Niftmint - NFTs for Brands on their channels

[mikemorgan]

Name of Project

Niftmint

Niftmint | NFTs for Brands

Proposal Overview

Niftmint is an enterprise retail-focused company allowing Brands to build loyalty and awareness, while selling new digital products directly on their website, without the need to manage or introduce cryptocurrency to the customers. Niftmint is the first NFT minting, listing, selling, and custody platform for Brands installed directly into their sales channels.

Brands don’t want to be sending their customers to Amazon or Ebay to buy their products, and so why are they sending their customers to third party marketplaces for NFTs? Furthermore, Brands don’t want their product listed directly next to other company’s products, and so why should they? With Niftmint, brands will be able to:

• Mint on demand or mint NFTs from your channels at the time of customer’s purchase

• List NFTs to their sales inventory, and introduce at checkout as ‘one-more-sale’ opportunities

• Sell NFTs to their customers in their active checkout cart, using the payment method they were already going to use (credit card, PayPal, etc).

• Custody the NFTs for brands, displaying the NFTs directly back to the customer, and only moving the NFTs out-of-network when the more advanced/savvy consumers wish to move their NFTs to their own personal wallets.

Niftmint is looking to partner with Harmony to support the NFT minting process for Niftmint. Niftmint will work as the Layer 2 application, facilitating the exchange between the Brand and the blockchain. Niftmint has had several conversations with $10bn+ revenue fashion and beauty companies looking to install the Niftmint NFT flow directly into their checkout process. With support, Harmony can become a preferred partner for the deployment of Niftmint into direct Brand sales channels, as well as be the gateway for NFT purchasing and adoption for the entire consumer ecosystem.

Product Details

On the brand and end-user side of Niftmint, while the consumer is going through the standard checkout flow on the Brand’s website, the NFT purchase is sent via API to Niftmint’s database. This will include the customer ID and the purchase data.

From here, an API triggers into the product specific smart contract to mint the NFT. The NFT is placed in a custodial wallet for the brand, and the customer database will be updated to reflect the NFT attribution to the customer ID.

As the NFT is attributed to the customer ID, an API displays NFT and customer ID back to the brand, and the brand displays this NFT back to the customer (in the user’s profile, account, et cetera).

If at any point the customer wants to move their NFT out of the custodial wallet and into their own personal wallet, they will provide their personal wallet address and Niftmint will transfer the NFT to the consumer.

Numerous designs for the user interface on both the brand and consumer side can be seen at www.niftmint.com

The API facilitating the display of the NFT back to the brand’s website is a Flask application that interfaces with the NFT smart contract, formatting the output and returning the output. The web service is hosted on Heroku.

Niftmint wants to integrate into Harmony to allow enterprise scale retail companies to mint NFTs on the Harmony blockchain.

Proposal Ask and Milestones

Total Allocation - $50,000
Estimated Timeline - 2.5 Months

Milestone 1 | Test Net
$20,000
Writing and deploying smart contracts on test-net to support 10K+ NFTs
During this period we will write the smart contract and architect to be able to create high volume batches of NFTs to support customer needs of high volume sales and attributing to customer ID
Timeline: 30 Days

Milestone 2 | Main Net
$10,000
Writing and deploying smart contracts on main-net to support 10K+ NFTs, plus the ability to add new NFT or repurpose smart contract for new high volume NFT contracts
Timeline: 14 Days

Milestone 3 | API smart contract deployment via eCommerce integration
$20,000
Our customers sell products on their websites. With this last milestone when a customer of the brand purchases an NFT on the eCommerce website we will create the NFT at that moment via API and attribute to the customer.
Timeline: 30 Days

Team

Niftmint, Inc.
A Delaware Corporation, Headquartered in Seattle, Washington

Jonathan G. Blanco - Founder, Technology, Commerce
Past: Retail Tech & Commerce exec @ Startups and Enterprise scale, 5+ years relevant blockchain experience

Mike Morgan - Partnerships, Operations, Database Infrastructure
Past: Management consultant & startup ops, 4+ years relevant blockchain experience (US/Can/Ch/HK/SG)

