An Open Letter to the Motley & Night Market Community
GM everyone! In an effort to improve communication lines between our community & core team, I’m writing an open letter today spanning Night Market, Motley DAO, and Motley Friends. In this letter, I’ll be sharing details about what we’ve been able to accomplish thus far, clarity around the roadblocks we’ve overcome, and a look forward to many of the exciting milestones ahead.
TLDR;
- The Motley Friends collection is launching in August 2023, with a more favorable lockup schedule for presale supporters! More details shared below; official date announced soon.
- Night Market has been live on mainnet-beta since May 2023, fully open-source (with SDK)
- We’ve taken the community’s input to heart and will be publishing more consistent, transparent project updates moving forward.
- We’ll be rolling out our rewards system in the coming weeks, with some special sauce for Motley Friends holders & early marketplace traders.
- New features on the horizon: AI tooling, packs, and more
Introducing Night Market & Motley DAO
In mid-2022, we established Motley DAO to fund the development of Night Market, an NFT marketplace governed by creators, collectors, and builders.
Our thesis: The strongest Web3 products have a deep financial and social alignment with their communities, and existing NFT marketplaces do not foster that relationship. By creating a marketplace that gives creators and collectors a voice in governance, we create more positive outcomes for the entire Solana ecosystem.
Today, Night Market is live on mainnet-beta as the first completely open-source NFT marketplace on the Solana blockchain, supporting the secondary exchange of all NFTs available on Solana. In the future, Night Market will grow to provide a comprehensive hub of social & financial NFT tooling, including trading, discovery, rentals/loans, portfolio tracking, loyalty rewards, and more.
We are proud members of the first batch of the SolanaU Accelerator Program, and avid contributors to open-source projects within the ecosystem. Most recently, we developed the pNFT integration for Metaplex’s Auction House program, which powers notable marketplaces such as Night Market, Fractal, and GooseFX.
Overcoming Challenges
Like many small startup teams on Solana, we’ve had to fight through some enormous roadblocks to get to this point. Previously, our stance was to build in the shadows until we had something exciting to share in Discord. Under the pressure to increase “hype” for Night Market & Motley Friends, it felt wrong to post details about the challenges we were facing as a project.
After speaking with many of you over the past weeks, we realize that this lack of communication is one of the key reasons that valid concerns and frustrations would arise. It’s become laser clear that communicating actively (even in times of distress) is much better than radio silence.
Taking this to heart, I’d like to share a look behind-the-scenes at some of the major challenges the Motley crew overcame this year:
FTX Collapse
When FTX collapsed, Solana and its ecosystem teams were hit the hardest. Other teams chose to move cross-chain to pursue PMF and funding, and the future looked uncertain.
Even though these funding opportunities were made available to us, we chose to double down on our convictions on Solana. This was the right call; the high signal-to-noise has allowed us to establish more partnerships & open lines of communication with builder teams than ever before. As these come to fruition, the network value should be multiples greater than any short-term funding could’ve given us.
Development Hurdles
Halfway through the development process, we were informed that a critical indexing solution that powered all the data feeds on Night Market was being sunset by its vendor. In order to avoid this situation ever again, it was clear that we would have to re-engineer many of the core components of Night Market in-house. While this would set us back months, we embraced the opportunity to make some drastic improvements to our operation.
We brought on a new team of core engineers who were able to rebuild Night Market (from the ground up) in the span of 1.5 months. This was an absolutely monumental feat that will forever be etched as one of the most important parts of our history. With this team in place, we are confident we can tackle any and all engineering challenges moving forward.
Looking Forward
As the Founder, I have a deep belief that the potential for Motley & Night Market is limitless. Our team has spent the last 2 years deeply ingrained into the Solana ecosystem, and our mission is to build open-source products here that constantly push the boundaries of what is possible when crypto meets culture. We want nothing more than to be a market leader and champion of the space.
However, none of this happens without the community, and losing sight of that was a huge oversight. I take full responsibility for all the mistakes, setbacks, and miscommunication that we’ve incurred in the past. From here on out, we’re building out in the open with clear transparency and accountability.
With that, here’s a high-level plan for the project’s next steps.
Motley Friends
We’re excited to announce that the Motley Friends NFT will be launching in August 2023! 40% of our collection sold out during presale, and we will be putting special focus on rewarding these holders for sticking with us so patiently — starting with reduced lockup times on pre-sold NFTs and additional rewards through our upcoming Points System.
We’re also strategizing how to handle the 60% of the collection that is currently unallocated, and will be considering the input of our community and partners before making any decision on this front.
Night Market
Night Market is in the early stages of identifying PMF, and we’ll be experimenting with new features that make the product more useful for daily NFT enthusiasts. Here’s a short list of what you can expect in Season 1:
- Rewards from our prize pool of SAUCE, blue-chip NFTs, Motley Friends, BONK, etc. for Night Market users and feedback contributors
- A suite of never-before seen features on Night Market (currently in the works: AI-powered tools, cNFT-powered loyalty, and more)
- Keep your eye out for Packs…
On top of this, we’ll be looking to take a more active role in the Solana community. This means supporting various hackathons like the OPOS Hackathon hosted by Lamport DAO, creating more open lines for community discourse through weekly Twitter Spaces & Discord chats, and creating educational content to highlight some of the most promising aspects of Solana.
Conclusion
On behalf of the entire team, I’d like to thank the Motley & Solana ecosystems for all their support on this journey. Building this project has been one of the most rewarding challenges of my life thus far.
I assure you that all our next steps will be founded on a basis of transparency and community engagement.
With love and SAUCE,
Ryan Kim and the Motley Team
