NFT Media Management
Pinata empowers creators and developers to create consumer facing crypto products with an easy-to-use API and interface. Pantera is excited to have recently led Pinata’s $18M Series A round alongside Greylock Partners as they build out the best content distribution infrastructure in crypto.
In the past few years, grassroots NFT projects have spurred many iconic communities, trends, and networks across web3. Because of this, NFTs are largely known as one of the most exciting parts of the crypto world. However, as explosive as NFTs have been in the last couple of years, many creators are siloed by the industry’s lack of comprehensive infrastructure. For one, getting noticed on a (usually cluttered) NFT exchange can be a difficult process – especially if the creator is up-and-coming. Finding tooling for media distribution and navigating the technicalities of the project can be challenging as well. Barriers like these disincentivize NFT creation by lesser-known creators looking to get involved in web3 media. Pinata eliminates these issues by providing intuitive interfaces for individuals and teams building marketplaces, metaverses, dApps, and more. Control is fully put back into the hands of creators since they can build their distribution networks and monetize their creations directly from their own platform.
Pinata’s Platform
Pinata has over 200 server locations around the world and runs a CDN (content delivery network) to let users easily manage and distribute their creations. The platform maintains and monitors IPFS nodes for customers and enables developers to build hassle-free on any blockchain. IPFS is particularly useful for NFT projects since it leverages cryptography to guarantee NFT immutability and ownership through content addressability and CIDs. These mechanisms provide maximum flexibility and authenticity for content creators as opposed to Amazon S3, Google Cloud, or other hosting platforms. Pinata allows File, Folder, and CID (content identifiers, used to represent NFTs) uploads across images, videos, apps, and more to deliver flexibility to their customers.
To easily grab content from IPFS, Pinata developed Dedicated Gateways, an efficient way to distribute media through a marketplace or other medium. Dedicated Gateways allow users to pull content from IPFS into public https websites using Pinata. Customers simply set up and name their gateway and are instantly able to start sharing content via pinning data to IPFS. Pinata also offers a tool called Submarining, where users can share unlockable content through token-gating, geo-location, or other criteria. Other helpful platform features include previews, short links, video / image optimization, and more.
The content upload process is efficient and easy. Source: Pinata
Through this process, Pinata streamlines NFT media management for developers (to manage content on IPFS and build applications) and creators (to publish on-chain content without the technical side). Through this infrastructure, protocols built around NFTs – marketplaces, metaverses, and gaming, to name a few – are better able to serve content to their audiences. Popular consumer-focused companies like Polygon, Yuga Labs, and Autograph each use Pinata for sharing across IPFS. Pinata now has[b] over 250[c][d],000 customers from individual developers, to nascent NFT companies and even enterprises. The company’s customer base has over doubled since January, when the platform had around 100,000 users. Now, Pinata’s clients have more than 170M[e][f] files pinned to IPFS. The company has also seen an impressive 42x[g] growth in revenue year over year.
Pinata has a suite of plans including Free (store content on IPFS through Pinata), Picnic (go-to-market tooling), Fiesta (early-stage marketplace management and dApp / game products), and Carnival (full infrastructure engine for builders / rapidly growing companies). The company also recently launched an Enterprise plan for more developed companies who need larger amounts of bandwidth and tooling from Pinata.
Flexible pricing plans for individual creators, start-ups, and enterprises. Source: Pinata
Pinata’s Team
T[h]ut, Pinata’s founder and CEO, is a crypto veteran who has been building full-time in the space for over 5 years. Prior to Pinata, he co-founded BlockEra, a blockchain consulting company, and was formerly Operations Crew Chief at Racenote. Matt Ober, Pinata’s CTO, co-founded BlockEra with Kyle and was previously a software engineer at Aviture. Justin Hunter is the Head of Product and has 7 years of technical experience in crypto. He was most recently a cofounder at SimpleID, a company building a platform to increase user engagement and retention in blockchain applications. Pinata’s team is now 39 individuals (and growing) in roles across engineering, business development, product design, and more.
Pinata’s team – developers, artists, and web3 enthusiasts. Source: Pinata
What’s Next
Pinata plans to use this round’s funding to further build out their tech stack and interact with a wider audience. The team will design more engagement tools, customized UX for different file types, and collaborative accounts. Pinata is also working on making their content distribution infrastructure faster and more feature-rich (e.g. submarining and dedicated gateways). Right now, Pinata’s customer base is composed of all kinds of creators: technical, non-technical, individual artists, established companies – and there’s a massive opportunity to expand it even further. The team is looking forward to engaging even more users to provide them a much-needed platform infrastructure to distribute their creations and interact with their fan bases.
- Paul Veradittakit
DISCLAIMER
Pantera Capital Puerto Rico Management, LP and its affiliates (“Pantera”) makes investments in crypto assets and in blockchain-related companies. Pantera and/or its affiliates or personnel may be an investor in, or have relationships or other business arrangements related to, certain instruments, companies and/or projects discussed herein. This document does not contain any advertisement for Pantera’s investment advisory services, or any other services or products, whether provided by Pantera or otherwise. The information and opinions presented in this document are solely those of Paul Veradittakit; they do not represent, and should not be interpreted as representative of, the views of Pantera or any other individual working for Pantera, and do not represent investment, legal, tax, financial, or any other form of, advice or recommendations. Neither Pantera nor Mr. Veradittakit is acting, or purports to act, as an investment adviser or in a fiduciary capacity with respect to any recipient of this paper. Information contained in this document is believed to be reliable, but no representation is made regarding such information’s fairness, correctness, accuracy, reasonableness or completeness. There is no obligation to update this document or to otherwise notify a reader if any matter stated statement or information contained here changes or subsequently is shown to be inaccurate. Nothing contained herein constitutes any representation or warranty as to future performance of any financial instrument or company. Forward-looking statements should not be relied upon, and performance or outcomes may differ materially from what is contemplated herein. Opinions included here incorporate subjective judgments or may be based on incomplete information. This document does not constitute or contain an offer to sell or a solicitation to buy any securities or a recommendation to enter into any transaction, and no reliance should be placed on this document in making investment decisions.
DIGESTS
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DIGESTS
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The IMF highlighted how a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism could lead to an “excessive concentration of decision-making powers.”
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LETS MEET UP
Devcon, Bogota, October 11-14
Dublin, October 20-25
Legends4Legends, Amsterdam, October 26-28
New York City, October 31 - November 4
Walks and coffee meetings in San Francisco throughout the year!
ABOUT ME
Hi, I’m Paul Veradittakit, a Partner at Pantera Capital, one of the oldest and largest institutional investors focused on investing in blockchain companies and cryptocurrencies. I’ve been in the industry since 2014, and the firm invests in equity, early stage token projects, and liquid cryptocurrencies on exchanges. I focus on early-stage investments and share my thoughts on what’s going on in the industry in this weekly newsletter.
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