Mintables Opens For Business
What Is A Product Retrospective?
Our monthly Product Retrospective is designed as a backward-looking review of the features we delivered in the previous month.
The intent of the blog post is to lay bare for all our stakeholders what our engineering team built and why with an eye toward shining a light on the evolution of our technology platform and whether or not we’ve kept our development promises.
Let’s dive in.
June 2022: Mintables Opens For Business
As always, first a recap:
March: Burning April: setup work for future functionality, Mintables May: Advanced Pack Buying on the Web June: MINTABLES! That’s right.After a year of development, we released Mintables out of private beta and into full, general availability for the entire Quidd community.
Thank you for your patience as we thoughtfully developed this groundbreaking new feature.
Now, let’s breakdown why we built it, how it works, and what it means for your collecting experience on Quidd.
Web: Mintables
Type: Epic
Deploy Date: Tuesday, June 21, 2022
First, a story.
At Quidd, we like to talk about our insanely long time horizons.Collectibles of all kinds — trading cards, figures, sneakers, fine art — tend to get better with age.Items get damaged, lost, or stolen.Items change hands, moving into the collections of famous individuals.And cultural tastes ebb and flow over time, where something that is “all the rage” one decade is frowned upon in the next, only to experience a revival, perhaps due to nostalgia, twenty years down the line.The longer collectibles are around, the better, we say, because the whole experience just gets a lot more interesting.
To frame Mintables and where the feature sits in the context of Quidd it’s apt to compare it to something else with a long time horizon.Hyperbole aside, let’s compare Quidd to the development of human civilization.
Through that comparison, it’s safe to say that Mintables is akin to the discovery and harnessing of fire.
Scientists have discovered that other, earlier species of humans, not sapiens, started using fire for cooking nearly one million years ago.When we sapiens arrived on the scene some 200,000 years ago, our use of fire helped propel our species even further, accelerating our biological development and helping to greatly expand and improve our way of life.
In this way, the discovery and use of fire became a platform on which a myriad of applications were built, and it was these applications that fundamentally changed the course of human history forever.
With the use of fire, humans had:
A source of warmth, which led to expansion of the species into colder climates A means to make weapons, which could be used to hunt to procure food A source of light, which led to more nighttime activity and other behavioral changes A means to cook, which led to changes to diet and greater biological change A means to create art and goods, like pottery, which drove societal change Basically, a single discovery had a myriad of applications, which fundamentally altered the human experience.
Mintables, we believe, fundamentally alters the Quidd experience in ways we know, in ways we know but aren’t yet sharing, and in ways we cannot yet imagine.
The context:
Since its inception, digital collectibles on Quidd are located on Quidd’s own servers; basically, the collectibles are stored in our database, which itself is hosted by Amazon, and subject to Quidd’s marketplace policies The challenge:
As digital collectibles age and our collecting community grows, the value of such collectibles is increasing; what was a fun sticker to collect 5 years ago, is now a digital asset with current, real world value and the potential become an heirloom in the distant future These digital collectibles are really no longer “rented game pieces”, but have transformed into digital property; it is this transformation that precipitates a new approach to storage, access, and ownership The solution:
Mintables: in June we opened up the “Mintables” feature for the general Quidd public.It moved from private beta only used by a handful of testers, and into something to which the whole community has access.What It Is: Mintables is both a technical gateway that bridges Quidd to the blockchain and a unique characteristic of certain digital collectibles on Quidd that imbue them with a special utility Who It Is For: Mintables is for anyone that holds a digital collectible of particular value and wants to change its storage location from Quidd’s servers to the Ethereum blockchain.
Like fire, with its limitless applications, Mintables has a number of uses.Today’s primary use is to mint your digital collectible into an NFT, store it at your crypto wallet address accessible through MetaMask, and sell it on a compatible NFT marketplace, like OpenSea How You Do It: in order to experience Mintables, you must: Own a mintable digital collectible on Quidd, clearly labeled with a yellow “Mint” chip Have a crypto-wallet address on Ethereum linked to your Quidd account; setting up a wallet address on Ethereum is super easy with the MetaMask browser extension for Chrome Go through our minting workflow in order to transfer the storage location of your digital collectible to the blockchain, minting it into a full-fledged, “no compromise” NFT What’s Cool About It: well, a few things: Ethereum: minting happens to the Ethereum blockchain, the most widely used blockchain for NFTs on the planet Interoperability: right off the bat, your newly-minted NFTs can be listed and sold on OpenSea and Rarible, two really cool NFT marketplaces full of potential buyers Real NFT: what you “mint your digital collectible into” isn’t a watered down, faux-NFT; this is more than just “putting receipts on the blockchain” where the item still remains locked down to a centralized, walled garden application; once minted, you can take your NFT with you, outside of Quidd; in the future, more smart contracts will be offered to “mint into” that put all the media and metadata on the blockchain meaning there will be zero reliance on Quidd to host, store, and deliver you your full collectible Un-mint: you can un-mint, bringing the storage location back to Quidd’s servers; in this way, Quidd is becoming a hub with many spokes … mint to one blockchain to play in a metaverse, un-mint back to Quidd, then mint to a new blockchain to play a game No Crypto-Currency Required: for the introduction of Mintables, we’ve set the cost to mint to the low price of $3 per mint, which based on the timing of minting can be a significant discount to gas fees on Ethereum; plus, no crypto-currency is required to pay for the minting gas fees … we pay that on your behalf using our reserve of ETH Scores, Ranks, and Leaderboards Maintained: as long as the NFT is the crypto wallet address linked to your Quidd account, you DO NOT lose your scores, ranks, or leaderboard status in the Quidd marketplace; only if you trade it out of your crypto wallet address will Quidd recognize “this user no longer owns this item” No Idea What Is Coming Next: at any moment, old collections of digital collectibles can be “turned on”, gaining this incredibly special utility — near superpower — to port your items to and from various blockchains Phew! That’s a lot, and it only begins to scratch the surface of the power, promise, and potential of Mintables.If you haven’t already, give it a try and tell us what you think!
Final Thoughts
First off, thank you to the best community of digital collectors on the planet for your patience and support as we built out this groundbreaking new feature.We are so fortunate to have you in the community.
Secondly, stay tuned for more blockchains, interoperable on-chain experience, and more and more mintable collections.
That’s it!
Thanks for collecting on Quidd..
