NFTs have been a special part of the crypto ecosystem for several years now, and take many forms — From the early CryptoPunks project to Cryptokitties to music as mathematical art on Eulerbeats to individual creators, ranging from wildly popular like beeple to emerging digital artists like Justin Ouellette on Foundation. But it wasn’t until quite recently with the launch of NBA Topshot on the Flow blockchain that NFTs hit escape velocity and went fully mainstream. Since October, there’s been more than $450M worth of transactions on NBA Topshot alone.
Like all new emerging technologies, the core infrastructure is built up over time, often over many years. For NFTs, that’s blockchains like ETH and Flow, and transactional minting and marketplace products like Opensea and others. We believe we’re now emerging into the next phase of NFTs (and crypto broadly) that will give rise to a wave of consumer-facing (and usable!) products built on these core Blockchains and new platforms. Evaluate Market is one of them, and we’re excited to announce that we recently co-led their pre-seed round with our friends at Castle Island, with participation by several strategic angels and Draftkings.
We first discovered Evaluate Market by stumbling on their popular discord channel, which most NBA Topshot fans are well aware of by now. Through their community and analytics product, Evaluate Market plans to be the first truly social platform built around NFTs, a place to look up stats, trade notes with like-minded collectors, and eventually a slew of other social features that we believe will make NFT transactions more informed and more fun. We think of this as NFTs 2.0.
It’s no surprise that the founders of Evaluate Market, Christian Dittmeier, Alex Ramirez, and Cody Bouche are avid collectors themselves, building the product to serve their very needs, as well as the community broadly. Check them out on Evaluate Market and join the Discord to connect directly. See you there!