Rui Maximo - Blockchain Developer, Cybersecurity, Lead Programmer
Past: Smart Contract Auditor @ largest US Bank, ERC-20,721,1155 Smart Contract Development (5+ years), 20 years cybersecurity engineer

Vision

At Niftmint, we take a brand-first approach to NFT sales and integration. As such, we are in numerous conversations with household name media companies, multibillion dollar global retail companies, event hosting giants, and numerous other entities. We strive to provide a seamless engagement for both brand and consumers in purchasing, viewing, and custody of NFTs, and want to build into Harmony to facilitate this.

As the only NFT company focused on integrating into Brand’s active channels (as opposed to sending NFT considerations out to third party marketplaces), we have a significant inbound channel of Brands looking to integrate our solution.

Niftmint envisions itself as a mixture of Paypal, Stripe, and Coinbase. Niftmint will be the NFT purchasing portal for retail consumers, allowing for NFT purchase and the same way as any product they buy online. Niftmint will also be the custodian of NFTs, allowing consumers to see their NFTs in their Brand’s websites and accounts. As consumers don’t worry about shipping logistics, supply chains, financial institutions and merchant processors as they purchase products online from their favorite brands, consumers won’t worry about wallets, blockchains, crypto, or security as they purchase and own NFTs from their favorite brands.

[gabby]

@mikemorgan thank you for submitting this proposal to Harmony’s $300M Ecosystem Fund with exemplary detail.

We’re in the process of reviewing it with the grants committee. We would also love to have the Harmony community participate to ask questions and provide feedbacks.

[mikemorgan]

Thank you so much Gabby! We’d absolutely love to connect with the harmony community as well, as we’re excited about the potential of pushing enterprise scale NFT minting and transactions onto Harmony.

From the brands that we’ve been talking to, its become clear that the path for mass adoption for NFTs by Brands, and retail consumers (outside of the standard crypto ecosystem) will come from brand channel direct integration of seamless/frictionless NFT purchasing and viewing - and we’d love to have Harmony as a partner in this!

[gabby]

Hi @mikemorgan , this proposal fits best to the Launch grant based on the guidelines at Apply for Grants or DAO

Applications of each launch must have prototyped a feature-full product. Harmony helps incubate these founding teams with product development, fundraising, and talent recruit.
We recommend a $50K equity-free contribution each:

$10K after launching a feature-complete product on our testnet,
$10K after forming a DAO with 5-out-of-9 multisig with our DAOs,
$10K after launching on our mainnet with audit,
$10K after 1K daily active users (with launch video, full PR promotion),
$10K after 10k daily active users (with a detailed roadmap, governance process).

Moreover, we recommend a 5-out-9 multisig account on Gnosis Safe with 3 governors from the project team, 3 governors from the project community, and 3 governors from Harmony DAOs – namely, ONEcommunityDAO, ONEdeveloperDAO, ONEincubatorDAO.

In all cases, we ask for 3-month exclusive campaigns with Harmony before more porting with other chains. We also offer follow-on investments – see 50 Investments ($20M) above; but, at the moment, you must have an outside, lead investor for us to match the funding terms. All codes, development materials and production assets must be fully open, preferrably with MIT or BSD licences; weekly updates must on sent on forum; and, all server deploys or mobile apps must be easily clonable.

Can we agree to the above terms?

[gabby]

Also, please note, we’re still reviewing the business model.

[mikemorgan]

Hi @gabby! Thanks for asking about the standard Launch grant terms.

The milestone structure you laid out is a structure for orgs that are forming their own DAOs, things marketed towards already existing crypto users, games/collectibles/etc. With our project, we’re taking a much wider approach at NFTs - no longer thinking about them as exclusive collectibles, but moreso as inventory for your average retail consumer (the way that Brands and retailers are trying to adopt them).

