The seed investment round, which raised $5.1M in funding for the NFT utility platform Tropee, was led by the European-based Web3 firm Tioga Capital.
About Investment
Key names from the crypto ecosystem such as Sébastien Borget from The Sandbox, Thibault Launay from Exclusive, Grégoire le Jeune from Geometry and Lorens Huculak, founder of Gem, which was acquired by OpenSea, participated in the share round, which closed in August. The project refused to share its pricing.
Initiatives that simplify the mining processes of NFTs have been attracting a lot of attention from blockchain investors in the recent period. Haun Ventures and OpenSea recently provided funding for their no-code NFT minting platforms Highlight and Fair.xyz. Tropee draws attention because it is a project that focuses on the ‘post-mint’ period, rather than addressing the mint process directly.
Although the founder of the Tropee, François Mahl, conveyed in an interview that users should at least have knowledge of the use of crypto wallets, he stated that users can have an enjoyable experience around brands’ NFTs with relatively little technical knowledge.
“It could be an event, it could be merchandise, a 1 to 1 with a celebrity, an exclusive video, or maybe even an audiobook,” he explained.
Mahl stated that the post-mint process is still complex and has to work with inefficient criteria such as relying on Google forms and Discord servers.
Tropee was founded in May last year by a team of four people, including the co-founder of French Meero unicorn, and will help brands such as G-Star and NFT to provide utility to their Christian Lacroix collections, Mähl said.
NFT Utilities
This year, Paradigm led a $16 million investment round for the NFT membership platform Hang, digital property startup Arianee received an investment of $21 million from Tiger Global and the French sovereign wealth fund Bpifrance. Last month, Electric Capital made a $4.2 million investment in Lasso Labs, a project that allows NFT owners to track the utility of their assets. These investments were made despite the fact that volumes on their marketplaces surged and the base prices of popular collections fell throughout the year.
According to the research, in January this year, the popular Ethereum NFT market OpenSea saw a volume of close to $ 5 billion, while this figure fell to $ 326.4 million last month.
But Mahl, the founder of Tropee, is not worried about the base prices of popular collections. He thinks the trend will help transform technology into something more closely related to utility.
“A lot of people were buying not because they were passionate about the community or because they were passionate about their NFTs but because they wanted to make a quick buck. The next phase will be about buying NFTs to enjoy value out of them whether that be real life or digital value.”Founder of the Tropee, François Mahl
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