Orange DAO, YC's alumni DAO first created a membership NFT to scratch their own itch.

In late 2021, Orange DAO ran a Discord server but discovered that they needed a better way to grant automatic access to YC alumni. The solution needed to work with Discord, as well as other token-gated applications that were coming online.

A small team of engineers got together and created “Alumni Gem”, the first membership NFT — a non-transferable (Soulbound), revokable NFT that represented a member’s YC alumni status on the Polygon blockchain.

These Alumni Gems gated access to Orange DAO's Discord (via Collab.land), Notion (via Charmverse), as well as other internal applications, such as the member’s section of orangedao.xyz. Over 1,000 people have already claimed their membership NFT and successfully onboarded into Orange DAO.

Passport is a public goods project by Orange DAO that productised Alumni Gem to make it accessible to everyone. Using Passport, anyone can create their own membership NFTs in a few clicks — all without code!

We believe NFTs are important for the internet because they make identity portable across platforms, and they’re composable by nature, meaning people can build on top of their data permissionlessly.

By making it easier to create and share membership NFTs, we want to encourage more builders of all stripes to experiment with NFTs so we can create a more open and permissionless internet.

Check out the project on passport.orangedao.xyz.