My real name is Martim Molina. I’m a 25 year old degen-trepreneur born and raised in Portugal to an American-Nicaraguan mom and a Portuguese dad. I like cheesy pizza, big roller coasters, old pokémon cards, funky hip-hop, long marvel movies, and since August 2021, NFTs.
It all started when my cousin, who’s 5 years younger than me, and who was already really into crypto, showed me his Coinbase Wallet with his NFTs; One which was a Pudgy Penguin with a crown which he had recently bought for roughly 1 ETH which was growing in price. For some reason, looking at a wallet with digital assets made me feel like I was in the future. It just made sense.
Years back when I was 18, I kept telling my parents (who’ve run a paintball field for over 20 years) that one day they would be able to give field visitors paintball goggles and outfits for their virtual avatars as a sort of collectible or something to remember the real experience by. And digital collectibles like that would be everywhere. I saw it as a worldwide GTA-Online meets Pokémon Go. The Internet Universe is what I called it.
It’s not really a big fast-forward. Its was like the next day after knowing about NFTs that I bought a SympathyForTheDevils NFT (which I later sold to CryptoMason lol). But probably the best experience I ever had in the space came a day later from The Mike Tyson Collection by Cory Van Lew. For those who’ve never heard of it, hopefully you’ve heard of Mike Tyson. It was his official collection in collaboration with an emerging artist called Cory Van Lew and the pieces looked sick. It had barely been advertised, and it was dropping that night, and out of ~500 pieces (most which were editions of 50-250) 10 of them were 1 of 1s going up for auction that night.
I saw it as a once in a lifetime opportunity. If I teamed up with my cousin, we maybe could mint a 1 of 1 Mike Tyson, so that’s what we tried to do. On the last seconds of the auction I prayed, and I don’t usually pray. The last seconds passed and we won.
These things don’t happen often. In fact they don’t happen at all and will not happen ever again. I wish I knew that sooner. When we sold it, I was driving with my cousin in the car. He opens his email and just starts screaming. I had to pull over. We just started blabbering screams of happiness, dancing, rolling on the floor, to the point people came out of a grocery store next to where we were to look at us. I called my parents, I called my ex who was my gf at the time, I called my best friend. It was a nice little moment, but several rug pulls and red days on the market later, I think back how good it would have been if my involvement in crypto and NFTs had stopped there.
It has everything to do. During the 12 days before selling the NFT, we had a very niche NFT in our hands. It’s not anyone who has 85 ETH on their hands, and who’s ready to spend it on a Mike Tyson NFT; Especially when very few people knew about the collection, let alone NFTs.
People didn’t know about this collection. But we had a feeling that if people knew about it, or if we found a way to put the NFT in people’s faces, it would help us sell.
In case you haven’t heard of the story of the Million Dollar Homepage, back in 2006, a guy called Alex Tew decided he would create a page with a million pixels, and sell each pixel for a dollar giving the buyer the freedom of placing a link on that pixel. The idea quickly went viral and Alex made the million dollars.
I was fascinated with the idea for a long time. Most of all, I liked that he was able to create an iconic “place” on the internet which people come back to visit. The only problem about the place he created, was that its static, the visuals don’t change, and about 99% of the links on there are not working or are irrelevant by now.
But what if I created a similar page for NFTs that was dynamic? And people who are looking to gain attention on their NFTs could use it to drive more visitors to their listing page? Well, that was the beginning of the idea. Then it was a lot of drawing, brainstorming, deciding, and finding help from the right people to get Mintedgem to where it is now. And Mintedgem today is still only at the start.
Months before buying my first NFT, I had bought a domain called mintedgem.com which I was going to use to make an online store for selling PSA graded trading cards. Trading cards, when in pristine condition, are labeled Gem Mint 10. But quickly I realized the name made even more sense for NFTs.
To conclude (and I promise), I really do believe Web3 needs a front page of NFT. If you have a special punk, a special ape, or anything else that’s special that you want to sell, you deserve to have more eyes on it than just the people who visit the collection page and skim through your item. If Mintedgem can provide a service where you pay $20 or so, (better even, you decide the price) to have several thousands more people see your listing, not only will you be more likely to sell, but you will get the liquidity you need faster and are more likely to sell at a value you deserve.
Additionally, the more you’re willing to pay for more attention on your NFT, the more interesting it is for the rest of us. Why are you paying $3 a day to showcase your NFT at the top of the front page to the NFT community? Maybe because you think 100k is a fair price for it, and we want to help you connect with that buyer so that you can scream and dance and call your family the moment you sell.
To sum it all up, why I believe we need Mintedgem:
Empower sellers to reach a wider audience for faster more profitable sales.
Empower buyers to find more interesting opportunities at less effort.
Allow collections to advertise to consumers in a fair safe place. (Plz stop DMing me on Twitter/Instagram/Discord! I will not click on your links!!)
Onboard new user groups and the mainstream into NFTs and Web3.
Establish a central trading place for the NFT community that’s marketplace and blockchain agnostic (with no fees).
To me, it goes back to the “place” Alex created with the Million Dollar Homepage. If we can create a place for NFTs, that the larger NFT community is excited to keep revisiting, we will funnel in the most interesting offers of the market for all of us to see. I believe it’ll benefit everyone from small to large Collectors, Collections, Communities, and Marketplaces, and make mainstream adoption easier and closer than ever.
Thanks for the read. I’ll be posting more about the ongoing story of the 1001 Squares here on mirror.xyz and in the meantime, you can catch me as Axe on the Mintedgem Discord discord.gg/mintedgem or on Twitter @AxeMintedgem.
Stay safe and see you around.
P.S. Most of the money I made with the Mike Tyson NFT I lost on Logan Paul’s stupid Zoo Coin.
Sorry Mom.
