2023 was another wildly successful trip around the sun in the POAP ecosystem. This week's newsletter showcases some highlights from the past 12 months!

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IM-PRESSED BY POAP

Top publications across the world and the most important voices in Web3 had something to say about POAP, including:

• 👗 Fashion outlets such as Vogue Singapore, Vogue Business, GQ, Glossy, and The New York Times Style Magazine: Australia published pieces on how the fashion industry has embraced Web3 tech and POAPs.
• 😇 Vitalik Buterin discussed POAPs in blog posts on stealth addresses, Ethereum's three major technical transitions to reach maturity, and his techo-optimism. Fortune also interviewed Vitalik (Yahoo for no paywall) and he discussed how POAPs can prove you're a human in the age of bots and AI. 
• 🎙️ In an interview with Sotheby's, Pussy Riot's Nadya Tolokonnikova discussed how she likes the POAPs (and Sotheby's tweeted about it). LA Weekly and Billboard also ran pieces on musicians with successful POAP drops.
• 🎬 Artnet News profiled Hollywood talent agency William Morris Endeavor (WME). Their Head of Digital Strategy highlighted WME's POAP drops as one of their successful Web3 projects.
• 📷 Le Monde published a piece on how Paris Photo, the largest international art fair dedicated to photography, had a "digital sector" for the first time and mentioned the POAP at the event:

• 🎨 Designboom covered a POAP dropping during Milan Design Week, while L'Officiel and Numéro discussed the POAPs at an interactive art exhibit at the Great Pyramid of Giza.
• 🏦 As part of a series of articles on digital identity, JP Morgan published a piece on Web3 building blocks with a long section on the role of POAPs.
• 📈 Messari published "Solving the DAO Data Problem" and wrote how DAOs can utilize POAPs for attestations.
• 🦘 The Australian government discussed POAPs in a paper on token mapping.
• ⛳️ The American Express POAPs at the U.S. Open Golf Championships were covered in Golf Digest, Fortune, and HYPEBEAST. American Express also mentioned the POAP in an interview with six-time PGA Tour winner Tony Finau.

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THE PEOPLE WANTED THE POAPS

There was no shortage of POAP love on social. People posted about how POAPs are ubiquitous with Web3, why they love curation, and just because they wanted to show off their precious collectibles:

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POAP ARROW POINTING UP

POAP delivered product launches and design updates, and celebrated successful collaborations at conferences across the globe.

• 🚀 Official product launches included POAP Drops to make dropping POAPs more streamlined and fun, POAP Family for finding collectors in common across drops, and POAP Checkout to let issuers easily sell POAPs. The nostalgic IRL minting experience that is POAP Station also recently got a test run – just one of many exciting initiatives on the horizon.
• 🧑‍🎨 POAP Fun, POAP Scan, and poap.xyz received a totally revamped user experience; POAP Kiosk got a refreshed look and so did the POAP minting flow.
• 💪 The Commercial Use Policy went live to ensure a sustainable POAP ecosystem; the POAP Curation Body website was updated to include guidelines on specific use cases, distribution, and commercial use.
• 🎉 POAP Studio celebrated two years in business.
• ✍️ Just last week, adding artist attribution metadata to POAPs began a beta rollout (check out this Patricio birthday POAP as an example).

As usual, POAPs were dropped at major conferences throughout the year. In total, the POAP team gave out 30,000+ POAP stickers, pins, and patches and 5,000+ POAP FAQ flyers at events in 2023, including:

• 🏔️ 26,000+ POAPs minted at ETHDenver in March, such as this fantastic goat Patricio POAP.
• 🍎 NFT NYC in April, which held an elaborate POAP treasure hunt from 9dcc.
• 🇫🇷 Hundreds of POAPs at EthCC in Paris in July, including 600 collectors that visited the POAP booth.
• 🤠 In September, Permissionless II in Austin had a POAP pub crawl and a general attendance POAP at the world's largest DeFi event:

• 🇹🇷 In November at Devconnect in Istanbul, the POAP team hosted a happy hour with a POAP Fun raffle for some nice LEGO sets and made appearances at events all around the city throughout the week. The always exceptional POAP design team went the extra mile with Devconnect swag:

• 🌴 Most recently, lots of POAP Fun at Art Basel in Miami, with people winning some pretty cool prizes and Rug Radio partnering with POAP Studio to conduct a POAP scavenger hunt at the RHAUS villa.

