Unlock is a protocol developers, creators, and platforms can use to create memberships. Unlock’s goal is to ease implementation and increase conversion from “users” to “members,” creating a much healthier monetization environment for the web.

In short, Unlock is an open-source, collectively owned, community-governed, peer-to-peer system that creates time-based memberships.

Our goal is for Unlock to support multiple kinds of memberships, enable easy integration of these memberships into any application, and share the protocol’s ownership with its adopters.

At its core, Unlock Protocol supports three main functions: minting, gating, and earning.

Mint: Create a membership NFT Memberships can be created via the minting process into two ways:

NFTs can be purchased by users. Users can purchase an NFT membership for themselves or others. These memberships may be purchased once or renewed on a recurring basis. NFTs can be earned. The "manager" of a membership contract can airdrop or grant memberships to users at their discretion. Once minted, members and managers can extend, cancel, terminate, or even "destroy" a membership.

Since these memberships are represented as NFTs, managers and members can define the metadata of the NFT itself. An NFT’s public metadata — for instance, the image associated with a particular token or collection — can be updated, changing the NFT’s associated artwork or visual representation. Similarly, an NFT’s private metadata (e.g. member information, Dapp data, or references to associated assets) can also be updated after minting.

Gate: Members-only access to perks, benefits, and resources The core protocol includes functions to quickly identify a user's membership status. These functions can immediately determine if someone's membership is currently valid or if it has expired. This makes it trivial for an application to alter behavior (for example, token gating content or features) based on membership level or status.

Additionally, the protocol implements "hooks," enabling the option to delegate these membership checks to third-party contracts. This supports use cases of checking for membership based on a wallet holding arbitrary ERC-721, ERC-1155, or ERC-20 tokens from third-party collections.

Earn: Unlock Protocol is collectively owned by its members The core protocol aims to be collectively owned and managed by its adopters, embracing a core web3 ethos.

Anyone who implements the protocol in their application can earn UDT governance tokens to join the Unlock DAO, or may elect to pass those earned governance tokens onto their community members as additional rewards.

UDT owners can submit and vote on protocol upgrades and the allocation of the treasury's funds.