Bear Market Building: Becoming the Amazon of Web3

It’s been a less-than-ideal year in crypto. But despite markets being down and the world seeing headlines about Web3 company lay-offs, we’re not only building incredible tech to set ourselves up for the next leg-up, but we’re also scaling our team. As the vision for the Few and Far platform becomes more crystallized, we wanted to share some highlights of what we’re building to onboard the following billion users to Web3 through NFTs.

🏗️ What we’re making now: A one-stop destination for exceptional Web3 experiences

Rewind to April this year: Just over six months ago, we received a grant from the NEAR Foundation to kick-start the development of Few and Far’s platform — starting with a simple goal of building a best-in-class NFT marketplace on NEAR’s scalable blockchain protocol.

Fast forward to today: Since earlier this year, our vision has substantially evolved. During this market downturn (i.e., Crypto Winter), it’s become clear the crypto landscape is beginning to consolidate at a rapid pace.

Funding is beginning to run dry for the high-flying Web3 companies this year, many of which did not have core business models or teams with the experience going through multiple bear markets. And projects that are over-hired to build simple copy/paste forks or solutions from other layer-1 blockchains.

Now, Few and Far find itself in a unique opportunity: to build a one-stop destination for exceptional Web3 experiences. We are building a technology platform that includes an NFT marketplace shopping experience and spaces for users to play in many different crypto verticals — including entertainment, gaming, and DeFi. As the crypto universe consolidates — this is an approach and solution we think is a winning ticket. And with a well-funded and experienced team at the helm, we’ve got the runway and chops to achieve it. Hence, our new vision statement: Becoming the Amazon of Web3.

Starting with a best-in-class NFT shopping experience.

The core of what we do is NFTs, and we’re building a world-class NFT marketplace experience to support it. What we have: A custom, speedy indexer, global NFT standards, and white-gloved approach to onboarding creators and top IP. And, our engineering team is working to harden our existing product and roll out new features, including in-app minting, ‘Allowlist’ as a service to grow creator communities, and more.

We can’t wait to share a new release of our app in the upcoming week which is fully built in Django — and a high-level Python SDK for NEAR. We’re confident it’ll be one of the slickest and snappiest marketplaces in the industry.

Building blocks for onboarding the next billion users to Web3.

Talk to anyone building in crypto — the UX for apps needs to increase significantly to reach the mass market. And, over and over, you’ll hear the same thing — today’s onboarding sucks. Using Metamask is confusing and overwhelming for newbies, plus it takes time to purchase ETH for gas. By the time you go through KYC, buy your ETH, and transfer it to an extensive plug-in, you’ve probably dropped off already and forgotten about that $15 NFT purchase you were going to make.

Easy-to-use onboarding is a big focus for us at Few and Far. We’re currently building seamless sign up / log in process where users don’t need a wallet to use our app — and can purchase NFTs with a credit card.

But decentralization is essential to us, so we’re not building just some ordinary centralized solution (which often can be hacked) where users don’t own their assets, and activity doesn’t happen on-chain until you leave the gardened walls (we call these “Web 2.5” solutions — why even build on blockchain anyway??).

On our platform, we’re creating a non-custodial onboarding solution that enables users to seamlessly onboard without creating a wallet. We set up a wallet for you — and let you manage your private keys — and also buy NFTs with fiat. And with the brilliance of NEAR Protocol, your public address can be as easy-to-remember as a Twitter handle (ex. johndoe.fewandfar). It’s a proper crypto-native solution that will scale us to a mass market.

Next up: Far Gaming — a world-class game store for web3.

The gold rush of PFP (Picture-of-proof) NFT drops that are just JPGs (right-click-save-as) is dying down. And we think it’s a good thing. As we usher in the next era of NFTs, which include real-world utility, Gaming has to prove to be a real-world use case driving tremendous value to end-users and IP.

Far Gaming is a new product rolling out on Few and Far — where users can watch, play, and share their favorite Web3 games — and collect NFTs of in-game characters, power-ups, and more on our marketplace. We’re excited to share what we think is a “Game Store” for Web3 in the upcoming months.

Let’s not forget: DeFi.

What makes Few and Far unique from most other marketplaces and Web3 platforms is that, at our core, we are crypto-native and offer DeFi with our FAR Token. For the first time, we’re cross-pollinating pools of DeFi and NFT “Degens” and are becoming an actual one-stop shop for all Web3 experiences.

While the app will have table stakes DeFi, such as staking and yield farming, the FAR Token enables us to create a Rewards Program (think an Offer Wall but for DeFi) as a monetization strategy for our app. We’ll reward users in FAR Tokens for completing specific tasks, such as listing NFTs, playing Far Games, and HODLing digital assets. And on the creator side, we can realize our vision of becoming the “Amazon” of Web3 by enabling projects to utilize FAR Tokens to purchase advertisements and get in front of customers.

Omni-chain interoperability is the future.

Let’s face it — a Layer-1 War is going on right now. As a new fourth-generation of L1s hit the market (SUI, Aptos, etc.), it’s becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate yourself as an application at the base protocol layer. Not to mention, end-users shouldn’t care about which blockchain they use (Instagram users don’t talk about how cool it is because it’s built with Python!!).

As blockchain becomes mainstream, end-users will become detached from interfacing with layer-1 on the backend and have delightful Web3 experiences without knowing what’s under the hood. As the market becomes more saturated with more and more blockchains, it’ll become increasingly important for users to have a cross-chain marketplace experience, where they can seamlessly purchase and transfer assets on any chain. At Few and Far, we’re building flexible smart contracts and global aggregate solutions to create an Omni-chain NFT solution where users can mint NFTs on several layer-1s.

We thank you for getting us to where we are today and in a position to build a truly decentralized one-stop destination for Web3. We’re excited to continue delivering our roadmap and bringing our vision to life.

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