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BUILDERS THAT PARTIED

A whole host of builders and collaborators launched new POAP integrations or upgraded existing ones:

• 👕 Richie Hawtin announced a token-gated merch drop where anyone who collected POAPs at his IRL shows received a 25% discount.
• 📱 Coinbase Wallet and Salsa launched POAP-gated messaging, and Brave launched POAP-gated video calls.
• 🧠 Bello and Airstack made it easier for people to use POAPs for discovering insights and connecting the dots of the Web3 social graph.
• 👁️ MetaMask, MetaMask Portfolio, Taho wallet, Bitski, and the 1inch Network were among the teams that added POAP viewing and browsing directly in their app.
• 🕺 Many other POAP updates from builders such as Perk Shop, Uniqly.io, Club CPG, Kazm, Gandalf, and Tropee.

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COOL DROPS THAT DROPPED

What do all these mainstream brands and niche communities have in common? They all dropped POAPs in 2023, of course. Here's to many more in '24.

• Coinbase x POAP helped fans commemorate big sporting events:
  • A POAP at the WNBA Commissioner's Cup Championship in Las Vegas.
  • A POAP during the jersey retirement ceremony for WNBA legend Sue Bird; the Seattle Storm discussed the POAP in their press release.
  • A POAP at Madison Square Garden during a New York Knicks game:

• Just like in 2022, Amex x POAP collaborated on large-scale activations:
  • POAPs at the Austin City Limits Music Festival.
  • POAPs at the U.S. Open Tennis Championship in New York.
  • POAPs at the U.S. Open Golf Championship in Los Angeles.
• The Knuckleheads podcast from the Players' Tribune dropped POAPs during shows featuring NBA legends like James Worthy, Grant Hill, and Kevin Garnett (as well as Mark Cuban), and it caught the eye of Sports Business Journal.
• There continued to be a steady presence of POAPs in the art world:
  • Beeple dropped multiple POAPs, including a POAP at the grand opening of Beeple Studios (tweet thread showing the exhibit).
• Artists Bryan Brinkman, Snowfro, and Jeremy Booth dropped some memorable You Met Me POAPs.
• The artist MESSHUP collabed with POAP and earned ~10 ETH selling a POAP via POAP Checkout to celebrate Jack Butcher's Checks.
• POAPs at gallery openings and art events in locations such as Helsinki, Tokyo, San Francisco, Buenos Aires, Paris, Milan, Portugal, New York, Germany, Marfa, Manila, São Paulo, Miami, Toronto, and Berlin.
• SuperRare created POAPs designed by some of their top artists and dropped them to their top collectors:

• As referenced above, fashion continued to be enamored by Web3 tech and POAPs, and there were drops at Milan fashion week, during London Fashion week from SYKY x British Fashion Council, and from brands such as GQ, DKNY and Tommy Hilfiger.
• At the United Nations Science Summit, Isabel participated in a panel on using Web3 tech to address the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals, and there was a POAP for those who attended the talk.
• The music industry kept on POAPing:
  • Mario Lopez's reboot of Puerto Rican boy band Menudo dropped a POAP during their launch event and several others.
  • The Pet Shop Boys dropped their first POAP.
  • POAPs at shows from the likes of Griffyn, BLOND:ISH, VALÉ, Les Plages Electroniques in Cannes, RollingLoud in LA, Sofar Sounds in Berlin, Umphrey's McGee, Richie Hawtin, and Paris Hilton.
  • Snoop Dogg x VeeFriends dropped a POAP during a listening party for a new Snoop track:

• Gary Vee also went bowling and gave out POAPs.
• PleasrHouse dropped a POAP during a live show featuring Edward Snowden and Daniel Ellsberg.
• 31 different breweries in Upstate New York dropped POAPs to anyone who visited and verified their location with tokenproof.
• The Flying Formations NFT project (designed by notable Nike designer Tinker Hatfield) dropped a POAP; collectors were eligible to enter a POAP Fun raffle for a pair of limited edition Nikes.
• And the list goes on with many notable brands: Bayer, Starbucks, Mastercard, Porsche, Johnnie Walker, Hennessy, Lacoste, BMW, Suzuki, Vayner, Cisco, AllHipHop Magazine, Škoda, Real Vision, Sibos, EY, Warner Music, Goldman Sachs, and Adidas:

