Why we invested in Fair.xyz

We believe that NFTs will play a significant role in bringing the next million (billion?) people into web3, serving as a key part of onboarding web2 users into the decentralised world. Yet the current NFT infrastructure is lacking, resulting in a standard user experience which is fraught with issues that represent considerable hurdles to unlocking this next wave of users. 

That’s why firstminute has invested in Fair.xyz, which is innovating at each level of the NFT stack with an eye on how this ultimately translates to broader adoption. We have seen many iterations of verticalised marketplaces - across music (Royal), art (Foundation), digital fashion (The Dematerialised), gaming (Fractal) and more - which aim to drive greater uptake. The Fair.xyz platform takes a horizontal approach, serving as a infrastructure layer that abstracts away tech challenges and improves integrity issues using smart queuing technology, thus delivering a superior - and crucially more fair - NFT minting experience for both creators and consumers. 

How? For creators, Fair addresses issues associated with minting large NFT collections and whitelisting. Fair empowers creators to launch NFTs cheaper, faster and with no need to hire tech talent. For collectors, Fair addresses issues associated with unfair minting practices, the woes of gas wars, and subpar discoverability and search capabilities. Fair enables consumers to mint NFTs with confidence, empowered by the assurance that they will not be victims of exorbitant gas fees and are engaging with legitimate products. In short, Fair delivers an overall better user experience which is code free, cheaper and high integrity. 

The team is led by Issac, Issac, and Nathan - three engineers with deep experience across data science, machine learning and web3 consumer products from their time at Meta, Goldman Sachs and Instagram. We first met the trio in early 2022, and were immediately impressed by their ambition, energy, and vision for rewriting the rules of the NFT launch experience. Their profound understanding of the problems faced by creators and consumers is rooted in personal experience on both sides, most notably through their NFT collection experience (check out their mad cool Party bones collection - complete with onchain merge functionality!). And of course, their incredible integrity shone through at each step of the process - very fitting for a team whose product is built on the ethos of transparency and fairness. Few moments exemplified this more than when the team paused their fundraise to partner with the Ukraine government to raise funds for the war efforts via the Meta History NFT sale.