The Original and Best: How to Create a POAP

Caption: Matthew Cardno, Community Ops for POAP

In 2019, at ETHDenver, Patricio Worthalter introduced a novel concept that would change how digital memories were recorded: the Proof of Attendance Protocol, or POAP. The idea was simple but powerful and Worthalter had been toying with the idea for the previous twelve months. Events, whether in-person or virtual, deserved a memento, something digital, verifiable, and collectible. What began as an experiment in a hackathon has since grown into a global standard for recording attendance, with POAP becoming both a product name and a category-defining term, much like Kleenex or Hoover. By 2021, POAP was formally incorporated, but its community-driven spirit has remained intact. Today, millions of POAPs have been minted across conferences, concerts, online gatherings, and even the US Open.

At its heart, a POAP is a digital collectible issued on the blockchain to prove participation in an event. Unlike traditional tickets or badges, POAPs are tamper-proof, portable, and often serve as keys to future opportunities, unlocking access to communities, gated content, or even rewards. For the organiser, they provide a lightweight yet powerful way to recognise and engage an audience. For the collector, they become a visual timeline of experiences, all secured on-chain.

As Community Ops for POAP, Matthew Cardno puts it plainly: “The long story short is it’s very easy. You don’t need to be technical, and you don’t need to worry about wallets or fees. The hardest part is usually the artwork.”

Step One: Creating a POAP Drop

All POAPs are created at drops.poap.xyz. Start by logging in, either with an email address or an Ethereum wallet. For most first-time users, email is the easiest path. Once inside, you’ll see a dashboard of your existing POAPs, or a clean slate if this is your first.

Click on Make a POAP. You’ll then be asked to submit the core details:

• Artwork: Each POAP must have unique artwork, ideally 500×500 pixels, under 4MB, and in PNG, JPEG, or GIF format. “The biggest barrier for people is the artwork,” Cardno says. “Not everyone is a designer, but the image is the recognisable part of the POAP. Ideally, you should make it so that if someone just sees the artwork, they immediately know what event it relates to.”
• Title: Unique to each POAP or series.
• Description: A short explanation of what the POAP commemorates.
• Start and End Date: The event duration. This could be a one-day conference, a weekend festival, or even a months-long online program.
• Website: Optional, but useful for linking back to your organisation or event.
• Personal vs Commercial: Select Personal for non-commercial use (free). Commercial drops, for example, POAPs distributed as part of a paid product, incur a small fee, roughly $0.25 per POAP.
• Estimated Number of Attendees: This is only a rough guide and doesn’t limit how many POAPs you can actually distribute.

Click Create POAP, and your draft is saved.

Step Two: Choosing a Distribution Method

Once your POAP is created, the next step is deciding how to get it into the hands of your audience. Distribution is the crucial stage, and POAP offers several methods to suit different use cases.

“POAP creation is the easy part,” Cardno explains. “The important step is distribution and how do you get your POAP into the hands of the right people?”

The main options are:

1. Mint Links: The most straightforward and widely used method. You request the number of mint links you need, say 100, and, once approved, you’ll receive a .txt file by email containing unique URLs. Each link can only be used once, ensuring that only your intended recipients can claim a POAP. “We send you a file with, say, 100 unique URLs,” says Cardno. “You can email them, issue via an NFC device, send them on Telegram, or even put them into a spreadsheet to keep track. Once a link is used, it can’t be shared again.”
2. Secret Word: Ideal for live broadcasts, Twitter Spaces, or real-time events. Attendees enter a pre-set secret word to mint the POAP within a short time window. “We keep it short, maybe 15 minutes, so that secret words don’t leak into Discord groups of collectors who weren’t at your event,” Cardno says.
3. Location-Based (GPS): Designed for in-person events. Attendees with the POAP app installed can claim the POAP by verifying their presence at the event location.
4. Website/QR Code: A QR code is generated that links to the POAP claim page. “This works really well for small meetups,” says Cardno, “but at bigger events it can be risky, because someone might take a photo of the QR and share it online.”
5. Whitelist: Organisers upload a list of approved Ethereum wallet addresses, and only those on the whitelist can mint the POAP. This is useful for newsletters or closed groups.

Step Three: Approval and Delivery

Every POAP drop undergoes a quick human review to ensure it meets community guidelines. “There’s a global team checking every drop,” Cardno says. “It’s not about rejecting designs we don’t like, it’s about making sure nothing offensive or unsafe slips through, because your POAP might sit right next to another brand’s POAP in the gallery.”

Approval usually takes under an hour, though POAP advises allowing up to eight. Once approved, you’ll receive your distribution tools. From there, you simply share them with your attendees.

Recipients click the link, enter an email or Ethereum address, and mint. No gas fees are required, POAP absorbs the costs across networks like Gnosis, Base, Polygon, and Celo.

“There are no hidden hurdles,” says Cardno. “People don’t have to sign transactions or pay gas. We mint all the POAPs on our Smart Contracts and cover the fees, so claiming is frictionless.”

Beyond the Basics: Collections and Moments

POAP has expanded beyond simple attendance badges.

• POAP Collections (collections.poap.xyz): Organisers can curate series of POAPs into branded collections.
• POAP Moments (moments.poap.xyz): Enables richer storytelling by attaching images, videos, or links to a POAP.

POAP in Numbers

POAP in Numbers reveals the scope and evolution of POAP’s ecosystem as more than just a quirky collectible, but as a cultural archive. Since its inception in 2019, over 7.4 million POAPs have been minted across 97,000 collections, collected by approximately 1.4 million unique holders, an immense footprint for something that began as a hackathon experiment (ournetwork.xyz).

Ethereum was the original playground, but by 2020 minting had largely migrated to Gnosis, which today still accounts for 81% of all POAP mints; however, the landscape is diversifying with recent activity on Base (9.2%), Mantle (4.4%), and Unichain (2.6%) (ournetwork.xyz). Meanwhile, creator zeal has softened: monthly new POAP collections have plunged from a high of 7,300 in October 2022 to under 1,000 by August 2025, an 86% decline (ournetwork.xyz).

Yet even amid fewer launches, POAP has cemented itself as vital onchain cultural infrastructure, a standard fixture at conferences and events that continues to chronicle shared experiences in blockchain history.

Why POAPs Matter

At first glance, a POAP is just a digital sticker. But in practice, they are becoming powerful tools for community building. They can act as entry points into token-gated forums, grant eligibility for future rewards, or simply serve as a permanent record of where you’ve been.

Cardno sees them as proof of engagement: “You want to know that the right people were there, listening to you, meeting you, engaging with you. That proof can then open doors later, whether it’s access to a Discord, a discount, or an exclusive event.”

What started as an experiment at ETHDenver is now a thriving ecosystem of millions of digital mementoes. The mechanics are simple enough for anyone to try, but the possibilities for engagement and recognition are only just beginning to be explored.