• ... and Sotheby's, Flowcode, Budweiser, Spotify, CoinGecko, Puma, JP Morgan Chase, Allianz, Salesforce, Red Bull, PricewaterhouseCoopers, XPRIZE, Audi, TIMEpieces, Deutsche Telekom, Bang & Olufsen, Tim Ferriss, Google Cloud, McCann Worldgroup, and Kraken.
• Many academic institutions dropped POAPs, including MJM Graphic Design School in Paris, The Imperial College Business School in London, Oxford, the Computer Science Department of Concordia University of Wisconsin, Vlerick Business School, and the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico, as well as professors at the University of Tennessee, NYU, the Cupertino Union School District, Princeton, CUNY Queens College, the University of Havana, Montclair State University, and Bentley University.
• Legal entities like the American Bar Association, the New York State Bar Association, the Southwestern Law School, TechGC, the Polish Association of Enterprise Lawyers, and law firms such as Foley & Lardner, Wolf Theiss, and Goodwin Law couldn't resist the allure of a nice POAP drop.
• POAPs at meetups and events in dozens and dozens of countries and cities around the world, such as Uzbekistan, Tel Aviv, North Macedonia, Slovakia, Montenegro, Kyiv, Boston, Rio de Janeiro, Lyon, Singapore, Columbus, Dubai, Greece, Luxembourg, Brussels, Bangkok, Lima, Portland, Manila, Cebu, Cluj, Stockholm, Palo Alto, Latvia, Bordeaux, Warsaw, Kansas City, Melbourne, New Orleans, Barcelona, Venezuela, Antwerp, Gdańsk, Edmonton, Reno, Prague, Nairobi, Ottawa, Tegucigalpa, San Salvador, and Vancouver:

• ... and The Dominican Republic, Accra, Kenya, Belgrade, Denmark, Delhi, Montreal, Tbilisi, Kilifi, Glasgow, Slovenia, Québec, Tokyo, Kyoto, Bucharest, Salzburg, Marfa, Indonesia, Calgary, Amsterdam, Mumbai, Istanbul, Zürich, Kuala Lumpur, Riyadh, Medellin, Seoul, Athens, Mexico City, Ghana, Nigeria, Adelaide, Rotterdam, Madrid, Washington DC, New York City, London, Bratislava, Rome, Santiago, Hong Kong, Portugal, Charlotte, Houston, Toronto, Montevideo, Botswana, Quito, Cincinnati, Bogotá, La Paz, Rabat, Casablanca, Tijuana, Guadalajara, and Hyderabad:

• Finally, there were countless POAPs to commemorate and preserve special memories of all kinds – because that's why POAP exists! A sample:
  • Wedding POAPs in Taipei, Florida, Istanbul, Germany, Buenos Aires, NYC, Turkey, and Czechia.
  • A POAP at a stag party in Prague.
  • Birthday POAPs in Florida, Germany, Hungary, Buenos Aires, and Mexico.
  • Anniversary POAPs and baby shower POAPs.
  • POAPs for camping trips, ski trips, road trips, and bike trips.
  • A hiking POAP in Texas, an alpaca hike bachelor party POAP, a POAP for a hike with fondue in Switzerland, and a POAP for summiting Vânătoarea lui Buteanu in Romania.
  • Trick or treat or POAP:

• A POAP at a vegan cooking workshop in Munich.
• A POAP at a regatta in Lisbon.
• A POAP for a sauna and frigid swim in Lake Starnberg.
• A POAP at an awesome curling sesh in Berlin.
• A POAP at a yoga session in Portland and a breathwork session in Los Angeles.
• POAPs for purchasing candles as part of a fundraiser, and at trash cleanups and beach cleanups.
• A POAP at an enchanted village gathering in England.
• A POAP for participating in a memorial golf tournament in Chicago.
• A friendship POAP.
• Commemorating 20 years of family vacations with a POAP.
• A POAP for watching the sunset.