If you've paid any attention to the NFT ecosystem for more than a few months, you're sure to have seen plenty of instances where someone is claiming to be "world's first NFT such and such". As someone who's spent 120hrs. a week fully immersed in the goings-on throughout NFT land, I can confidently say that 9/10 times, the people claiming to be the world's first, aren't; and the people that actually were, didn't care enough to advertise it as a part of the appeal, we were just doing cool stuff for the sake of doing cool stuff. Point being, I'm very careful not to claim to be the first anything at this stage of the NFT timeline. If I do, it's because I'm 99.5% certain that I'm correct, and there's not many people on the planet who would know better than I would when making that claim. I mention that as context becuase I'm about to claim it twice. First, I know with a fairly high level of certainty, that NFThub is the first platform of its kind. Things of a similar nature exist, in most cases trying to perfect one of the plethora of features that exist within the NFThub ecosystem, but no one has gone to the extent that I have to provide an all-in-one jumping-off point for the entire NFT industry. I won't go into too much detail about NFThub now, suffice to say it's "producthunt for NFTs" as well as social media features, a public community calendar, yield farming, NFT farming, and an upcoming gamified learning system. There's more included and more planned, but that's for another update, though I will point out that it's also a DAO; so the focus on community can be acted upon at any time, since any member of the community that feels that they would change something, or suggest something is added or removed, is welcome to join the Moloch and submit a proposal to do just that. Anyway, back to claiming world's first.
Soon™ NFThub.com will launch the first token-curated NFT marketplace. At least that's the working description. Currently, NFT marketplaces/platforms come in 2 flavors. You have walled gardens that have a few varieties among the different platforms, but curated or open, focused on one IP or several, the walled garden platforms only allow for the purchase and sale of NFT's from their own contract(s), and may or may not allow for creators/collectors to access a native secondary market. Some examples of this would be Foundation, Nifty Gateway, etc. Take Foundation as an example. Should you manage to overcome their gatekeeping, you'll be forced to use their smart contract to publish your work, and your existing NFTs won't have the copability of being sold on their auction block or more recently, their secondary market. Additionally, you'd ONLY be able to accept ETH as payment, from which they'll have 15% for their pocket, and require at least 3 contract interactions to be paid for in gwei. On the other end of the spectrum would be Rarible/Opensea. While both have recently added some minor curation aspects, it remains true that anyone, at any time, can mint whatever they want and post it for sale in the market; or tokenize someone else's work, or even mint the same work on several marketplaces. Platforms like Rarible and OPENSEA also function as "NFT aggregators" pulling metadata, sales feeds, etc. for practically every NFT on the Ethereum Mainnet (and expansions to L2's being added). Neither of these models are necessarily bad, and each asolutely has its distinct advantages, but what if creators prefer their own contract and don't have the time, the knowledge or the audience to warrant building a website on which they could embed a marketplace from one of the few sources that make it relatively simple? Well, then they'd do well to explore the planned model for the NFThub marketplace. As one notable factor, NFThub is native to Polygon; the fastest-growing and most secure Ethereum scaling network. Transactions to mint, sell, deploy contracts, etc. nearly instant, and the transaction fees are negligible to the extent that by the time you've made 2000 transactions, you may have spent $1 on gas.
But here's what makes it truly unique; the NFThub marketplace will be curated in a sense, but not in the sense that individual artists are the only permissable applicants. Any project, artist, creator, or otherwise that's issuing NFT assets on the Polygona network will be eligible to apply, but to do so they'll need to stake either tokens or LP tokens to the DAO treasury. If they've not joined the DAO officially, or if they've not sent the required (TBD) tokens, their application will not be processed. In addition, there is no guarantee that the collection / creator will be approved, as it will be dependent on a community vote. Should the vote fail, and the requested contract / creator / collector isn't whitelisted, 80% of their staked tribute will be returned and they will be unable to apply again for at least 30 days. This should serve a few different purposes. For one, the market won't be so oversaturated with low-effort work, or have every NFT on polygon visible and utilized. In addition to keeping the marketplace from becoming cluttered and flooded with low-effort items, the system will also incentivize all marketplace participants to be an active part of the development of the overall platform; as they'll be a part of the DAO as well as the marketplace, and as such will have monetary stake in the platforms overall success.
Overall; the details aren't all finalized, but, as has been the case through the entirety of building NFThub, I could plan and adjust details for months (believe me, I did it through half of last year), but once I've publicly stated that it's going to be happening, (regardless of having watched countless projects get massive funding rounds simply to sit behind a landing page for months), it's out among the ether, and my refusal to fail becomes a major motivator. So, to wrap up; it wasn't initially on the roadmap to have our own marketplace; but this post can be considered the addendum that states the NFThub Marketplace (name tbd) will be live during Q3 of this year.
>> On the roadmap initially, and will still be a part of our ongoing development, is curated art drops across numerous platforms. The team at NFThub, along with the majority of the community, are artists. For all the talk of decentralization, there remains an awful lot of very centralized, very capitalist platforms who pick and choose who gets to succeeed. With no ill-will or hard feelings toward the artists on these platforms, since I'm truly happy for them, the oppurtunity is often based on the opinion of one or a few people. And yes, I realize that the argument exists that the platform doesn't determine the artists success, but consider this: The highest value art sales primarily take place on SuperRare. Because of the volume and price history, SuperRare then attracts the most serious collectors. When I last applied, and was denied, it was stated that approx. 2% of applicants were invited. So if 98 of 100 applying artists are denied, and the majority of serious collectors prioritize the platforms that are perceived as being the most successful (and/or perceived as having the best quality art) then by causality, 98% of artists aren't paid any attention by the people responsible for 90% of sales. I'll end the rant before it begins; with the point being that artists should be leading the decision making around art if we're supposedly building a new art economy. We've created accounts on a variety of platforms, over nearly every NFT compatible blockchain, so that we can harness the brand recoginition, as well as the collective audiences of our community, to host curated drops, build awareness around them, and contribute to the long-term success of more artists. No applications will be denied, every one will be added to the waitlist; and every (TBD Timeframe) a number of them will be randomly selected for the community to vote on, and the winning votes will be featured in that cycle's drops, with the rest returned to the list, and likely prioritized in the next selection. Lowkey, I hope that at least one of the larger platforms bans or deactivates our account for using it for multiple artists. Because that will start a conversation that needs to be had, and needs to be had loudly. The NFT space is still very nascent, and its up to the people who enable this recent cambrian explosion to ensure that lambos and moons don't take precedence over the oppurtunities made available to creators.
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