Mintify: Worried about NFT creators with thousands of fake followers? And do you find it hard to keep track of your NFTs? Are you asleep when NFT drops happen on the other side of the world? A new platform is making wild promises about solving all these problems. Delivery might be another story yet. BeInCrypto speaks to the founder, Evan Varsamis.
Mintify.me is a members-only Web3 platform that helps you discover NFTs through smart notifications of upcoming drops, presales, and whitelist events.
Digital-artwork NFTs are sold mostly on specialized marketplaces like Zora, Rarible, and OpenSea. Coinbase NFT – a peer-to-peer marketplace – is coming soon, which plans to make minting, purchasing, showcasing, and discovering NFTs easier.
If you’re more interested in games and sports collectibles, developers like Dapper Labs have created experiences including NBA Top Shot (virtual trading cards) and CryptoKitties (a Pokémon-ish digital-cat-collecting app that actually was the first NFT hit in late-2017). Online games including Gods Unchained are starting to use NFTs to sell in-game assets like weapons or cosmetic upgrades.
Real estate in new virtual worlds is sold via markets, including Decentraland and The Sandbox. You can also buy or sell some NFTs directly via a compatible crypto wallet.
I Bought NFTs – Now What?
What can you do with NFTs once you buy them? Some people display their digital artwork on large monitors. Some buy virtual real estate (via NFT, of course), where they’re able to build virtual galleries or museums. You can also roam virtual worlds like Decentraland and check out other people’s collections. For some fans, the appeal is in the buying and selling, much like with any other asset class. (The collector who sold the $6.9 million Beeple NFT paid less than $70,000 for it in October 2020.)
Mainstream artists have also gotten involved in the space, especially from the world of music. In early March, Nashville band Kings of Leon announced their next album would arrive in the form of multiple NFTs. Depending on which one a fan buys, various perks will be unlocked—like alternate cover art, limited-edition vinyl, and even a golden ticket to a VIP concert experience.
The secondary marketplace opens up more earning opportunities for NFT artists. For example, it allows secondary sale royalty rights to the original creator of the NFT art.
What problem does Mintify.me solve?
Evan Varsamis is the founder of Mintify.me. He is a New York-based entrepreneur who has been involved in the crypto industry since 2016. Also, he is the CEO of Gadget Flow, a product discovery platform that reaches over 30 million people per month. He says he started being interested in NFTs in 2015, and made some investments. “I got involved with a few projects. The first thing I realized in the NFT space is that it’s just chaos right now. It’s like the early days of Web1 – without Google. Discovering projects is just such a hustle right now. Discovering drop events is also hard – when the projects become available, you have to grind through Reddit. You’ve got to go on Discord, do this, do that.”
As of January 2022, hundreds of NFT projects are being announced daily through Reddit, private communities, Discord channels, newsletters, and social media. This makes it impossible for those interested in joining minting events to find them on time and benefit from them. Instead, they have to buy the NFT in secondary marketplaces, which usually means that they’ll have to pay a higher price.
Mintify: Early Notice
Mintify.me wants to become the only platform that aficionados use to discover their next favorite NFT and participate in the minting event (drops, whitelist, presales).
Says Varsamis, “I put together a team not that long ago – trustworthy developers, designers and so on. We want to fix this. So we came up with the idea of Mintify. One day in the NFT space is like a week in any other industry. There’s not enough time throughout your day to do your research. So we want to simplify that process. We want to provide one platform to discover all these cool upcoming NFT projects that they haven’t been revealed yet.”
Members will be alerted via the Mintify smart notification system. “If you’re interested in a project, you get a notification before it drops. For people who are heavily invested into the NFT space, one of the biggest struggles is that of their calendar. They need to set reminders, taking into consideration timezone difference.” Mintify want to figure that all out for members.
Verification
Mintify also want to provide a “background check” on the drop’s creators. They plan to evaluate the minting events, showcasing risk factors. This includes whether it’s a first-time creator, a suspicious wallet address, or backed by a real person.
Members will be able to choose the price range and type of NFTs they are interested in, such as art, memberships, music, and collectibles. They will integrate with third-party platforms to make calculated decisions when buying NFTs. Data from these sources will include, risk/reward ratio, rarity chances, potential flip profit, percentage of fake followers on Discord and Twitter, smart contract rating, popularity of creators, suspicious wallet activities.
Varsamis says they will be auditing the smart contract for their members, to make sure that there aren’t any flaws. “We will have a 24-hour team of developers – their only job is going to be to reviewing code. Smart contracts are public. So if it’s a project that’s minting, and they don’t offer a smart contract, that the first level of being shady. Why not show the contract? We will do automated auditing. If there is a red flag, we will do manual auditing. We will give verification badges for all the projects that we’re featuring. It gives peace of mind – you don’t have to do your own research.”
Varsamis also plans to investigate the creators’ followers. “We will be authenticating their followers and make sure that they’re not bots. It’s a big issue in the industry.” Some creators claim that 60,000 people are waiting for a drop, but 59,000 are fake. “People get FOMO, and they end up losing their mind. Unfortunately, it can happen to anyone. It happened to me during my early days. When you are new in the market, you’re trying to jump in as fast as possible.”
No Guarantees
While Mintify plan to provide verification, and check smart contracts, this still does not guarantee you won’t get “rug pulled.” There’s no Web3 cops that police these smart contracts, so it is still a roll of the dice.
Says Varsamis, “It’s like getting a tweet from a verified Twitter account. Does Twitter guarantee that this is not a scam artist? No, but it’s another layer of security.”
Another feature of the site is a wallet tracker. Says Varsamis. “As soon as I started in the space, I spoke to people that have been there for six months or more. I asked them, what works and what doesn’t work? So the next things on the list was being able to properly manage your wallet. This means you can figure out how much profit you made. If you have multiple NFTs, across a number of platforms, it’s going to take time to check. If you have hundreds of NFTs, it is going to take you days! It’s just a pain in general. So the idea is that we’re going to be integrated with Etherscan. We’re going to be using the API to track all the activity of all of our members. You’ll be able to see your profit and loss statement within Mintify.”
Showing Off
So you have your NFT collection, then what? Varsamis says that you can wear your Rolex to show off, or drive a luxury car. But NFTs can be shown off online. “Twitter is going to be soon releasing an update to verify your profile image. If it’s an NFT, you have to verify that you actually own that NFT. So when it comes down to showing off, that’s going to be huge.
“On Twitter these days, most people have removed like their real-life images, and they’re using their favorite NFTs. Twitter is good for this community because it’s speedy. It’s a text-based community. The pace that Twitter has with threads – instant tweeting, mentioning, follow and unfollow. It’s just convenient for the NFT community. Twitter right now is just not communication, it’s also considered like an educational tool for the NFT space. If you want to get involved in the space, it’s impossible not to join communities on Twitter. The thing to remember is that we are all starting from ground zero because it is all so new, so nobody really is that much ahead of anyone else.”
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