ERC-6551 & The Future of NFTs Recently there was a MASSIVE improvement to the entire Ethereum NFT ecosystem and very few people are talking about it ..at least relative to the amount of attention being given to the latest Azuki or Yuga or Ether FUD. So I want to talk about it. Because it's Really. Freaking. Cool. What is ERC-6551? At a high level, ERC-6551 (also known as Token Bound Accounts) makes it possible for NFTs to have their own wallet. Rather than a person owning assets, the token itself can hold custody of the assets. Basically: every NFT can now own / store within it ETH as well as ERC-721, 1155, and 20 tokens. Actually an NFT can store an NFT which itself stores other NFTs. It’s NFTs all the way down. How? The gist of it is that there is an on-chain and permissionless Registry (a smart contract) which can be used by anyone to create token bound accounts and deploy them for any NFTs. The beauty of this is that it’s backwards compatible, so all existing NFTs are able to hold tokens. Honestly it’s a technological marvel that they were able to do this. You don’t need to wrap tokens, upgrade contracts, etc. It just.. works. Actually, all NFTs already have their own accounts. If you own NFTs.. those NFTs have their own accounts. Why? It’s always good to ask WHY — why might we want NFTs to custody assets? What are the use cases? How does this make the future better? The first thing that came to mind to me was airdrops. Instead of projects taking snapshots and airdropping tokens to the holders of NFTs, they can airdrop them directly to the NFTs themselves. Think about that for a moment. This eliminates the need for all the pre-snapshot/post-snapshot kerfuffling about. No more immediately flooring the collection after the snapshot. The airdrop goes directly to the NFT, and everyone can see clearly on-chain the assets held within that NFT. But there are lots of other ways ERC-6551 makes a lot of sense too. Think about playing a game and owning your character. Now think about all the items that character might own: weapons, clothing, potions, in-game currency, etc. Previously these would all have been separate tokens all connected to the person’s account, now they can all be owned by the character / NFT itself. So that if you were to trade it, everything associated with be traded in one clean transaction. One more interesting idea is that the NFT itself can now have a trading history, a collection, an identity. A… life? What happens when you infuse ERC-6551 + Artificial Intelligence? Give your NFT some ETH and tell it go to trade and see what it collects. The future is going to be absolutely insane and none of us are prepared. Shoutout to @jayden_windle, @BennyGiang, @DruzyDowns, @wwhchung, Raymond Huynh, Steve Jang, Paul Sullivan, and the rest of the contributors who helped bring this proposal to life 🙏 Also shoutout to @0xCygaar, @WhatTheLJW and @beast_eth who have already covered this with great Twitter threads that helped me while I was doing my own research 💜 If you want to read my full breakdown you can find a link to it over on my bio.