Australia Post launches non-tradeable cryptostamps

Australia Post is belatedly getting in on the cryptostamp action with an issue of its own while taking the unusual step of blocking transferrability of the authenticity records for the stamps.

The Lunar New Year collectible physical stamps will sell for $15 and are designed by Sydney artist Chrissy Lau, are paired with what AusPost calls "DigiStamps".

DigiStamps are tokens recorded on the Polygon blockchain, and work like non-fungible tokens (NFTs) but with an important difference.

NFTs were once hyped as the future of tradeable digital assets, with people speculating wildly on badly drawn electronic images of bored apes and cryptopunks that came with digital authentication tokens stored on the immutable blockchain ledger, as proof of ownership.

However, NFTs soon became synonymous with large-scale hacks and fraud on the internet, and "rugpulls" in which developers closed down their crypto projects and made off with massive amounts of investor funds.

It would take a brave company to launch any NFT related product in 2026.

Instead, Australia Post and its Austrian technology partner StampFinity use "soulbound tokens" (SBTs) instead for the novelty collectible stamps.

While SBTs are digital tokens that can be cryptographically authenticated, the abovementioned important difference is that they are not transferrable between digital wallets.

No private keys are provided for the digital wallet, an Australia Post spokesperson said, and the DigiStamp is forever associated with the stamp card in a collector's posession.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin thought up the concept of SBTs in 2022 along with lawyer Puja Ohlhaver and economist E Glen Weyl as a mechanism to tie, for example, professional and educational credentials permanently to a person, without the possibility of transferring them to someone else which in turn would invalidate them.

Some internet history: soulbound tokens (SBTs) is a term that harks back to the early-2000s online game World of Warcraft, in which virtual items bound to a player's character ("soul") could never be exchanged.

In Australia Post's case, collectors scan a QR code on the stamp card to activate the DigiStamp SBT, and have it recorded on the Polygon blockchain, which also gives them a free digital wallet.. 

The DigiStamps are accessed via a nearfield communications (NFC) chip on the stamp card.

Philatelists can verify the authenticity of the DigiStamps on the Polygon blockchain, but not the actual physical stamp.

"The owner of the physical card containing the NFC chip and QR code retains ownership of the digital token," an Australia Post spokesperson told iTNews.

In that scenario, hanging onto the stamp card which has the NFC chip for authentication becomes necessary.

Beyond the initial activation of the Polygon blockchain record, no further ownership data is recorded.

The practical point of DigiStamps may seem a bit opaque, and the Australia Post spokesperson admitted that the tokens function "solely as a novelty item".

It means that secondary markets such as OpenSea and Rarible are not available for Australia Post DigiStamps philatelists.

The physical stamps are themselves legal postage, but if you use them for that, all you have left is an NFC-enabled stamp card that lets you authenticate DigiStamp tokens on the Polygon blockchain with your smartphone; and that's it.

"Using the physical stamp for mail does not affect ownership or authenticity of the digital collectible," Australia Post said.

The focus of the DigiStamps is on the fun and collectibility of stamps, Australia Post said, and part of the postal service provider attempting modernisation, innovation and attracting a new demographic of collectors - while appealing to traditional ones too.

Postal services flock to NFT cryptostamps

With the SBT twist, government-owned Australia Post is late to the cryptostamp party.

Several other postal operators around the world have worked with StampFinity to stamps with NFTs over the past few years.

This includes Austria Post, which was the first to issue a tradeable NFT stamp in 2019, along with postal authorities in Guernsey, the United Arab Emirates, the Faroe Islands and elsewhere.

Gibraltar Post meanwhile was the first in the world to issue an NFT cryptostamp in 2018.

Polygon itself is a scaling solution built on Ethereum blockchain and runs the biggest prediction market in the world, Polymarket.

Prediction markets are banned in Australia, as illegal gambling platforms, and recently suffered the same fate in New Zealand.