Liquidity. Transparency. Customizability. The NFT Launchpad
“Greatness is nothing unless it is lasting” — Napoleon Bonaparte
Launching is the most important phase of an NFT collection’s lifecycle. All the community building, hype creating, art generating, partnership establishing, and much more come to a culmination on the one day when the future success of a project can be manifested. And you only get one shot to get it right.
Hitherto, launching an NFT collection has been a formulaic process: near-identical contracts, minting pages, fixed prices, distributions, etc. We wholeheartedly believe that these outdated, rudimentary ways are not one-size-fits-all, and as NFT projects become more diverse for a fresh, new cycle, novel primitives for launching will be needed to eradicate the issues that early-stage collections have faced in the past couple of years.
So, what were the problems of last cycle’s approach, and how can we solve them?
Let us first list the biggest problems in the NFT launching space:
- Sourcing and sustaining liquidity is difficult
- Collectors are scared due to rugs, scams and hacks, making it more difficult for legitimate founders to launch genuinely promising projects
- Royalties are no longer a sustainable revenue source
- Formulaic launching mechanisms have been unsophisticated, limiting collection diversity and potential
How do we solve these deep-routed issues in the NFT space with Baton?
At the heart of our approach is to align the incentives of collection founders and collectors by focusing on three main pillars: Liquidity, Transparency, and Customizability.
Liquidity
Why do NFT projects care about liquidity? We believe it is the glue that keeps things together. People in this space have short attention spans and above all care about making a profit, and scarce liquidity makes it difficult to sustainably grow your community without risking backlash resulting from exogenous as well as insignificant, endogenous factors. In other words, noise that does not concern the main premise of the project is oftentimes the reason for the downfall of a once-promising idea. Examples of this include unfortunately launching in a bad market, positioning oneself in a faltering ecosystem, baseless FUD, and more.
Good liquidity also makes it much easier for prospective members to join the community.
Simply said, projects need good liquidity to maximize their collection’s chance of long-term success.
How is Baton going to guarantee liquidity?
Raised funds are paired with NFTs from the collection and are utilized for liquidity on NFT AMMs, for example, SudoSwap or Caviar, for a predetermined period of time. This presents huge improvements for several reasons:
- A greater share of the collection is utilized for liquidity at such a critical time in a collection’s lifetime. A rule of thumb in the space is that usually 10% of an NFT collection is actively traded. Now, collection founders can ensure that a multiple of this is used so they can sail smoothly through the treacherous waters of the launch period
- Collectors can sell their NFTs into the pool at any time — they are not waiting for a counterparty to lift their offers. This implies that any buying or selling is likely to occur at a more gradual pace, resulting in less excess volatility and finally limiting the chance of repulsion by a disgraced community
- Collectors can easily and hyper-efficiently swap between NFTs in the same collection, assuring that they have an NFT with traits that they love
- Many more
Launching your collection on an AMM through Baton brings benefits beyond improved liquidity. Charging royalties on the sales of NFTs in your collection is a practice that is undoubtedly in a downtrend, so collection founders need to find a way to earn revenue through alternative sources to make their collection truly sustainable over the long run. With Baton, collections can not only earn yield on their liquidity, but they can utilize their vested NFTs to monetize the success of the project without sacrificing their reputation.
Furthermore, locking liquidity means that the team’s NFTs are vested — they cannot sell them until a predetermined date — which aligns the long-term incentives of collection founders and collectors: namely, achieving higher prices of the NFTs due to a completed roadmap, a vibrant community, and more. This brings us to the next pillar:
Transparency
It was Napoleon who said that “If you wish to succeed in the world, promise everything, deliver nothing”, clearly a message that resonated well with many NFT founders and teams last cycle.
There have been countless scams, rug pulls, slow rugs, and most prevalently, overpromising followed by regretfully foreseeable underperformance. Especially in the heights of a bull market, where it was clearly a seller’s market, it has been too easy to maximize the founder’s short-term interests at the expense of collectors.
The trust market is broken and Baton wants to fix it.
How does Baton improve transparency?
Baton can by no means guarantee the legitimacy or success of a collection but we can lead an effort to overhaul current trust mechanisms.
Firstly, launching an NFT collection on Baton is completely permissionless. Unlike countless other launchpads, where vetting processes are opaque, vetting will be purely optional, with guidelines and criteria openly accessible to the public. Baton will offer various Badges that projects can apply for to display their efforts to launch fairly and successfully, for instance, smart contract security audits, KYC checks, and much more.
Secondly, collections are encouraged to be more transparent through a completely revamped user experience. Collections, for example, must indicate what the raised funds will be used for, only one of the numerous indicators that help collectors make investment decisions that they are happy with. Our goal is to crush information asymmetries by transforming opaque documentation and other forms of communication into a Web 3 prospectus-like experience.
Finally, collection creators are also able to opt into certain features which increase the transparency of their collections without sacrificing their long-term interests. For example, if a collection selects the Refund option then the raised funds will be returned to investors if the collection does not fully mint out. We dislike one-size-fits-all solutions, so collection founders can frictionlessly decide the parameters that determine whether a refund should be given or not.
This brings us to the final pillar:
Customizability
To date, the way NFTs were launched catered to a small subset of profile picture NFT collections, covering a minuscule range of the set of ideas that are made possible by this revolutionary technology.
Because of some of these projects’ huge success stories, the entire space began emulating them, because it was easy and accepted. This is even though other types of profile picture NFT collections, or even collections in the Music NFT space, Gaming NFT space, and more, require a totally different structure for their launch to be successful.
For these creative projects, more creative approaches are needed for them to prosper.
Furthermore, putting some of the ambitious ideas into code can be difficult, and the reality is that most founders in the space are non-technical, meaning that they have to find an expensive smart contract engineer that may not even be aligned with the vision of the founding team. Founders deserve enough freedom to focus on what is really important: developing the brand, the ideas, the art, the memes, the culture, and all the other good things that make a successful NFT project.
Thus, we want to lower the barrier to sophisticated launches with the final aim of making a tailored launch accessible to anyone with an idea.
How does Baton add value to collections through its suite of features?
Baton aims to be the go-to toolbox for launching upcoming NFT collections by providing founders with features that genuinely add value to their launch, whether by reinforcing their long-term commitment to the vision or by hyping up their launch by turning to features like BuyBox.
Features like yield-farming, advanced whitelisting, and innovative auction mechanisms are often talked about, but because founders lack the technical expertise, connections, and capital, the perfect launch is but a dream. No more. Baton will offer these and many more features which are easy to configure to meld a truly bespoke launch.
The sky is the limit for what is possible and Baton will make sure to be inclusive of all those looking to be a part of this burgeoning space.
Closing Remarks
“Impossible is a word to be found only in the dictionary of fools” — Napoleon Bonaparte
Verily, a novel epoch doth befall us, and those that desire to endure must be ambitious to vanquish, forsooth, lest they themselves be vanquished.
Join us to make the NFT space more transparent, equitable, and developed.
Vive la révolution!
If you want to have a chat about what we’re building, kindly send a private message to our Twitter @BatonFinance
