Product Highlights #1: end to end digital collectible minting experience

Welcome to our first post in our Product Highlights Series leading up to our Beta launch on August 16. For the next post in the series, click here. We’re super excited to share with you what we’ve been building over the past few months! Subscribe to our blog to stay up to date on Beta release details and future product news!

2021 was the year of NFTs. We witnessed the mind-boggling sale of a collage-of-sorts NFT for $69m, we saw celebrities adopt monkey JPEGs (also trading for serious $$$) as profile pictures (pfp) on social media, and we saw big brand names like Adidas, Coca Cola, and Budweiser hop into the NFT pfp game, aiming to delight their customers with new digital experiences at the intersection of the “metaverse” and Web3 (trying, but not always succeeding). Now that the dust has settled, we can pick up apart the major whiffs and overzealous hype from the innovative technology that digital collectibles (yep, there’s a new name now!) are based on—and, even more importantly, the implications this technology has on brand loyalty.

Why are we (still) talking about digital collectibles?

If you’ve been following 3mint for some time, you know we’ve been banging the drum about this since our inception: digital collectibles are a tool rather than an end product; they are an input (in the form of data), rather than an output.

This shift in perspective unlocks a ton of value for brands. Specifically, in the context of customer loyalty, brands can now use digital collectibles as digital receipts of activity, ranging from product purchases to gamified quests and beyond. Because they are recorded on a blockchain (ie. an open, shared ledger), they are readable (and usable) by anyone, laying the foundations for a truly open, universal, and interoperable standard for commerce.

In other words, digital collectibles enable an important shift into the future of customer loyalty—one where consumers have more ownership over their actions, are able to have a more participatory experience vis a vis their favorite brands, and most importantly where interoperability enables a more engaging and gamified customer experience.

The problem remained how to implement this new paradigm easily, quickly, and inexpensively; in other words, how to deliver on the promise without creating new friction in the process. That changes today.

Introducing the 3mint Beta

3mint is your end-to-end customer loyalty platform powered by web3. With the release of our Beta, any brand, retailer, or creator has the tools they need to create and distribute collectibles seamlessly as part of their engagement campaigns or loyalty programs. In this series, we’ll highlight some of the main features of the Beta platform, and follow this by covering the key features that will be released in the next 3 months.

Today, in our first post, we start with the Web3 infrastructure basics: our end to end minting experience.

What it is

At the core of the 3mint product is a managed service for creating smart contracts, creating collectibles, and then distributing or selling those collectibles to end users. In a matter of minutes, without any need to hold crypto or even have a wallet, you can create and sell a digital collectible to your fans or distribute a collectible to your top customers over the past month. Whether you are a brand founder, a marketer, or a developer, you’ll find we have the right tools for you.

How it works

It’s dead simple to get started:

1. Create a collection
2. Create your collectible
3. Create a claim link or use our APIs to sell or distribute the collectible

Let’s dig into each step.

1. Create a Collection

Collectibles are minted from Collections, ie. smart contracts. The first step is to deploy a smart contract.

• Choose from our smart contract templates for tokens and NFTs
• Choose your blockchain (we support Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Avalanche, and Ethereum)
• Choose your network (mainnet or testnet)
• Click Deploy

2. Create your collectible

Once your Collection is deployed, you’re ready to create your Collectibles.

• Create a Collectible, either individually or with a batch upload
• Upload the media, name, and description
• Set traits, benefits, price, and max quantity
• Click Create

3. Create a claim link or use our APIs to sell or distribute the collectible

Now that the collectible is created, you can distribute or sell it to customers, either through configurable claim links or programmatically through our APIs.

• If you’re looking to create a programmatic airdrop, use your API key and head over to our documentation.
• If you want to set up a claim page that can be embedded in an email, website, or QR code to allow a customer to claim or purchase your collectible, go ahead and create a “claim link.”
• Set parameters like wallet options, restrict the link to a subset of your customers, bound the drop by time and date, etc.
• Configure the branding of your link.
• Click “Create.”

That’s all there is to it, now your customers can easily mint the collectible, whether they’re using their own wallet or a 3mint wallet. Oh, and did we mention this process is entirely gasless?

In this post, we focused on the ease and accessibility of the minting experience made possible through the 3mint platform. In subsequent posts, we’ll dive into several specific product features that are rolling out with our Beta release. Stay tuned for more!

To see the second post in the series, click here.

About 3mint

3mint is the all-in-one Web3 customer loyalty platform for consumer brands, enabling you to leverage digital collectibles to capture more customer data, drive engagement, and build loyalty—without any of the hassle of dealing with Web3. Get in touch with us here.