[deaddabe]

A reward system is something nice for new contributors in my opinion. I am currently thinking of something similar for the Debian project to incentivize new contributors with a bit of opt-in gamification.

However I did not understood why NFTs were necessary. We had badge systems way before NFT became fashionable, on forums for example.

[jerojero]

They are absolutely not necessary. I'm guessing it's just part of the hype and trying to plug their product in some way. If you go into the website mentioned in the article you'll see they don't really have any open-sourced code.