2021 was a breakthrough year for Mintbase, NEAR, and the NFT space. Let’s review some of the highlights of the last twelve months.
January was a month for new beginnings. Mintbase recently moved to Portugal and we’d just started growing our team, after deciding to rewrite all of our code in Rust and NEAR Protocol. Luis Freitas, our product lead, was one of the first hires.
For the next few months, the team was in full programming mode. By May, we were finally live on NEAR mainnet.
The summer was all about continuing to develop our technology. Mintbase is now a true marketplace factory, allowing anyone to deploy their own smart contract in just three clicks.
By the end of June, Mintbase’s collectables are displayed in the NEAR wallet. In July, we had over 300 deployed stores. In August, over 500. And we upgraded them all to comply with the NEP-171 standard.
We also launched the integration with 3XR — this means each store on Mintbase also gets its own virtual gallery. How cool is that?
And because there is life beyond the keyboard, the summer was also about bringing NFTs into the real world. At the Wilde Möhre festival, we built an NFT house called Wildeverse1 where we airdropped NEAR to festival guests, who could then exchange NFTs for beer and other experiences.
By October, we’d grown to a full team of 10! We welcomed frontend developer João Loureiro; UI designer Marcelo Kunze, Community Extraordinaires Maria Neu, Luis Infante and Regina Nogueira.
And thank god we did! October was a busy month at Mintbase land. We were at LisCon, where we had the pleasure to meet fellow blockchain builders and exchange knowledge and ideas. We also did NFT ticketing in Lisbon for NEARcon and tested our redeemable NFTs. The highlight was our auction party: people were able to place real-time, on-chain bids on works *collectively* painted at Wilde Möhre (yes, you guessed it — and all artists were added in our split revenue & royalties feature).
To celebrate Lisbon Blockchain Week and go even further in showing the usability of our technology, we onboarded several restaurants in Lisbon to accept NFTs as payment, every single one with their own NEAR wallet and being paid on-chain by our revenue and royalties features. Fancy a burrito NFT?
November brought more big news tech-wise. Mintbase created a system that allows users to mint, list and buy thousands of NFTs at once, opening the door to even more possibilities. Furthermore, NEAR implemented sharding, which will enable the satisfaction of the demand for transactions as more and more users start to use it. We became one of the first NFT markets on a sharded chain.
And we ended the year with a bang 💥. In December, we travelled to Miami for the launch of DeadMau5 and Portugal. The Man’s new single “This is Fine”. The song was released exclusively as one million NFTs on Mintbase! Once all of them are sold, they’ll be the first artists to go platinum with NFTs. In any case, the sheer scale of this launch is unprecedented and a giant leap towards mass adoption.
Furthermore, we successfully pushed for a new eventing standard and now all 855 Mintbase NFT contracts work flawlessly with the web wallet. This opens the door for secondary markets like we know on Ethereum with OpenSea to flourish on NEAR.
We also found time to rebrand Createbase to Mintbase DAO. Createbase was one of the first guilds on NEAR and its name no longer reflected its true purpose: to support projects building on Mintbase Protocol. Curious about Mintbase DAO and the history of guilds on NEAR? Read more below.
What’s next?
We couldn’t be more excited for what’s to come in 2022. After a (very) busy year striving to build a strong foundation for tech, we can finally focus on all the other features we want to implement like the UX/UI of Mintbase.io.
But the big thing we’re all pretty excited about is interoperability. This is what makes NFTs so special: they can be traded and exchanged on different marketplaces ✨
2022 will be the year of NFTs as we finally have the technology to bring to the masses. We did the hard ground work, now it is time to show what we can do in real life- after all we want to reform broken economic systems and enable true peer-to-peer transactions without middlemen.
