Quick take:
- Gary Vaynerchuk’s VaynerFund, Packy McCormick’s Not Boring Capital, Amy Wu and RTFKT participated in the round.
- Co:Create aims to manage and engage communities through DAOs.
- The startup is already in talks with NFT projects that participated in the funding round.
Web3 protocol Co:Create has raised $25 million in seed funding to help NFT projects launch their own native tokens. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) with participation from Gary Vaynerchuk’s VaynerFund, Packy McCormick’s Not Boring Capital, FTX’s head of ventures and gaming, Amy Wu, and RTFKT, along with over 50 investors and Web3 angels.
Inspired by the successful launch of Yuga Labs’ native utility ApeCoin in March, Co:Create is a new protocol that aims to provide NFT projects with the tools and infrastructure to mint NFTs, as well as launch their own DAOs and fungible tokens associated with their collections.
The launch of ApeCoin, the native token of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, Mutant Ape Yacht Club and Otherdeed NFT collections, has shown the wider Web3 community the potential of tying a token to the performance of NFTs. ApeCoin is also the governance token of ApeDAO.
Using its “factory method,” the Co:Create protocol generates customisable tokens and treasuries for NFT projects, allowing royalties to be distributed in the native tokens to the NFT creator, the NFT project’s DAO, and the NFT buyer, using a decentralised exchange swap.
One of Co:Create’s core pillars is to empower NFT projects to expand their reach. The startup believes that launching native tokens is a more scalable way for NFT creators to expand and engage their community, especially when it’s a blue-chip collection that not everyone can afford.
“The recent launch of ApeCoin expanded the Bored Ape ecosystem beyond its few thousand collection holders. By introducing a native token, the project now has the potential to reach millions of community members,” Co:Create CEO Tara Fung wrote in a blog post.
The protocol’s second goal is to help projects incentivise their communities through grants and rewards. For instance, third-party developers may build games centred around an NFT project in exchange for a portion of the project’s tokens.
Lastly, its third pillar is decentralised governance, and Co:Create hopes that a native token that represents membership in a DAO can give voice to every member of the community.
Co:Create CEO Tara Fung told TechCrunch that the full protocol will launch in beta this autumn, while its website with developer tools and documentation are expected to be released this summer. Fung said that the protocol will be multi-chain and chain agnostic.
Fung added that Alberto Simon, co-founder of art investing platform Masterworks, is leaving his current role at Nifty Gateway to join Co:Create as a co-founder and chief product officer. Two other founders are in the process of exiting their current roles to join Co:Create full time.
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