With Niftmint, we’re not going to have a DAO, and DAU/MAU KPIs aren’t applicable to our project. We’ve tranched out our milestones in a way that keeps us and Harmony mutually aligned to integrate the NFT minting feature of Niftmint onto Harmony’s protocol. Rather than DAUs, I’d think about it as either:

1.) Unique number of brands that have the Niftmint integration installed on their website using Harmony as the backend blockchain protocol,
2.) Unique number of customers that have purchased NFT inventory from brands on their websites using Harmony as the backend blockchain protocol, or
3.) Total number of NFTs that have been purchased through the NFT integration (with harmony as the backend blockchain protocol).

That being said, the proposal should give a fairly clear idea of what Niftmint is trying to build, but we’re more than happy to have any/all talks with you, your team, or anyone else at Harmony to help clarify how this integration is going to work, and how the milestones/allocations for each milestone will allow us to complete this integration.

Thank you!

[Jacksteroo]

Re: the structure, Harmony’s Launch grant caps at $40k if there are no DAOs formed.

Questions:

• Brands - which brands are you partnered with thus far? Curious to know existing relationships
• Payments - which payment rails/merchants is the team planning to partner with?
• Team - can you elaborate what “relevant blockchain experience” mean when it comes to NFTs?

Thanks

[mikemorgan]

Hey @Jacksteroo! Thank you for the clarification and additional questions. I don’t want to devalue what Niftmint is currently building - and how this approach is focused on bringing widespread NFT adoption rather than just creating for the already-crypto environment - but that being said, I full well understand communal requirements that Harmony has in place and how that can limit grant caps.

Running down your questions below:

Brands: I can’t give specifics on the names of the companies, but three I can run down for you that we have paid engagements with right now for Niftmint’s services are:

• A well known American film/media franchise (running since the 90s) with $200m+ box office sales
• One of the largest retail conferences in the world held annually in Las Vegas (~10,000 attendees, 3,000+ unique brands)
• A large US based non-profit (501c3) with $25m+ in annual revenue

Payments: Great question. An important distinction is that we’re not building new payment rails. Since the NFTs are treated as inventory for the brands, the sales of the NFT go through all the major payment processors that the brands already use (i.e. stripe, paypal, block, etc). Nifmtint will have treasury from existing engagements with which to facilitate the crypto fees for NFT minting, and then will rectify these expenses and payments with the brands. The workflow for payments is incredibly simple and easy.

Team: Our CEO, Jonathan, has run for several years a blockchain conference and event company, TF Labs, and has had numerous speaking and interviewing engagements relating to NFTs.
More importantly, the third member of our team, Rui, has extensive experience with blockchain development. He has written several smart contracts for NFTs on ad-hoc basis. He has also previous served as the SVP of Engineering for StormX, alongside numerous consulting and development roles. He’s about as bona fide as they come in the crypto world.

Thanks Jack!

[Jacksteroo]

@mikemorgan our Launch grants have a structure that’s well-defined (see @gabby’s reply up top). The DAO formation is quite straightforward, we strongly suggest to have a wallet ready to receive the grant funds be a multisig wallet. We suggest to eventually solicit governors from the other DAOs mentioned above and when found, swap out the wallet addresses with the new governors’ wallets. This will encourage your team to actively involve the Harmony community, much like how a project like MarsColony 👽 - play to earn, colonization game-fi with full community control [Approved] will help to ramp up interest and takes off organically.

We understand this is an increase in administrative effort, and the intent is to generate a long term benefit between your team and the engagement with the Harmony community. Also, we recognize hat the cost incurred from software development is not aligned with when the grant funds disbursement schedule, but please understand that these are goal-driven milestones that we have as part of the guidelines of our ecosystem grant explained in Apply for Grants or DAO

All-in-all when your platform launches, it will be interesting to see this takes shape once it’s structured in a way to involve Harmony’s community sooner than later. We will be able to support from a co-marketing perspective. Your team may require to invest a bit of effort and resources up front. Thoughts?

[CryptoSan]

A promising idea catering to e-commerce ecosystem

[Jacksteroo]

Hi @mikemorgan can you confirm that the funding structure works?

