3 years ago, after graduating St Andrews University along with my friends, Misha and Abtin, we decided to take a business idea one step further and launch a start-up. The start- up was intended to develop socially responsible marketing by creating an advertising platform that benefitted charities. Its users would be able to make a cost-free donation by watching a quick video or by answering a questionnaire. We developed the app, partnered with a few Universities and prepared to test our beta version. Then Covid happened , Yaaay. It set us back a bit but we continued to work on the app. A few months later we were able to make a soft launch and started gaining some traction. Unfortunately our app was later removed from the IOS App store as they deemed we were solely an mobile advertising app which goes against their guidelines. We tried to fight it but without much success.

During the development of our app, one of our cofounders being Russian, another Irananian and the last Nigeria ( and yes this sounds like the beginning of a bar joke) it was quite hard and time consuming to move money around. This is where we got the idea of moving funds through crypto as the process was much simpler and faster than traditional methods. This was when I opened my first wallet (custodial on coinbase).

My curiosity took me a bit further and so I started learning about different crypto currencies and investing in some. About a year later I went down a rabbit hole on YouTube about Web 3 / NFTs and it was pretty much love at first sight. I realized that even though I’d been trading crypto here and there for over a year I had no real idea what a blockchain was nor how it worked, I was completely clueless about decentralization and it’s importance. I didn’t even even know what a non custodial wallet was. I tried to buy my first NFT through my Coinbase account and not a non custodial wallet, and as a result was utterly confused.

I eventually figured it out and opened a wallet and ventured on to buying my first NFTs. The first one I bought was what I thought was SOL degenerate Ape which I bought on OpenSea, I thought I was smarter than everyone else and bought it at a 90% discount. It was obviously a Rug. The second were multiple Mammoths that I minted on the Solana blockchain which also turned out to be a rug, (to be fair I had done barely any research and looked for the first thing I could mint). I then realised that if I wanted to participate in this space I had to do things properly. One of my best friends who had been in the space for a while recommended Mfers to me, I bought the first one I could get my hands on (which is actually my PFP right now) then the rest was history. I made my Twitter account got roughly about 500 followers in the first few days, which were all mfers and even opened what i’ll self proclaim as the first mfers Oncyber gallery.

By joining the mfers community I got to meet so many new , interesting people. I learned more and more about web 3 / blockchain every single day. The amount of educational threads and links to academic sources are unbelievable. In addition, people seemed to literally answer anything you wanted to know without anything in return. What struck me the most was the friendly community culture of starting off everyday with a simple “gm” (good morning). In my day to day life I literally say a hi or hello to anyone I make eye contact with, this has sometimes led to some awkward “do I know you situations”. The fact that pretty much everyone did that there was just amazing to me ; starting of the day with countless “Gms” is / was just fabulous. I pretty quickly realised that this was the space I wanted to work in. Not specifically NFTs but the whole space, understanding the importance of decentralisation, trust less and permission less protocols make complete sense to me especially with the way my brain works. It’s something that I’ve vocalized a lot in the past without realising this was what I was referring to. One of the main reasons we started our previous charity business was to empower users by monetizing their data and reducing exploitation by advertisers, but instead the money is sent to charity. In the future we’ll probably revisit this through a decentralized website or platform.

As mentioned before, when I first began my journey I went through multiple rugs (scams in other words) and lots of random learning in order to set up the right wallet and also acquire NFTs. This is how we came up with this idea. We wanted to make a game/platform where it would be simpler to onboard new users to the Web 3 space at no cost for the users and help acquire digital collectibles for free. Even though people (including me) always state that the best best way to learn is to get rugged or scammed; it’s probably just for us to sleep better at night. We also realized that there are so many talented creators who find it very hard to gain exposure, therefore the platform would serve as a way for the creators to gain the exposure they desire.

Finally, NFTs are mostly known for digital art but, as a technology we believe that there is so much more that they could do to help in everyday day life be it by, properly trading , academic record keeping, event tickets and so much more. The possibilities are endless and are merely being discovered. We want to be a catalyst in the adoption of NFTs in everyday life and hope this platform can do that.

So yeah… that’s how NFT race was born. Currently we’re touching up on a couple of features and will be ready for beta testing very soon, if you want to be part of it shoot us a message on twitter @touchemontoch or @nftraceeth, we will be glad to have you as a part of this journey.

If you made it this far thanks for reading have a good day. If you didn’t you’re definitely NGMI , jk.