The early crop of music NFTs made stonks, even if the market has since settled down a bit. But it’s clear that the companies looking to help artists sell NFTs are also capable of generating big funding rounds. The latest example is OneOf, backed by Quincy Jones Productions, and a cool $63m of seed funding.
What’s the story here? It’s about music – Doja Cat, Jacob Collier, G-Eazy, Jones himself and the estate of Whitney Houston are among its first planned releases – but it’s also about environmental sustainability, which has been seen as a key problem for the NFTs sector (and blockchain / cryptocurrencies more generally).
OneOf will be using the Tezos blockchain, and says that minting an NFT will thus be much, much less of an energy drain than alternatives like Ethereum. Meanwhile, the company is also setting its sights on accessibility both for artists (promising “zero-cost NFT minting”) and fans / buyers (who’ll be able to pay using credit and debit cards, as well as cryptocurrency).
“We are building a technology company with an artist-first ethos and eco-conscious mission to help introduce hundreds of millions of non-crypto native users to blockchain through easy and exciting use cases such as NFTs,” is the pitch, from co-founder Lin Dai.
It all sounds good, but the world of NFTs is evolving fast: other marketplaces and companies may well respond with their own initiatives to reduce their environmental impact and make all this more accessible to artists and fans. That’s the positive effects of competition for you!
What we’ll be keen to see is how OneOf structures its NFT sales with artists: and particularly whether it opens them up beyond crypto-rich collectors to the wider fanbases of the artists that it works with.
These issues are something we may hear more about from one of those rivals, Crypto·com, when its EVP and global head of NFT Joe Conyers III talks at our Sandbox Summit Global conference later today…
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