Launchpad & Marketplace

Nonfungible tokens, commonly known as NFTs, have taken the world by storm. They are unique and irrefutable digital representations of either digital or physical assets, and they reside on the immutable digital ledger called the blockchain.

NFTs, as nonfungible tokens are commonly referred to are the hottest selling cakes in the crypto domain. It all started with one digital painting by the renowned digital artist Beetle selling it out for a staggering $70 million to MetaKovan. Which is about a 10th of the value of the most valued painting on the planet, the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci.

This tsunami started a series of ripples of a lot of nonfungible tokens being created left, right, and center.

Parallel to musicians and artists, a lot of celebrities like Jack Dorsey, Lindsay Lohan, Shaquille O’Neal, and Amitabh Bachchan have started to release their own NFTs featuring some of their most iconic creations.

This creates a little clash between two different marketing methods. On one side, small artists might want to capitalize on the crowd presence in marketplaces, so they can maximize their chances of selling the artwork for a good value. Slowly, they can start building their brand within NFT marketplaces.

On the other side, people who have already established a proper brand presence through their names might not want to get lost in the massive flurry of artworks that are present in marketplaces. They might want to create a unique proposition for themselves using signature websites that list only their own NFTs and only for buying. Such websites or platforms on fittingly referred to as NFT launchpads.

This brings us to the billion-dollar debate of whether you should go for a marketplace or a launchpad!

Benefits of a Marketplace

The marketplace model is the best place to start for people who have not already built a brand for themselves. In short, they have to piggyback on the brand value that has been created by the marketplace.

In the marketplace, there is already an active crowd of enthusiastic NFT consumers always spending valuable time.

It all comes down to the question of whether an NFT will get visibility if it is present in a crowded marketplace or if it is better for the NFT to reside on a platform that has built its appeal over an already existing brand.

Another advantage of the NFT is that the technical complications are quite low. Since the marketplace has already been perfected as a product, it is just about creating the artwork, deciding the price, paying the minting cost, and launching it on the platform.

The marketplace also gives you the option to individually market your creation. If you have your own communication channels like Facebook, Instagram, discord, and telegram, you can consider marketing your creation just like how you would market any digital entity.

In short, the marketplace model is best suited for someone who does not have enough brand muscle and who does not have deep pockets to build their NFT ecosystem from scratch.

The launchpad

The launchpad can be considered the premium offering of the NFT ecosystem. It brings a sense of exclusivity and is a flexing move when it comes to brand presence. Not every person can launch a proper NFT launchpad because it needs to, as the name implies, take off with a big thrust.

No amount of digital marketing money can provide that trust unless there is a proper brand presence and power.

Most of the NFT offerings by celebrities have been done on launchpads. This makes better sense because they have the capacity to attract crowds, and the fan following that they have ensures that there is no chance of their premium NFT offerings not getting sold.

Although the NFT launchpad, on the surface, seems like a lucrative idea, it also presents a lot of disadvantages and challenges to deal with.

The first but definitely not the least of the challenges is choosing the right blockchain for launching your NFT. It might seem like a simple decision but the scalability, the kind of traffic that you expect during your lunch, the transaction fees, and the handling capacity of the blockchain play a crucial role in the decision-making process. It might be very easy to say that Ethereum is the best choice. It is similar to telling that you can cycle all the way from Stalingrad to Vladivostok. While it might not be completely impossible, it does not make practical sense.

If the blockchain choice itself is going to be a challenge, developing the launchpad from scratch requires immense coding knowledge. There are also possibilities of errors in the code that might interfere with the expected basic functionality. Therefore, as much as intense coding is needed, there is also a need for robust testing.

In addition to the development, figuring out the economics of the token would also be a challenge. The economics of the token includes but is not limited to determining the number of supplies of the token which will be retained by the company, the allocation of the token for marketing activities like bounties and airdropping, and the number of tokens that will be listed for public sale.

When all these things have been figured out, there is also a challenge involved in marketing. Let us, however, discount that because the brand has already been built by the person who is launching their exclusive NFT.

The presence of platforms to open your own NFT launchpad without any code makes the entire task easy, almost rendering obsolete, the misgivings of a launchpad. All you need to do is get in touch with a no-code NFT launchpad provider, and they will take it forward.

Advantages of a Launchpad

If you look at successful NFT projects that have thrived to build a proper ecosystem where all the NFTs interact with each other, they have depended on marketplaces although they have always had a dedicated drop page. On the contrary, if you were to look at celebrities who have launched their own NFT, they have always wanted their own NFT launchpad to retain their sense of exclusivity and premium flavor in their offering.

The question of whether or not you should go for a marketplace or a launchpad should be determined by a multitude of factors. As long as everything is in black-and-white, it is very easy to determine. The challenge comes when there is a gray area or an area of adolescence in brand recognition.

At this moment, intense research needs to go in figuring out where your audience are and in what direction your brand building will sway. It is also to be remembered that irrespective of you being a large celebrity, it is important to have a proper digital footprint.

Even if there is someone who has recognized you as a person and as a brand and even if they have the financial muscle to purchase your NFT, they might not resort to purchasing it if they do not understand the concept of crypto, blockchain, and NFT.

The entire world of NFT consumption is in a tricky state right now. It makes people wonder why quirky images of apes and aliens have been selling for millions of dollars while proper artwork has been selling only for a few hundred, and in occasional cases, thousands of dollars! To be honest, the answer is a lot more complicated than it seems.

While a lot of crypto enthusiasts are in pursuit to find an answer, it is this territory of uncertainty and speculation that keeps the value of crypto. It might be observed as a dubious attribute by a lot of mainstream analysts but ask any crypto enthusiast and they will be able to figure out the order in the chaos, and they will be able to predict which would be the next big trend in the crypto world!

Right now, NFTs are the in thing in the crypto world. Since they create a confluence of something that is universally consumed like art or music or celebrity frenzy and something that was considered to be unreachable for the common man like the blockchain technology, they will not see the sunset in the near future. In fact, they can be considered the harbingers of practical unification of technology like the blockchain and the common needs of people outside the world of technology. It is useful to an unknown artist living in some corner of the world and it is equally useful to a celebrity who wants to monetize their creation or a classic.