Singapore’s Gomu raises $5 million to power NFT liquidity incentives and trading
Gomu, a non-fungible token (NFT) infrastructure and liquidity enabler based in Singapore, has closed a $5 million seed round with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Defiance Capital, Saison Capital.
Several angel investors including Carylyne Chan (former CEO of CoinMarketCap), Matthew Tan (Founder of Etherscan), Bobby Ong and TM Lee (Co-Founders of CoinGecko), Mike Dudas (General Partner of 6MV) and Benedict Chan (Vice President Engineering at Chainlink) also participated in the round, Gomu said in a statement on Wednesday.
Gomu raised this seed round on the back of their strong infrastructure and product launches.
To date, the firm has launched two main products, NFT Hub and Collection.xyz, built on their robust NFT APIs, which are already widely available to developers.
Their first flagship product – NFT Hub – gives NFT communities a white-labeled community hub and marketplace to call their own.
NFT communities can create custom marketplaces and token-gated communities in minutes, all without having any prior experience with blockchain technology.
Gomu is also partnering with Mutant Cartel, an independent community of Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC) NFT holders to launch Mutant Hideout – the first community-owned hub for all MAYC holders.
Hideout will provide a place for MAYC NFT holders to gather in a single place to discover content, share information and transact with each other using NFTs. The Mutant Ape Yacht Club community numbers over 8,000 with an estimated market value of $700 million.
In addition to improving the community experience for NFT holders, Gomu just released Collection.xyz, the first NFT liquidity incentive protocol.
The team built a simplified liquidity incentivization process for NFT DEXs, and introduced LP tokens and corresponding permissionless reward vaults.
Collection.xyz offers a seamless process for any person with NFT and ETH tokens to create a liquidity pool on NFT DEX Sudoswap and receive a tokenized representation of their ownership.
NFT projects will be able to specify and indicate the parameters they wish to stimulate by creating a vault.
This attracts NFT holders to create liquidity pools and stake their liquidity pool tokens against the vaults to earn rewards and incentives.
For the launch of Collection.xyz, reward vaults to fund the first round of liquidity incentives for select NFT collections, including Pixelmon, Capsule House, Loot, Sandbox, Otherdeed, Azuki, Memeland and Pudgy Penguins.
“NFT’s great potential for real impact can only be realized if the wave of industry interest is paired with the right infrastructure to support this growth,
“We believe Gomu’s NFT Hub and Collection products are the rails required for a great end-to-end Web3 experience for communities and collectors in the space.” said Chris Sirise, Partner at Saison Capital.
The Gomu team comes from some of the leading companies in the industry.
Spencer Yang, Co-Founder and CEO of Gomu, previously led product at Coinbase focusing on derivatives, DEX and Coinbase Wallet. He served as Vice President of Growth, Revenue and Operations at CoinMarketCap, including driving the acquisition with Binance.
Jeremy Seow, co-founder and vice president of product, had led product at Chainlink and was previously vice president of product at CoinMarketCap.
Other team members were key engineering and product managers at other companies such as Millennium Management, Zendesk and CoinMarketCap.
With their experience in the industry, the team aims to create a reward community around liquidity, especially in the burgeoning NFT and DeFi ecosystem.
“NFT holders and projects can easily stimulate liquidity for their favorite NFT collections, adding an important building block to the NFTfi space,” Yang said.
“The LP tokens of pools can also be collateralized for other protocol interactions. Reward Vault is just the beginning and we look forward to working with the community to build more amazing blocks,” he added.
With the global NFT market expected to grow from $3 billion in 2022 to $13.6 billion by 2027 at a 35 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR), Gomu believed that the convergence of the digital and physical worlds will continue to take shape.
As the demand for digital art and the use of cryptocurrencies continue to grow worldwide, it said non-fungible items will constitute a larger asset class than exchangeable items in society.
It also sees the funding and proliferation of NFTs continuing to grow, and Gomu is well positioned to contribute to its underlying architecture.
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