Part 3: Club Memberships VS Access Tokens

Do you have a favourite baseball team or soccer club? Maybe a membership to a country club or to your regular gym? What do these have in common?

If you're a fan of a sports team, you'll be familiar with their season passes for fans. You get privileged access or reserved tickets for being that long-time supporter so that you can be there to watch your team play.

On the other hand, you might have a personal membership to a country club or gym. This pass gives you access to the facilities and also to network with other like-minded people inside the facility. While gym memberships are usually sold on a monthly subscription, country club memberships may go on multi-year passes or even lifetime passes, which can be passed down to the next generation or resold.

Tokenising Access To These Clubs

The access to the fan club and the community has been around forever. NFTs merely provide a different dimension of that. If you're thinking that no, your favourite team or your regular clubs already have something that works and have no reason to switch to NFTs, hold up, you're just being really early into the space.

The benefit of putting these tokens onto NFTs is the verifiability of the tokens. Further, if NFTs do become mainstream in future, I have no doubts that they will adopt NFTs. By mainstream, I mean that our social profiles will detail what types of NFTs we own, and that's where these sports teams and private clubs would want their tokens to go, because your social profile becomes a billboard for them.

Besides the verifiability and the visibility, NFTs offer one major advantage that traditional access tokens do not have – tradeability. Traditionally, they would not like you to trade your access with other people, because they will only lose sales and potentially lose out to a black market. Yet, with NFTs, it changes the game, because it allows for royalties. Imagine that these clubs add in royalties for every sale of these passes, the more resales, the more revenue for them, wouldn't that be something?

NFTs Benefit Both Brands And Users

You are right to say that access and community is already present; there is no need to "disrupt" it with NFTs. Yet, if you were to consider that NFT is not a choice but an eventual state, would you still think the same?

Besides the above mentioned benefit, NFTs also adds a different dimension to communities. Traditionally, you might only know other like-minded members via physical means, but NFTs allow for these interactions to happen online – through Discord. Just as you might display your favourite bands and teams on your Facebook profile, you will want to display your membership NFTs on your social profile next time.

OG member of Punks or BAYC since 2021? I'm sure that will be a badge that many others will appreciate and long for in time to come.