Your guide to Bitcoin, Ethereum and Web 3.0

Floor, the startup behind NFT portfolio app of the same name, raised $8 million last year and is claiming significant growth for its token-gated app amid the NFT bear market. The firm has now revealed the next step in its plans to expand both its feature set and audience, announce today that they have purchased the NFT analysis platform WGMI.io.

While Floor delivering a streamlined way for NFT collectors to view and track their holdings, WGMI.io is focused on analytics around market activity and trading trends. Together, they aim to deliver richer features for Floor users while bringing WGMI’s analytics capabilities to a potentially wider audience.

“There were big parts of what they do that we thought could help accelerate us,” Floor CEO and co-founder Chris Maddern told Decrypt.

Maddern added that he saw “a real interest and passion” from WGMI founder Thomas Mancini in expanding the platform’s features and functionality beyond the relatively small audience of diehards “dough” traders, and that there was “a lot of adjustment” on a common path forward. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Mancini has joined Floor full-time.

Floor debuted in October 2021 to an initial audience of users who created their Generation I membership pass NFT, providing access to the token-gated iOS and Android app. The platform expanded via word of mouth among traders and through subsequent NFT sell-offs in the months that followed.

In June 2022, Floor announced that it had raised $8 million in seed funding led by 6th Man Ventures, and that Christine Hall (nee Brown) – former COO at Robinhood Crypto – had joined as COO and co-founder. Maddern and fellow Floor co-founder and CTO Sid Dabral were previously co-founders of e-commerce startup Button.

Builds in the bear

When Floor’s funding was announced, the NFT market entered what would prove to be a sharp decline in both trading volume and asset prices, paralleling crumbling crypto prices and high-profile collapses. NFT only has market conditions worsened during the yearexcept for a small increase in sales in December.

Although broader momentum and hype around NFTs waned late last year, Maddern and Hall said Decrypt that Floor steadily grew its user base, even while remaining fenced off behind an NFT access pass. It collaborated with large projects such as Doodles and Proof to give NFT holders access, and allow existing users to airdrop passes to friends to board them in Floor.

That led to what Floor claims is a 700% increase in users during the bear market, with more than 10,000 total active users so far connecting to over 22,000 total crypto wallets to track their holdings. The company further states that Floor users accounted for 8% of sales at leading NFT marketplace OpenSea in December, pointing to an audience of connected traders.

Maddern said the WGMI.io deal provides “an opportunity to raise its head” after months of behind-the-scenes construction, and to begin sharing its vision for Floor’s roadmap going forward.

In the short term, this means utilizing some of WGMI’s functionality to enrich Floor’s offer. Users can expect new features such as trade analysis and attribute pricing – that is, tracking demand for the individual attributes of NFT projects, such as the various visual details that make up a Bored Ape Yacht Club profile picture (PFP).

Maddern also envisions a feature that allows users to specify what kind of NFT they want from a particular project (based on specific characteristics) and at what price point, and then receive a notification when a marketplace listing matches those criteria. It would be related to what StreetEasy deals for real estate, he said, but for digital assets like Doodles and Apes.

Floor’s way forward

Floor’s larger vision is to ultimately become the go-to destination for NFT collectors to not only view their own holdings and track trends, says Maddern, but also to stay in touch with projects, receive community updates and take the temperature of market sentiment . . In other words, an all-in-one hub for NFT owners.

Hall said that in traditional markets there is “a lot of formality” around the way companies share information with investors, due to centralized structures and regulations. The long-term goal of Floor is to collect and present information and “signals from the community” both to NFT collectors in a decentralized manner — a shift she described in gaming parlance as going “from single-player mode to multiplayer mode.”

It’s also a shift for Hall, who left the corporate world for public company Robinhood for an NFT startup, but she said it’s been “probably the most fun year of my career so far.” She enjoys the experience of building in the open, experimenting and “getting her hands dirty”.

Floor hopes to eventually reach a much wider audience, but when and how is still in the works. The invite-driven model will remain intact for the foreseeable future, Maddern said, as Floor continues to build in the bear market and prepare for what it expects will be a new growth cycle for the NFT space going forward.

“What’s fun for us in a period like this is that we can really understand the core uses of people who are here, and who are still engaged and active,” Hall said, “but also spend a lot of time building for what we think they want be the next wave of growth and adoption.”