Mintbase Raises $7.5 million in Series A and $5 million grant pool to pioneer NFT infrastructure

Mintbase, the platform that allows anyone to create their own non-fungible token (NFT) store, today announced a $7.5 million round in series A funding backed by Coinbase Ventures, Libertus Capital, Sino Global Capital, Animoca Brands, Woodstock Fund, Fundamental Labs and others. Mintbase will use the funding to scale its operations.

The round follows an initial seed round of $1 million in late 2020, with participants such as Sino Global, D1 Ventures, Block Oracle Capital and Arweave.

In addition to this series A funding, the non-profit NEAR Foundation, which is responsible for contracting protocol maintainers and funding ecosystem development on the NEAR protocol, will award up to $5M to support Mintbase’s new pass-through grants programme. Titled Mintbase Grants, the programme will look for seasoned teams that want to build the next evolution of web 3.0 ticketing, music, and gaming platforms using the Mintbase developer infrastructure. A new and improved user interface will not only make the experience of minting and trading smoother, but also help guide those looking to build on Mintbase’s tools.

The Lisbon-based NFT protocol is building infrastructure and tools to empower niche NFT marketplaces. Mintbase provides a global platform that allows anyone to create NFTs without worrying about technical complexities. Artists can create NFTs to sell digital art, musicians can use them for music, and event organizers can use them to sell tickets for their next event.

“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,”  said Mintbase’s founder Nate Geier.

In 2021, Mintbase launched on NEAR protocol when NFT minting on Ethereum became too expensive. With affordable tokenization of NFTs on a climate neutral blockchain, creators can now experience purposeful NFTs.