Token Bound Accounts: Connecting NFTs, Ownership, and Identity

Key Insights

• The recently proposed ERC-6551, drafted by the Future Primitive team, enables NFTs to begin acquiring assets into their own smart contract accounts, which only they control.
• The new-found ownership capabilities create an emergent dimension for NFTs to convey and manifest their identities.
• On the long-term horizon, combining these ownership properties with digital social capabilities leads to the intersection of NFTs, AI, and the well-known virtual beings.

NFTs and their communities, especially PFP collections, are fundamentally linked to identity. Since the inception of NFTs, owners of these assets have begun to form a sense of emergent identity with them. There are numerous examples of attached NFT owners rejecting jaw-dropping bids for their NFTs. For some, parting with an NFT is equivalent to parting with a piece of one's identity, and there is no price tag high enough to justify this.

Yet, historically, NFTs themselves have generally had a static and stateless identity:

• Static: NFTs like an Azuki or Milady PFP have no dynamic properties — they look the same today as they did yesterday.