NFT creation platform Mintbase has announced a $7.5 million Seris A round backed by Coinbase Ventures, Libertus Capital, Sino Global Capital, Animoca Brands, Woodstock Fund, Fundamental Labs, and more. Mintbase said it will use some of the funding to offer grants to NFT projects and scale its operations. Mintbase completed a Seed Round of $1 million in 2020 that saw the participation of Sino Global, D1 Ventures, Block Oracle Capital, and Arweave.
Simultaneously announced, the NEAR Foundation, responsible for contracting protocol maintainers and funding ecosystem development on the NEAR protocol, will award up to $5 million to support Mintbase’s new grants program.
Titled Mintbase Grants, the program aims to find teams that want to build the next evolution of web 3.0 ticketing, music, and gaming platforms using the Mintbase developer infrastructure.
The Lisbon-based NFT protocol is building infrastructure and tools to enable niche NFT marketplaces. Mintbase provides a platform that allows anyone to create NFTs minus technical complexities.
Mintbase’s founder Nate Geier commented:
“At Mintbase, we believe that we are moving away from massive single NFT marketplaces towards more individual and community-owned ones. Sharded WASM chains are the future as they operate with other more desired programming languages like Rust and AssemblyScript. That is why we picked NEAR.”
Mintbase notes that in 2021 it launched on NEAR protocol when NFT minting on Ethereum became too expensive.