Mintbase Raises $7.5M Series A + $5M Grants Pool to Pioneer Utility NFT Infrastructure

Nate Geier

Published in

Mintbase

6 min readApr 19, 2022

TLDR;

$7.5M VC raised
$5M Grants Pool for projects built using Mintbase + NEAR
New frontend launched
Come work with us.

Global and Strategic Investors

Mintbase is announcing a $12.5 million round in series A funding ($7.5M VC +$5M NEAR grants program) led by Woodstock Fund, and backed by Coinbase Ventures, Libertus Capital, Sino Global Capital, Animoca Brands, Fundamental Labs, Figment, TRGC, and others. Mintbase will use the funding to focus on the developers and entrepreneurs pioneering the new digital economy.

The series A closed with an incredible, global (range from India, China, Hong Kong, Europe, Japan, and the US) and strategic group of investors. We required every investor from the $1M seed in 2020 to this A round to possess one similar attribute: A long term vision of where the decentralized web is heading.

$5M NEAR + Mintbase Grants Program

The NEAR Foundation awarded $5M to act as a pass-through grants program. Mintbase Grants will be looking for seasoned teams that want to build the next evolution of web 3.0 ticketing, music, and gaming platforms using the Mintbase developer infrastructure. A new and improved user interface will not only make the experience of minting and trading smoother, but also help guide those looking to build on Mintbase’s tools. Learn more and apply here.

Shiny New Interface

Our core build process, and in this order…

Make it work 🏗
Make it pretty 💅
Make it fast 🚄

We launched Mintbase in 2018 on ETH and realized Ethereum doesn't work they way we wanted in 2020. We then re-wrote everything going back to step 1 a few time over. Marcelo Kunze, the design lead is finally getting us past step 2 and Luís Freitas and Rui Santiago are pushing us past step 3.

We now have the foundation to ship super fast, integrate with other projects, and empower the open-source community to contribute to the network. Using our open-source component library, others will be able to build their own marketplaces much easier, comparing the UI elements as the components will grow.

Future is Sharded, WASM Chains: 😉 NEAR

Blockchains are on the third evolution cycle. First was Bitcoin followed by copies of the chain (Litecoin, Doge, BCH), second was Ethereum with its copies, (xDai, AVA, Polygon). We believe that the obvious third evolution is all about WASM chains like NEAR, Polkadot, and Solana. Although we don’t think Solana is going the right route on its decentralized core, it is proving that developers want WASM. With the latest $350M fundraising announcement, the NEAR ecosystem is about to take off.

Why NEAR?

Back in 2020, most other NFT platforms saw the hype and built their projects on Ethereum or ETH copy-paste chains. We deployed on ETH in 2018 but saw the legacy future writing on the wall. We stopped and re-wrote every line of code in rust and deployed it on NEAR mainnet in May 2021. We are just getting started.

The only way non-sharded chains will succeed in the near future is if we just think of them as the lesser evil of centralized exchanges, but we are confident that chains without sharding will struggle to hold real value in the future.

Even though we have been building on NEAR for over a year, we are still only using about 10% of the innovative capabilities like connection allowances, private key swapping, and contract function restrictions. If you want to understand why we think NEAR is a better choice than say Optimism or Solana, give this Epicenter podcast a go (Epicenter).

Putting it All Together

We have always been good at being the first in the NFT space through experimentation and pushing the boundaries of what the decentralized world was capable of achieving at the given times.

Proof of Early Experiments

2018 MetaCartel tickets at Berlin Blockchain Week
2019 Cryptovoxels Advent Calendar Events all month
2020 First NFT platform to use The Arweave Project
NFT NYC Ticketing
2020 Move all efforts to NEAR
So many experiments with this German festival
NFTs for redeeming local, wine, skateboards, paint, party invites
Minting in mass: One million NFTs for deadmau5 (we made it to 600k 😘)
First to have Metaverse galleries automatically mint off their own contract

We have always stayed true to our decentralized beliefs and will continue to do so. With this series A raise, we now have the firepower to put all the crazy experiments into action, with a focus on the ones we think have real potential.

What’s Next?!

We have kept our heads down for the most part throughout the hype cycle, not participating in the PFP pumps as we were focused on building core infrastructure on a super new chain. Once people learn the power of owning their own smart contracts and how this can scale, it’s going to get interesting. We want to incentivize people to build their own NFT projects and they are invited to use our toolkit.

A Mintbase Store is an independently smart contract, where owners can add other minters (DAO, company, person, nonprofit) to it and add up to 50 royalties and single payment splits. Mintbase is currently managing over +1086 stores🤯

A Mintbase Store is your own smart contract.

We have a strong belief that the future is about niche NFT utility markets, fired up by companies, entrepreneurs, and no-code users alike. We are here to support the developers and entrepreneurs of tomorrow that will build their own NFT redeeming, selling, and distribution tools off our infrastructure.

Virtual galleries for every store

Use Cases

Companies like GorillaShop and 3XR.SPACE have just the right mindset of where the decentralized web is heading. Instead of owning all of their customers’ stores and content like Shopify and building it all from scratch, they have seen that the Mintbase platform already has +1,086 stores deployed on-chain. As such, they used the Mintbase code and build their business on top of it. These are all smart contracts with permanent storage on The Arweave Project which is the perfect building block/lego to build off of. With Gorilla, all stores on Mintbase will have a prettier experience even if they deployed it months ago.