Original title: "An overview of NFT platforms that have received financing since the New Year"
Original author: Jiawei (Twitter: @Elegy4TheArctic）
Metaplex
The Metaplex Foundation announced on January 18 that it has received $46 million in strategic investment, led by Multicoin Capital and Jump Crypto. Participants include Solana Ventures, Alameda Research, Animoca Brands and other institutions, as well as other individual investors including NBA superstar Jordan and Iverson. The funds will be used to expand the business and provide financial support to the community.
Metaplex is an NFT infrastructure protocol on Solana that provides a series of tools and smart contract integrations designed to simplify the creation and distribution of NFTs. The architectural level consists of four contract sets: Token Metadata, Token Vault, Auction and Metaplex. Mainly provide the following products:
- Storefront: A common NFT standard that supports creation/minting of NFTs, NFT auctions in primary/secondary markets, and NFT visualization in wallets and apps.
- Candy Machine v2: NFT distribution program on the whole chain, providing whitelist management, verification code integration and other functions.
In addition, Metaplex also supports functions such as fair launch, airdrop and NFT burning, and has 5,300 Forks on GitHub.
Metaplex was launched in June last year, and 5.7 million NFTs of 85,000 projects have been minted so far, including the popular NFT projects Degen Ape Academy and Aurory on Solana, and have more than 600,000 active collectors. iOS and Android SDKs will be available this year.
Pixel Vault
Pixel Vault is a Web3 media company dedicated to creating narratives for encrypted native assets. The famous PUNKS Comic and MetaHero Universe are both its cultural IPs.
PUNKS Comic was launched on May 10 last year and is the first NFT and digital comic based on CryptoPunks. There are currently 53,000 Ethereum transactions on OpenSea.
A corresponding economic system has also been built around PUNKS Comic:
- Destroy the PUNKS Comic NFT to obtain Pixel Vault Founder's DAO NFT (the current floor price is 5 ETH, while the offering price of PUNKS Comic is only 0.2 ETH), enjoy its governance rights and access to Discord;
- PUNKS Comic holders can purchase MintPass NFT at a price of 0.08 ETH, which can be exchanged directly for 1:1 when the new IP MetaHero is launched. And MetaHero still maintains a floor price close to 5 ETH;
- Stake PUNKS Comic and get PUNKS Token, which represents partial ownership of 16 CryptoPunks NFTs that appear in the comic.
Pixel Vault announced on February 2 that it had raised $100 million in financing, with participation from Velvet Sea Ventures and 01 Advisors in this round. The funds will be used to support the development of TV, film and game projects.
(01 Advisors is a VC firm co-founded in 2018 by former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and former Twitter COO Adam Bain. Velvet Sea Ventures also invested in Autograph and SuperRare)
Autograph
Autograph is an NFT platform that integrates sports, entertainment and pop culture. Headquartered in Los Angeles, it was co-founded by famous football star and 7-time Super Bowl champion Tom Brady, and is committed to helping sports players and entertainers issue their NFT.
Tom Brady holds a part of FTX shares, claims to be the "big believer" of cryptocurrency, and uses "laser eye", one of the symbols of the encryption community, as his Twitter avatar.
The NFT platform received US$170 million in Series B financing on January 19 this year, led by a16z and Kleiner Perkins. The funds will be used to expand NFT technology and establish extensive partnerships with sports and entertainment partners.
In terms of teams, Autograph CEO Dillon Rosenblatt is from Apple Music, COO Ted Russell has served as the executive vice president of Fox Entertainment Group, and CMO Patrick Cassidy is the brand and marketing director of New Balance.
Autograph, which goes live in April 2021, has partnerships with content giant Lionsgate and sports entertainment company DraftKings, and SBF also has a seat on Autograph's executive board. At the end of September last year, golf superstar Tiger Woods issued 10,000 NFTs through its platform.
KLKTN
KLKTN announced on January 26 this year that it had completed $6.4 million in financing. Investors include Animoca Brands, Dapper Labs, Katsunori Sago, former CSO and board member of Softbank, and Joi Ito, director of MIT Media Lab.
KLKTN is an NFT artist platform and trading platform, headquartered in Hong Kong, focusing on the Asian market, aiming to connect musicians, artists and fans through digital collections, allowing musicians and artists to share their behind-the-scenes footage and creative process, and optionally ground into NFT. Last July, K-pop star Kevin Woo released his single "Got it" on KLKTN.
In terms of team, KLKTN CEO Daisuke Iwase is a Japanese financial technology entrepreneur who graduated from Harvard Business School; Chief Creative Officer Jeff Miyahara is a Japanese and Korean record producer and songwriter; CTO Fabiano Soriani worked in Dapper and participated in CryptoKitties and Flow research and development.
Closing Thoughts
As the NFT infrastructure on Solana, Metaplex provides functions such as NFT distribution, whitelist management Fair Launch and airdrop, covering almost the entire process of NFT issuance. After many DEXs have launched one-click coin issuance/one-click mining functions, future NFT issuance will probably also support "low-code" or "no-code" models.
The economic incentives launched by Pixel Vault have enabled its IP to create rich returns in addition to the cultural dissemination effect. Recently, it also cooperated with Boring Ape to release a limited edition second issue of comics. More cooperation with leading NFT projects/communities will give IP a richer extension and room for imagination.
Both Autograph and KLKTN are NFT platforms, focusing on sports and art respectively, and their core team backgrounds are written in these two parts.
Because the NFT platform itself does not have too many technical thresholds, and it is not easy to reflect the degree of differentiation between platforms, but more questions about "Why me" need to be answered. The resources of the founder and the team in the sports and entertainment circles are undoubtedly more important.
When researching the above project information, I came across a tweet by Chris Dixon, a partner of a16z, which mentioned "Web3 isn't just a tech movement. It's a cultural one", and I took it seriously.
Among the four projects introduced in this article, Autograph and KLKTN have a strong sports/entertainment background. Pixel Vault itself creates the cultural IP of the encryption community. Even the infrastructure layer project Metaplex also has Jordan and Iverson behind it.
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