Inventory of NFT platforms that have won large amounts of financing in 2022

Original title: "An overview of NFT platforms that have received financing since the New Year"

Original author: Jiawei (Twitter: @Elegy4TheArctic)

Metaplex

The Metaplex Foundation announced on January 18 that it has received a strategic investment of US$46 million, led by Multicoin Capital and Jump Crypto. Participants include Solana Ventures, Alameda Research, Animoca Brands and other institutions, as well as other individual investors including NBA superstars Jordan and Iverson. The funds will be used to expand the business and provide financial support to the community.

Metaplex is an NFT infrastructure protocol on Solana that provides a series of tools and smart contract integrations designed to simplify the creation and distribution of NFTs. The architectural level consists of four contract sets: Token Metadata, Token Vault, Auction and Metaplex. Mainly provide the following products:

- Storefront: a common NFT standard that supports creating/minting NFTs, NFT auctions in the primary/secondary market, as well as wallets and APPs NFT visualization in .

- Candy Machine v2: NFT distribution program on the whole chain, providing whitelist management, verification code integration and other functions.

In addition, Metaplex also supports functions such as fair launch, airdrop and NFT destruction, and has 5,300 Forks on GitHub.

Metaplex was launched in June last year, and 5.7 million NFTs of 85,000 projects have been minted so far, including popular NFT projects on Solana Degen Ape Academy and Aurory, and has more than 600,000 active collectors. iOS and Android SDKs will be available this year.

Pixel Vault

Pixel Vault is a Web3 media company dedicated to creating narratives for encrypted native assets. The famous PUNKS Comic and MetaHero Universe are both cultural IPs created by it.

PUNKS Comic launched on May 10 last year and is the first NFT and digital comic based on CryptoPunks. There are currently 53,000 Ethereum transactions on OpenSea.

A corresponding economic system has been established around PUNKS Comic:

- Destroy PUNKS Comic NFT , get Pixel Vault Founder's DAO NFT (the current floor price is 5 ETH, while the offering price of PUNKS Comic is only 0.2 ETH), enjoy its governance rights and access to Discord;

- PUNKS Comic holders can purchase MintPass NFT at a price of 0.08 ETH, which can be exchanged directly for one-for-one when the new IP MetaHero is launched. And MetaHero still maintains a floor price close to 5 ETH;

- Pledge PUNKS Comic and get PUNKS Token, representing the 16 CryptoPunks NFTs that appear in the comics fractional ownership.

Pixel Vault announced on February 2 that it has closed a $100 million funding round, with participation from Velvet Sea Ventures and 01 Advisors. The funds will be used to support the development of TV, film and game projects.

(01 Advisors is a venture capital firm co-founded in 2018 by former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and former Twitter COO Adam Bain. Velvet Sea Ventures also invested in Autograph and SuperRare)

Autograph

Autograph is an NFT platform integrating sports, entertainment and pop culture. Headquartered in Los Angeles, it was co-founded by famous football star and 7-time Super Bowl champion Tom Brady. The NFT.

Tom Brady holds a part of the shares of FTX. He calls himself the "big believer" of cryptocurrency, and uses "laser eye", one of the symbols of the encryption community, as his promotion special avatar.

This NFT platform received US$170 million in Series B financing on January 19 this year, led by a16z and Kleiner Perkins, and the funds will be used for expansion NFT technology and establish extensive partnerships with sports and entertainment partners.

As for the team, Autograph’s CEO Dillon Rosenblatt is from Apple Music, COO Ted Russell has served as the executive vice president of Fox Entertainment Group, and CMO Patrick Cassidy is New Balance’s brand and Director of Marketing.

Autograph goes live in April 2021, with partnerships with content giant Lionsgate and sports entertainment company DraftKings, with SBF also on Autograph's executive board seats. At the end of September last year, golf superstar Tiger Woods issued 10,000 NFTs through its platform.

KLKTN

KLKTN this year 1 On March 26, it announced the completion of US$6.4 million in financing. Investors include Animoca Brands, Dapper Labs, Katsunori Sago, former CSO and board member of Softbank, and Joi Ito, director of MIT Media Lab.

KLKTN is an NFT artist platform and trading platform, headquartered in Hong Kong, focusing on the Asian market, aiming to connect musicians, artists and fans through digital collections, so that Musicians and artists share their behind-the-scenes footage and creative process, and can optionally be minted into NFTs. Last July, K-pop star Kevin Woo released his single "Got it" on KLKTN.

As for the team, Daisuke Iwase, the CEO of KLKTN, is a Japanese fintech entrepreneur who graduated from Harvard Business School; Jeff Miyahara, the chief creative officer, is a Japanese and Korean record producer and songwriter; CTO Fabiano Soriani previously worked at Dapper and was involved in the development of CryptoKitties and Flow.

Closing Thoughts

Metaplex, as the NFT infrastructure on Solana, provides NFT distribution, white Functions such as list management, Fair Launch and airdrops cover almost the entire process of NFT issuance. After many DEXs have launched the one-click coin issuance/one-click mining function, future NFT issuance will probably also support the "low-code" or "no-code" model.

The economic incentives launched by Pixel Vault have enabled its IP to create rich returns in addition to the cultural dissemination effect. Recently, it also cooperated with Boring Ape to release a limited edition second issue of comics. More cooperation with leading NFT projects/communities will give IP a richer extension and room for imagination.

Both Autograph and KLKTN are NFT platforms, focusing on the fields of sports and art respectively, and their core team backgrounds are written in these two parts.

Because the NFT platform itself does not have too many technical thresholds, and it is not easy to reflect the degree of differentiation between platforms, but more questions need to answer "Why me" question. The resources of the founder and the team in the sports and entertainment circles are undoubtedly more important.

When researching the above project information, I came across a tweet by a16z partner Chris Dixon, which mentioned that "Web3 isn't just a tech movement . It's a cultural one", I deeply agree.

Among the four projects introduced in this article, Autograph and KLKTN have a strong sports/entertainment background, and Pixel Vault itself creates the cultural IP of the encryption community. Jordan and Iverson are also behind the facilities layer project Metaplex.

The top sports and entertainment circles have devoted themselves to the NFT field, making NFT "out of the circle" an inevitable trend in the future.

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