Announcing our closed beta release + seed round led by Electric Capital and IDEO Colab Ventures
This is an actual literal newsletter post, for once.
Hey everyone! As you might already know, but posting over here for posterity, we’ve just announced our seed round and the launch of the JPG closed beta. We’re really thrilled about all this and more motivated than ever, building towards a much better iteration that will be launched very shortly.
First, the seed round: led by Electric Capital and IDEO, JPG’s seed round raised $3.8 MM. The funds will be allocated to building the JPG platform and protocol, which seeks to establish cultural infrastructure aiding in discovery and sustainable long-term value. Electric and IDEO have been joined by Dragonfly Ventures, Nascent, Robot Ventures, Flamingo DAO, The LAO, and angel investors Stani Kulechov (AAVE), William Price, Maya Zehavi, Andy Chorlian (Fractional), Jacob Horne (Zora), Joseph Delong, Sarah Meyohas, Raul Romanutti, 0x650d, John Sterlacci and Julia Rosenberg (Orca Protocol), DEAFBEEF, 0xMons, Freddie Farmer, and friends and family of JPG (my mom, for instance).
Without further ado, here are the core updates to the JPG Platform:
Off-chain Infrastructure and Progressive Decentralization
Core to the mission of JPG is the creation of an open social and interest graph that maps out cultural relationships between curators and NFTs, which operates best with low barriers to and a high frequency of curation. By utilizing off-chain infrastructure with an open API, we’ll be able to achieve these ends, while still allowing anyone to query curatorial provenance history
Over time, we’ll continue to decentralize this portion of JPG’s offerings, utilizing decentralized data storage to record users’ curatorial efforts.
While we are moving some of our efforts off-chain, we’re also focused on setting our own protocol core tenets and building blocks, most specifically, discovering, alongside the users, what curatorial work should be on-chain, and the functionalities thaton-chain curation requires. JPG’son-chain curated registries will serve as important community-governed resources that add additional context and categorization to NFT collections, aiding in discovery and trustworthiness through community curation across the ecosystem.
JPG’s Bookmarking feature: Internal vs. External Curation
Another key feature we are exploring is bookmarking from anywhere in the JPG platform, allowing users to easily record the NFTs and collections that interest them. When it comes to thinking about building curator tools, we start from the notions of internal and external curationn. External curation most closely maps to what you probably think of as curation: creating an assemblage of work to share with the world. Internal curation often precedes this endeavor, however, and is personally valuable in its own right.
Coming soon™ to your favorite curation protocol:
Ability to curate collections, rather than individual NFTs
New exhibition interface, allowing for more context, segmentation, and viewing experiences
Creator pages
Ability to curate other exhibitions
Collaborative and Open exhibitions
The game-changing on-chain stuff...
If you want to join the closed beta - fill out the typeform. We’ll try to whitelist as many people as possible, but if we take a while, worry not, the open version (and perks) will be out very soon.