As a headless brand with a grander mission to power the creator economy and empower individuals to own their personal data, we are enthusiastic about opportunities to speak with teams and individuals across the globe working in web3 to bring these dreams to reality.
Tuesday, I had the privilege of hopping on a Zoom call with Regina, who is in charge of community management and development over at Mintbase. (An intro that wouldn’t have been possible without our own fervent fan base, so, s/o Daria!)Â
Mintbase is a powerhouse of a platform allowing creators to build their own web3 storefronts for other aspiring NFT artists, and they even have the ability to sell NFTs within WordPress and Shopify sites.
Given our well-documented gripes with current NFT platform offerings, a creator-first option is a breath of fresh air, and Mintbase works to put the creator before even itself. Using the NEAR protocol, Mintbase is creating a headless architecture to maximize self-custody and composability — meaning users’ NFTs and webstores would outlast even Mintbase itself, should, God forbid, their business go the Diem way.Â
NEAR is a competing protocol to Ethereum and Bitcoin, and, like our personal go-to, Solana, addresses some of the shortcomings of the layer-1 solutions that failed to account for the need to scale transaction processing across the network. One of the pioneers of the sharding strategy — decentralizing data sets to handle higher traffic and store more data — NEAR is a venture-backed, centralized, private platform, backed by massive amounts of institutional money. It’s operating in borderline stealth mode still, taking time to get the infrastructure right before bringing the network public.
Those last two sentences probably just ruptured some neckbeard degen’s hernia. But as a bit of a web2/web3 fence-sitter myself, it is one of the more rational approaches to developing a blockchain I’ve encountered. It is incredibly difficult to upgrade a blockchain protocol once it’s live, due to its decentralized nature and the permanency of a publicly distributed and managed network. You’d pretty much have to either get everyone onboard for the upgrade (most of us have trouble getting everyone onboard for a dinner party) or just fork the network (abandoning the hipsters who’ll inevitably stick with the original way of operating).
It’s not easy to build a strong company without using your technology to dig a moat and create a walled garden of data. Luckily, sleepy hollows are haunted by headless horsemen. I have a feeling Mintbase might be just the decentralized brand we need to give the Ichabod Cranes (read: mediocre web2 maxi white men) a run for their money. And/or lives.
