Venture Capital Seeds NFT Trading Tooling Firm Mintify

Capitalizing on the growing interest in refining NFT trading opportunities for professional money makers, digital collectibles startup Mintify has launched a seed round.

Digital asset-focused investment manager Arca led the $1.6 million round. The corresponding valuation was not made public.

Current NFT trading marketplaces from OpenSea to SudoSwap tend to be limited in terms of functionality, real-time data and scale that professional crypto investors can use to create and deploy NFT trading strategies. Mintify’s effort: a Bloomberg-like trading terminal built from the ground up for NFTs, ProDash.

Arcas Endeavor Fund, Alchemy Ventures, Psalion, as well as GSR and Fasanara also participated in the fundraising.

Mintify’s founder and CEO, Evan Varsamis, believes their trading terminal can provide software and data access of a caliber comparable to Bloomberg’s and its role in the stock market.

“Our goal is to bring tools to the market that are familiar to users of existing trading platforms, while exposing them to new and powerful NFT-based economies and markets,” said Varsamis.

A major problem with current NFT marketplaces, according to Varsamis, is that they are built using technology that is not interoperable with other chains and thus locked into specific blockchain ecosystems and unable to support multiple blockchains.

There are a few other multi-chain NFT aggregators like Mintify that focus on professional traders, like Blur.io and Curio. However, there is not a single interface that brings together all NFT collections and economies across marketplaces, liquidity and chains.

“NFT marketplaces compete with each other across and within the same chain ecosystem, creating competition and fragmentation of NFT liquidity,” he said.

Venture capital firms like Arca appear bullish on the NFT market which, despite recent slowing monthly trading volumes, still has a total market capitalization of at least $11.3 billion, according to Nansen.

“Following the dynamic rise to relevance of non-fungible assets over the past 24 months, there has been a strong need for infrastructure tools,” Sasha Fleyshman, a portfolio manager at Arca, said in a statement. “The ecosystem has grown at a rate such that the product lines have far outstripped the rails needed to serve the market effectively.”

When asked what Mintify’s vision of future markets looks like, Varsamis said:

“We believe many of the decentralized economies being built will run on NFT technology. Whether it’s on-chain music, Web3 gaming assets, metaverse real estate, or real estate representations, these verticals will create serious economic activity based on the NFT standard.”

The Mintify terminal starts with Ethereum support and has plans to introduce more chains and layer-2s in the coming months.

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