to be a creator. With the whole internet at the tip of our fingers, the only limitation on getting people to support the work or art that you’re building is up to you. But is that actually true? The problem is that the whole process of content creation is majorly controlled by only a few companies, who work as the middleman and take a large cut of the profits by being the controller of the means of production and distribution. The creator economy outside of web3 is a disaster. Over 95% of creators are not getting the profits from what they’re producing and the people making the money have almost no contribution to the production process at all.
NFTs are a way to eliminate the need for the middleman and return the power back to the creators, allowing them to get more focus and income out of what they’re producing. This allows art to flourish in web3 as we have never experienced. But there’s two things you need to be able to take full advantage of that: a trusty blockchain and community.
So what do Validators have to do with it?
If you’re building on Solana, for example, it’s considered to be one of the fastest and cheapest chains we have right now but its decentralization is fully supported by Validators. What this means is that each Validator has a voting power for making important decisions inside that blockchain. The less Validators the $SOL chain has, the less decentralized it is and therefore less reliable, as now you have just a handful of individuals making important decisions that will affect the whole community. That’s why, to support your native blockchain, in this case Solana, running a Validator is absolutely essential to make the space more decentralized in general and especially for your community not to be completely vulnerable to the decisions of others.
To run a Validator, you have to stake some $SOL in a contract and it won’t be accessible for a minimum duration of time. But why would you do that? The Solana blockchain has a reward system that works around the idea that the more $SOL you deposit inside your Validator node, the more perks you’ll get inside the chain.
One of these perks is tokens. You will be earning $SOL proportionally to the amount staked in your active Validator. The more you have staked, the more tokens you get. Cool, huh? Besides, your whole community can stake their $SOL into your Validator if they believe in what you’re building and also earn passive income from the amount they staked. This is a way for the chain to reward people who keep their tokens and support decentralization. The second perk you get by having an active Validator running on $SOL chain is voting power, which means whenever there’s an important decision to be made that will affect the chain users, you’ll be able to vote on whether you want it to happen or not. Again, the more $SOL you have staked, the louder your voice will be.
How are NFTs and Validators related?
Today, the top most successful NFT projects on the Solana blockchain are running a Validator of their own. Blue-chip NFT projects like Solana Monkey Business, DeGods, Degenerate APE Academy, and many others have set up Validators with Shakudo. Why?
It’s critical for them that their communities stay alive and this won’t happen if the native blockchain of the project isn’t reliable. If you’re building something substantial as a web3 community, your top priority now is to make sure the tools this was built on doesn’t just fall apart or change its rules overnight. In web2, we trust companies to do this for us and are vulnerable to what that specific team does and the rules they make. We believe that the Twitter team, for example, will maintain the platform and our Twitter account won’t just disappear forever. In web3, we don’t have anyone taking care of that except the people who want the chain to be alive and the communities that are constructed on top of it. It’s almost a responsibility to keep the machine working so that everything you built doesn't just suddenly fall apart.
But the good news is that they can actually make profits while doing this. The community creators as well as its members can literally use Validators as a source of passive income while making sure the blockchain stays strong, more efficient and truly decentralized. It’s a win-win situation and don’t sleep on it you’re building or already have a large community.
With this in mind, with the goal of supporting the Solana blockchain and NTF Communities, Shakudo and Magic Eden are championing the importance of validators for a decentralized Solana experience and passive income generation for NFT project creators. Shakudo is offering a 10% discount on all products of the platform for anyone who launches a collection on Magic Eden in the next year.
To learn more about setting up a Validator for your project, visit Shakudo’s website and have a validator active in just one day. The team at Shakudo will provide you with a team of specialists 24/7 taking care of all the setup and maintenance required.
