NFT Roadmaps and Why They’re Important?

Today’s question: What is an NFT roadmap and why is it important?

An NFT roadmap is kind of what it sounds like. Every NFT (for instance, a Leston Allen NFT card) is part of a project (for instance, Cornhole NFT cards) and each project should have a plan for what they are hoping to accomplish by creating and selling NFTs. 

With some NFTs, particularly those in the art space, there is no roadmap. You’re buying an NFT because you like it, and that’s it. You own that NFT until you sell it or give it away. Sometimes, a retroactive roadmap is created to flesh out the creator’s vision but not always.

More often than not, NFT buyers expect brands and businesses to inform them of their plans with regards to rewarding collectors/holders, incentivizing collecting/holding vs. flipping/selling, creating marketplaces for buying and selling, and offering IRL perks (i.e. event tickets, merch). Buyers need a reason to buy, after all, and it only seems fair that any brand or business selling a digital token offers something tangible in exchange for fiat currency or cryptocurrency beyond a certificate of ownership — which is fundamentally what an NFT is. 

NBA Top Shot, which is perhaps the most visible and important sports NFT product in the world, has incentivized holding certain moments (a “moment” is like a trading cards) and sets of moments, because doing so will entitle holders to airdrops: NFTs deposited into their accounts for free. Top Shot has also gone above and beyond this, sending collectors to the individual regular season and playoff games (including hotel and airfare) and to the NBA Draft. 

Outside of the sports world, other NFT roadmaps incentivize holding or being early to purchase things. Ethereum Name Service, where people buy addresses like “john.eth” or “jane.eth” to then map to machine-readable identifiers (i.e. crypto wallet addresses with long alphanumeric character strings that are hard to remember), did a token airdrop of $ENS to people who purchased domains before a certain point. At the time of this writing, $ENS is trading at $14.62 USD per token. At its height, $ENS was over $85 per token. 

Project roadmaps set the vision for wherever that project is going, and allow buyers to make conscious, informed decisions with their money, whether that money is fiat currency or cryptocurrency. Milestones established in a project roadmap will help flesh out the project creator’s vision, but also incentivize collecting and holding because buyers and/or collectors and/or community members know what to expect out of a given project. They are able to make smarter decisions. As such, it is in the creator’s best interest to create a thoughtful, achievable roadmap, such as ours, prior to launch.