Easy NFT Onboarding and Community-Building Experiences
How the Mint Platform Encourages Seamless NFT Interactions With Less Mess
It’s an exciting time to be in crypto and blockchain as we witness the evolution of NFTs. Their purpose and utility are morphing, and the next stages are taking form on a regular basis.
Here’s where we see an upcoming shift: NFTs are becoming less of a tech tinkerer’s or collector’s game and more of a tool for serving some of the top goals of any brand — centralizing community and providing unique experiences. At Mint, we’re dedicated to building a future of enabling NFTs as these powerful tools via less friction, lower barriers to entry and the simplicity of our ecosystem: storefronts, the NFT Viewer, and secondary marketplaces. To brands and consumers — welcome to Digital Marketing 3.0.
What Makes a Great Community Experience?
When there’s a place for your community to grow and connect, your entire brand perception and experience will benefit. NFTs are ideal vehicles for fostering these growing digital communities by actually giving consumers an ownership stake in your products or experiences. This turns people into strong advocates and loyal fans — sometimes more quickly than traditional marketing methods.
An excellent community experience consists of several factors, which include accessibility, inclusivity, participation and incentives, and consistency. (And did you know that the ability to troubleshoot via community interaction has been shown to save costs and deliver extra value?) To enable all of this, you need the right tools and platforms — or at least a combination. Social media, while great for interaction and participation, does not in itself provide a bespoke enough platform for completely unique community experiences.
NFTs can be an add-on to complete the pieces of the puzzle. As a tool for engagement, they provide incentive and a means to be a part of something, while platforms like Mint provide the ecosystem and centralized hub for brands to engage, share, and interact with consumers.
How the Mint Platform Fits Into the Equation
By now, you’re likely more aware of the impact of NFTs. (Read our primer in case you need a refresher.)
But what does Mint have to do with it?
Our raison d’etre is to provide the space for NFTs to do their thing within brand ecosystems. We create the platforms that allow you to leverage them to build positive community experiences and turn customers into brand champions. Partnering with Shopify to provide seamless ecommerce storefronts, our platform consists of bespoke and branded primary shops that enable customers to purchase NFT experiences that you create. Once purchased, our NFT Viewers allow customers to integrate their wallets (which we generate) and view their items in a centralized location. Should they want to sell them on secondary markets — we create those too.
We have all of these capabilities within one platform so we can unlock a centralized experience. Many web3 protocols complicate the path of entry to crypto due to the different platforms you need to use along the way. With Mint, it’s all in one place. There’s no need to connect one wallet provider to Metamask or a DEX, etc. Ultimately, this is mucheasier for consumers who are still onboarding onto web3.
Here’s how the Mint platform works:
Mint Storefront
The Mint Storefront is the initial experience powered by our platform through integration with Shopify. It’s the primary sale where you offer your NFTs to customers. All the magic of minting your NFTs happens with us behind the scenes. Once they’re minted, you can offer your NFTs as purchasable products via our Shopify integration, just like any other sale.
Your storefront can be as branded as you’d like it to be. And, concurrently, Mint can be as involved as you wish. If your team has experience building storefronts (particularly through Shopify), you can build your own store, and we can connect the Mint app in the background. Want a more hands-off approach? We can offer a “plug-and-play” solution where we build the storefront or even operate the store for you as the merchant of record. Either way, we’re here to make sure your primary NFT sale is seamless.
Most of what NFT 1.0 has grown from was established in primary token sales, but this is just one path forward. Brands no longer have to sell their NFTs, as we have a variety of flexible distribution mechanism to build loyalty and reward participation. For us, it’s all about providing you with options
Mint Wallet and NFT Viewer
Things get interesting here with an intersection between web2 and web3. Once store visitors purchase an NFT, they are emailed a link to view it in your branded NFT Viewer. This Viewer is the centralized view of all of your customer’s NFT experiences with your brand. In it, they can integrate multiple wallets (from different drops and sales), see what they’ve purchased, and, in the future, interact with any other types of NFT experiences going on.
At the moment, Mint is specifically geared toward the NFT Viewer displaying a customer’s purchased products. The future of Mint is bright, with other capabilities on their way, such as the ability to unlock more utility from NFTs. For example, aside from a special item from a brand, an NFT may also serve as an access point for an event. This way, holding an NFT in your Viewer serves as an entry to unlock memorable community experiences that can’t be viewed elsewhere. The potential is limitless.
Mint Secondary Marketplace
We would be remiss if we didn’t also allow people to trade NFTs. That’s why we also work with several blockchains, like Flow, to create secondary marketplaces. Consumers can easily resell their products to fans worldwide without you having to have a separate secondary marketplace and go through a lengthy process.
The benefit is that your products and NFT content will be shared and shown to a larger audience by virtue of community interaction.
What’s Next
As we said earlier, the next stage of NFTs is utility. We’re on our way to leveraging this power by simplifying a fan’s NFT engagement through Mint. The next stage of the platform will include options for token-enabled experiences. This would allow you to use NFTs for fan challenges, access to IRL events, and more. Imagine doing all of this without having to include multiple technologies or providers — that’s the evolution of Mint and NFTs.
To learn more about how the Mint platform works, or to see it in action, visit the website and get in touch. Or, visit the Mint blog for more nuggets of interesting web3 wisdom.
Written by Rob Simakovsky
