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Epic Web3 Weekly 🗞

Fireside chat with POAP co-founder on mass adoption and over 20 actionable talks at Epic Web3 Conference

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Epic Web3

Feb 27, 2023

GM, fellow Web3 frens 🖖

Welcome to Epic Web3 Newsletter — your weekly dose of actionable insights from the major Web3 experts. Every Monday at 10 AM (WET/GMT) we take your products TO THE MOON 🚀

🔥 Epic Web3 Conference: Program Sneak Peek

We've got major news. The moment you've been waiting for... Drum roll please...

We’re thrilled to reveal a sneak peek at our conference agenda! The upcoming event promises to be an immersive and transformative experience, with a diverse lineup of speakers, panel discussions, networking opportunities, and more.

On June 9th, you'll be able to delve into the hottest Web3 growth topics, including:

🔸 What the front line of mass adoption looks like (Q&A session with Isabel Gonzalez, Co-Founder at POAP);

🔸 How MetaMask Snaps are revolutionizing blockchain personalization and community involvement (Ryan Jones, Director of Product Management at ConsenSys)

🔸 How account abstraction can enable onboarding the next 1B users to Web3 (Stefan George, Co-Founder & CTO at Gnosis);

🔸 How WalletConnect built the interoperability standard connecting Web3 (Pedro Gomes, Co-Founder at WalletConnect);

🔸 Revolutionizing DEXs: How to create a seamless user experience (Stephanie Bell, Customer Experience Lead at Uniswap);

🔸 Antifragile Marketing: How to decouple Web3 adoption from market performance (Andrés Bóveda Alasia, Product Marketing Manager at MetaMask);

🔸 Bear Market Community Building: How to maximize engagement with virtual launch events (Clara Martucci, Director of Social Media at Star Atlas);

🔸 Lessons from CoinStats: Strategies for increasing DeFi Product Adoption by 2x (Vahe Baghdasaryan, Senior Growth Marketing Manager at CoinStats);

🔸 And much more!

No stories, just strategies. No tales, just tactics. No anecdotes, just actions. We’ll announce more sessions and speakers in the coming days, so stay tuned!

Don't miss the only how-to event in Web3. Grab a ticket for Epic Web3 Conference NOW.

Get a ticket before the price increase

P.S. Go to the “Community Insights” part to get a 15% promo code discount! 🤫👇

🧞‍♂️ From MVP to full-scale product. Community Insights on the Rarible success.

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Rarible is an online marketplace that allows users to purchase, sell, and trade non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Founded in 2020, Rarible has developed into one of the world’s top NFT marketplaces with:

~$16 million raised in total funding
more than 2 million users registered
support for three blockchains

Mac Budcowski (the host of Web3 Talks podcast) talked to Alex Salnikov, co-founder and CSO at Rarible, to know how the company went from a napkin MVP to one of the leading NFT marketplaces & protocols.

Let’s dive into the most exciting insights from this talk:

Acquiring first users

Rarible, which doesn’t have formal headquarters, was founded by Alexander Salnikov, Alexei Falin, and Ilya Komolkin. After several months of hard work, they released the first version of the Rarible marketplace in January 2020.

Back to those days, when NFTs were much less popular than they are now, the team spent a good amount of effort to create a slick, “Apple-styled”, website. They paid a lot of attention to the UI states: how to connect a wallet, how to send a transaction, and to the overall UX to make the product as user-friendly as it could be.

After that, Ilya Komolkin got to Twitter to reach out to modern NFT artists, showcasing the website page, and started to (re)tweet the best content that was created on Rarible. These actions helped to form a special Twitter feed that made people want to follow it, as they saw curated content made by cool leading digital artists in the space. This is how the first users began to be acquired.

Launching a token

In July 2020, Rarible launched the $RARI governance token and rolled out yield farming on Rarible to create reward active users and to create an incentive for people to buy digital art on the platform.

This made the governance of the platform directly dependent on its most active users, and further positioned Rarible as a public good operated by its community.

However, there were some challenges in the very beginning: early adopters of the platform had their own vision of how it should work. But since Rarible was originally a private, not public, company, it wasn’t easy for them to operate like an actual DAO: when you have the internal processes in the company that are structured strictly, it’s not that easy to accept any of users’ requests and go fulfill them right away.

Reorganizing community-centric operations

To improve the processes, Rarible made several iterations in their operations that resulted in a fully on-chain DAO with a governance structure that included outlined and well-written values, goals, etc.

They also decided to go with a ‘narrow’ approach, cutting down on the number of contributors, so each of them can be vetted and audited for being aligned with the company’s main goals.

“Make sure that everybody’s on the same page, because if not, it quickly degrades into running around”

Alex Salnikov, co-founder and CSO at Rarible

Going beyond the NFT marketplace

The company didn’t want to limit itself to and serving just as the marketplace for NFT artists or traders, that’s why they decided to move down the infrastructure side.

In August 2021, Rarible introduced the Rarible Protocol, an open-source API that allows it to onboard various blockchains. While many other NFT marketplaces were focused on the Ethereum blockchain, Rarible has already been able to establish connections with other chains like Flow or Tezos, which helped to expand its overall addressable market.

One of this protocol’s most exciting features is the ability to split fees during the exchange process. This means that NFTs can be co-created, with revenue from sales and trades distributed amongst all the artists or creators involved.

What metrics Rarible is focusing on

GMV (Gross Merchandise Volume) is their #1 metric, as they need to measure the volume that goes through the platform and to understand that people are actually making transactions.

Everything else is a proxy metric to the GMV: how many people went to the marketplace, how many of them connected their wallet, added items to their cards, how much of the listed item you have as a supply, etc.

Hey! If you’re curious to know more about:

— How Rarible plans to compete in an NFT market dominated by OpenSea, LooksRare & Blur;

— How communities can provide liquidity to their own NFT marketplaces;

— Why Rarible is a strong promoter of creators' royalties…

Then hop on the Web3 Talks podcast to listen to the full episode.

🔥 Extra news: Roman Prokhorenko, Growth Lead at Rarible, is joining Epic Web3 Conference, so you’ll get a chance to get on a consultation with him!

And the best part: Mac shared a 15% discount promo code for Epic Web3 Conference to his listeners, grab it now 👇

Listen to the podcast