NFTs for all
The Press Badge NFT collection minted out in a little over 24 hours. There's still 5 reserved for those with whitelist spots, but the reception has been phenomenal. I really appreciate the support of everyone in the community who minted an NFT!
With this project launch, it became really clear how much demand there is for dApps on Koinos right now. There was lots of interest from people who wanted to buy in, but thought the price point was too high. A fair criticism, but there's only 50 tokens in this collection, so it's meant to be exclusive.
After the mint, I had quite a few people reach out asking about my experience building an NFT collection, saying they wanted to make their own, which is awesome! The smart contract work for NFTs is pretty simple, so the majority of the work comes in with the art, a little work to create a nice site for minting tokens and viewing your collection, then the work of marketing the collection before the mint event.
One of the cool aspects of this launch was the experience for those with a whitelist spot. If you bought the merch bundle before mainnet, you were able to mint the token of your choice for free. Not only that, there were no gas fees, and I used my mana to pay for network resources for you. That meant whitelisted people were able to set up a brand new, completely empty wallet, and use the dApp to mint their NFT with zero hassle.
Early NFT collections on Ethereum like CryptoPunks were free to mint, but you still had to pay gas for the transaction. This meant you had to have ETH to participate in the mint event. On Koinos, a free mint could be launched where people who've never even heard of Koinos could participate. There's a lot of desire to list Koinos on a CEX and have a bridge and DEX so people can trade their Koin and bring new people onto the blockchain. That's great and needs to happen, but we can bring new people on without any of that.
Free to use dApps are the real way to onboard new users.
-Luke
P.S. As more NFT collections are launched, we're going to need an NFT marketplace built on Koinos. If you're looking for a project or have connections at an existing marketplace, this is a huge opportunity. I'll build it if no one else does, but it's third or fourth on my list at the moment.