It all started at the ETH Status Hackathon at Devcon4 in Prague in 2018 where I won with the first brittle version of Mintbase. Getting to where Mintbase is today was hard. The bear market was deep, long, and unforgiving with a fun final blow of insanely high gas fees on Ethereum, but Mintbase believed in the decentralized future of the ownership economy and shipped almost daily.
Experimentation
Mintbase grew by experimentation and building tools for creators like Mlibty, Lenara, DAORecords, Nelly, Nanosat, and Sparrow. The first claim to fame was doing 100% of the ticketing for the MetaCartel Demo Day in Berlin. It was a success seeing how NFTs could change the model of ownership for ticketing pushing the key NFT principle from collectability to usability. People who couldn’t make it to the event, auctioned the NFT tickets off on OpenSea or held their own contests to give them away and still stands as proof of ownership on etherscan with 223 holders. Mintbase integrated with many other decentralized applications that made sense, 3box for identity, TheGraph for the entire backend and Cryptovoxels for a Christmas Advent calendar giving away a NFT a day from 24 companies like Gnosis, MyCryptoHeroes, Trust, TheDefiant, GitCoin. As of today, Mintbase has been working mostly behind the scenes. A lot of NFTs that people own probably originated from Mintbase. Customers appreciate the minting tool that uses perma storage from Arweave that can never be changed by anyone. Most Mintbase NFTs end up getting sold on other platforms like OpenSea which is part of magic in understanding the interoperability of the NFT, making Mintbase the premier source of creation.
As of today Mintbase has
- 952 deployed smart contracts by our users (stores owned by our users)
- +44K NFTs minted
- +80K Transactions
Ethereum was a great experiment, but has shown its limitations over the past nine months. User adoption will never happen when deploying a contract costs $350 and minting 3 NFTs costs $50. As a result, Mintbase made the massive decision to rewrite all of the smart contracts from Solidity to Rust deploying on the NEAR WASM compiler for much cheaper and faster transactions. The massive team of two /s, co-founders Carolin Wend and I have done all of this without ever spending a penny on marketing, never outsourced a line of code or design, all by spending less than $70k of their own money. Mintbase realizes that it needs more than two people to scale and they are proud to announce that they have now officially closed a $1M seed round. Every penny will go to extremely good use as we know what it’s like to be hungry and understand how fortunate we are to be in this position of finally getting the help we need to accelerate the NFT space together with great partners. We recently moved offices from Berlin to Lisbon, Portugal where expenses are much lower than in San Francisco or New York.
Mintbase is backed by an incredible, global group of investors including Sino Global Capital, Woodstock Fund, Sustany Capital, D1 Ventures, Animoca Brands, Block Oracle Capital, Arweave, Lin Hou, Luis Moure, Yin Cao and other angel investors.