[Jacksteroo]

Thanks for taking the time to discuss this. This is an infrastructure play at building a foundation for different brands and audiences that are non-crypto native to adopt NFT with traditional payment rails.

Categorizing this as a Bounty and approved for $50K. Looking forward to working with you and the team on this and welcome to the Harmony Ecosystem!

Looking forward to the initiative to launch on Harmony’s Mainnet with the 3 milestones above.

Meanwhile, to prepare receiving funds, email your identification documents to kyc@harmony.one and create a Gnosis Safe MultiSig wallet at https://multisig.harmony.one and using instructions below
Setup Gnosis Safe with MetaMask & 1Wallet

Checkout the Funding FAQ for further info at Harmony Funding FAQ

We’d love to see weekly updates on this channel to keep the community posted on this proposal’s progress!

[mikemorgan]

Thanks so much @Jacksteroo, @gabby, the entire Harmony team, and everyone who asked questions! We’re so exited to begin building into Harmony, and will have some great updates for the entire community coming down the pipe soon.

Thank you all again for the support, and i’m looking forward towards a long, long relationship with Harmony!

-Mike

[jgblanco]

Thank you @Jacksteroo! We are so excited to be part of the Harmony family. @gabby so glad we met in person in Miami which drove us to this amazing community!

We are really excited to build and scale with Harmony and looking forward to onboarding net-new users purchasing their first NFTs with our partner brands to experience Harmony.

[cheualx]

Hi @mikemorgan - following up on current status and if you need any help. I would encourage your team to update any milestones you’ve completed on here. Thank you!

[mikemorgan]

Hey @cheualx!

Please forgive me for taking so long to get back to your message. Things are going great on our end! From the business side, we have great active paying clients and are growing that list, we just moved in to our first office in Seattle, and we’ve had a couple successful deployments.

For the two most recent deployments, both clients set other blockchains as part of the program requirements - we pushed hard for Harmony in both instances as not only does it unlock the grants, but we genuinely believe in this chain and want to help clients on to it / add to the overall interaction and traffic.

Regarding live product and demos, you can view the user flow that we stood up for one project here → www.FutureOfRetail.Niftmint.com, or see our update website alone at www.Niftmint.com

In other good news, since submitting the grant, our team has grown from 3 to 7, including an amazing blockchain developer who is focused full time on blockchain development and integration. He used to be a core developer for another noteworthy chain, and is excited to further explore into Harmony.

On a final note, if anyone from the Harmony team is interested, we’d love to do another call/video touchbase with the main team. We’re incredibly pleased with our progress to this point, and are happy to have Harmony supporting us along the way.

Best Regards,

-Mike

[AKExcalibur]

Congrats @mikemorgan and @jgblanco! We, Partavate Studios, are also Harmony grant applicants, and have previously worked with NiftMint as collaborators on a small project.

They’re a great team, and very active community builders here in Seattle. It’ll be exciting to follow both NiftMint and our game, Orbiter8’s developments with the Harmony community!

[mikemorgan]

Oh yeah!! We love Partavate studios! You’re all amazing developers, the depth of talent on your roster is out of this world. Orbiter8 is SUCH a cool project, I’m glad you’re working with Harmony!

[jbeltran]

Hi there team!
Would you please update the milestones of the project?
We would like to see new advances.

Thank you!

[mikemorgan]

Hey @jbeltran, if you haven’t had a chance to see the www.FutureOfRetail.Niftmint.com integration we did for the ShopTalk conference, please have a look.

We’re finishing up the integration with Harmony for the release of our own, TF Labs conferences. The live web app should go live this week, with people claiming their NFTs from past conference attendance, and getting their NFT for this coming conference’s attendance (https://www.tflabs.io/tf-blockchain-web3-con-seattle).

This should fulfill both our Milestones 1 and 2, with the 3rd milestone coming when we have a live integration onto a brand’s native ecommerce platform, that we’re still actively building against.

We’re excited about the live minting, display, custody and transfer of NFTs on Harmony and having the web app live and running here shortly!