RealizedRhapsody

When we got into the NFT space it was easy. Some of us were there for the very first Solana NFT launch, and for months anything we could get our hands on seemed to go up by a factor of 100. It was out of control in a really fun “net worth” way. But then the market exploded and the number of projects soared. Picking winners became increasingly difficult. Rug after rug caused our confidence to falter, by late October, our early outsized gains had taken a beating.

Looking at a project’s website, going through their discord, and tracking their twitter followers became an overwhelming task, and no longer uncovered alpha. The scale became a nightmare. The simple times of the early months were over. We felt sidelined, and the party seemed to happen in places we weren’t looking. We needed to gain some form of control and predictability in the growing chaos.

We looked at other NFT markets to see what the “smart money” did, and learned quickly that the outsized gains came to those who used a combination of data tools to track the pulse of the market.

Given the fast-growing developer community on Solana we were surprised to learn that there were no unbiased data insights providers in the Solana NFT space at the time. Some were offering secondary marketplace data based on APIs, but none seemed to mine the actual chain.

Initially, we saw this as an opportunity to gain an unfair advantage for our eyes only. But we soon realized that the real returns aren’t made digging for gold in a gold rush, they are made providing picks and shovels to the miners.

To do this we had to get real. Though we had some data analysis prowess of our own, we also knew enough to recognize we didn’t possess the skills and tools needed to deliver a reliable, performant data insights product. Attracting senior tech talent to the wild west of NFTs struck us as a daunting task. But by a big stroke of luck, we managed to lure some tech cowboys.

However, tech cowboys are expensive, mining the blockchain is expensive, interpreting undocumented structures into sensible data and developing analytics is expensive.

The development timeline our dev team put together was a real wake up call. Our initial roadmap and budgets were delusional. Our warchest dwindled faster than UST’s dollar peg. We had to secure funding fast.

The word ‘Community’ has received negative press of late, but we would have never pulled this off without the friends we’ve made in the Solana community. Long story short, we got some funding and have waded our way through to the first version of NFT Insights, and we’re ready for a reveal. We are excited to invite you to the new standard in Solana NFT analytics.