Center raises $11 million to build NFT search index
Nonfungible token tool company Center announced today that it raised $11 million in a seed round led by Thrive Capital and Founders Fund to build a search product that will index NFTs across multiple blockchains.
The company believes that it can increase the utility of NFTs, which are a type of crypto-asset, by providing services and tools that make them more useful to developers. NFTs represent the ownership of digital objects, such as artwork, music, files or other virtual assets stored using blockchain technology that can be bought, sold and traded.
Amid Center’s first NFT tool is an NFT rendering application programming interface, which allows developers to easily display any graphical NFT from any blockchain in a single line of code. The goal was to make it as easy as using an HTML tag on a web page.
Now the Center creates an index of NFTs in the same way that search engines index the web. To date, the company has indexed over 135 million NFTs. The goal is to allow developers to quickly and easily provide search capabilities for NFTs across multiple blockchains using NFT discovery metadata and embed the results into their apps.
“Our built-in NFT search API allows you to embed free-form text search using the same search engine we built that powers center.app,” the company wrote in a blog post. “We’ve already indexed over 120 million NFTs, track most chains by a fraction of a block, and strive to deliver world-class search experiences that take you less than 5 minutes to build.”
Currently, Center supports more than 10 different blockchains for the search function, and switching between them is as easy as changing a configuration option. The chains that Center supports include Ethereum, Polygon, Fantom, Avalanche, BSC, Solana, Optimism, Harmony, Starknet, Arbitrum and Celo. The company said that if it is a blockchain or a layer 2 scaling solution, it is on the roadmap for additions.
The Center’s tools are already being adopted by crypto and blockchain companies such as decentralized crypto infrastructure provider 0x Labs and NFT lending platform Astaria.
“We had tried every other NFT API on the market, and Center was the only option that could scale up to reliably fit our needs,” John Johnson, Chief Technology Officer at 0x. “Center helped us get new products to market months faster and has turned a multi-month engineering effort into a few lines of code.”
NFTs captured a meteoric rise in market capitalization in 2021, leading to $41 billion in trading volume. However, the markets lost 23% of their market capitalization in mid-June during what was dubbed “crypto winter” as the general markets experienced a more general decline.
As a result, Center is not the only NFT search engine entering the market. Another example includes the Numbers Protocol, which describes itself as a Web3 search engine – or a search engine for the “semantic web” – that claims to be the first for NFTs. NFT LAB, which also claimed to be the world’s first NFT search engine. HUMBL also announced Search 3, a search engine capable of cross-chain NFT discovery.
