Web3 Series: closed rounds and Sotheby's NFT marketplace

Good morning all ?? Welcome to a weekly newsletter covering top fundraising deals, industry trends and tech deep-dives in the crypto and blockchain space.

?? Last week's closed deals

Cookbook ?- development tooling

??US

??Raised $2 million?

Investors: MaC Venture Capital, Tagus Capital, Superscrypt and Alchemy

Blurb: Cookbook is a registry and index of smart contracts, which developers can audit and/or directly use to build their applications. It easily allows for users to search for and review coding templates for NFTs, Airdropping, DAOs and many more.

More info:?

• Cookbook’s smart contracts can directly be found in coding platform Remix through a recently launched plug-in
• The platform is free to use, but those who post smart contracts can decide to impose royalties for developers who use them

Blocktorch - development insights and monitoring

??Berlin, Germany

??Raised $4.2 million (Seed)

Investors: Ideo CoLab Ventures, Speedinvest, RockawayX, Alchemy Ventures (that backed Shield and Pinata), Remote First Ventures, Max Stoeckl (Dogami CEO), Henry Chen (GP WAGMI Ventures), Entrepreneur First.

Blurb: Compared to what Datadog did for Cloud, Blockctorch aims to do the same but for decentralised applications. Blocktorch is a data observability solution allowing developers to understand the behaviour and performance of their applications. The types of insights include logs, transactions and traces.

Artifact Labs - infrastructure

??Hong-Kong

??Raised? $3.25M (Seed)

Investors: Blue Pool Capital (fund managed by founders of Alibaba), Animoca Ventures

Blurb: Originally incubated by the South China Morning Post (SCMP) newspaper, Artifact Labs is an easy-to-use development tooling solution? to develop smart contracts. Its target use case and technology is adapted to tokenize historical artefacts.

More info:?

• Artifact Labs has built its own Ethereum NFT standard called the Cultural and Historical Asset Token (CHAT) or ERC6596 that provides metadata that is more contextual and adapted to “establish historical significance and value”
• You can find the EIP here. And EIP is the formal process and format for anyone to suggest new ideas to implement on the Ethereum network

?? Industry update : "Sotheby’s Metaverse" extends its NFT platform

Sotheby’s, a 275-year-old art auction house, deployed its peer-to-peer secondary marketplace for anyone to buy, sell and exchange pieces of art that are backed by NFT (Non-Fungible Token) technology.?

In 2021, Sotheby’s had already launched “Sotheby’s Metaverse”, a special space on their website dedicated to the sale of art backed by NFTs. However, this platform only allowed for primary sales, while this secondary marketplace means that anyone can buy and sell the art that has been listed by the auction house. The benefit of using blockchain to tokenize art is to track the sales and ownership of that art as well as trace and automate royalty payments for artists. This launch of a secondary marketplace shows that a platform like Blur or OpenSea might not be the most adequate in terms of image for fine artists like the ones curated by Sotheby’s. Indeed, the short-term trading and speculative angle of the NFT space is not the only one of interest: digital-only art is growing and collectors need the right technology to prove that they own the original creator’s asset. Art lovers do not always buy the art because they are backed by NFTs, they buy it for what it is while feeling more secure that they are also NFTs and backed by a legacy auction house. Moreover, it comes at a moment where some of these more general marketplaces have decided not to honour the royalty rates set by artists.

The marketplace being built on blockchains Polygon and Ethereum, users can pay in either ETH or MATIC and the platform will be able to automate payment to each artist, who personally chooses their royalty rate. Sotheby's will also rotate the featured artists every few months, with the launch featuring works from 13 leading digital artists. Users can use wallets like Metamask when purchasing NFTs on the platform, but Sotheby’s also makes it easy to on-board people not accustomed to web3 wallets by hosting its own embedded wallet. This initiative is done with the help of scaleup, Mojito, a web3 studio that supports the creation of marketplaces, payment and other features such as token-gating.?

The name used for the project, “Sotheby’s Metaverse”, obviously shows that the auction house sees the use of NFTs as beneficial specifically for digital art. In fact, it will also launch a digital gallery on Oncyber’s 3D virtual spaces platform. It is important to note that NFTs in the art world are not only useful for digital art, but can also allow for proof of authenticity of physical pieces. And outside of the art industry, NFTs is a technology that can be used for various tangible or intangible assets that might not have any visuals representing them or as part of their metadata.

You can find the marketplace here (feel free to test and create a wallet) and Sotheby’s Head of Digital Art and NFTs explaining its vision here.?

See you next week! ??

?? Feel free to reach out if you have any feedback, ideas, any companies you'd like to share or concept like you'd like to hear more of.