Kind of the big problem with the NFT space in the last few years is that too many places were too focused on minting NFTs as their business model rather than building on top of existing communities itself. A lot of startups underestimate how difficult it is to build communities from scratch - it requires much more than just a nice website and good tech to get that critical mass of users to start that feedback loop.
When everyone has their own minting contract with their own custom code and no universal standards, it also makes indexing a pain and reduces legibility by the public at large. Both ETH and Tezos' minting landscape is littered with corpses of dead projects that probably won't get indexed, long-term - which basically means that any artworks created on there will be gone for good in a few years, unfortunately.
With teia.cafe we purposely built our app and contracts to leverage the existing contracts of @TeiaCommunity - we felt like there wasn't really any need to add our own in a space already too crowded. For Tezos, TEIA (artsy, experimental) and @objktcom (auction, collection driven) has the minting sides handled and new projects should be focused more on distribution, token-gating features, and other secondary markets, imo.
Skip ahead a few years, and we were right about the whole thing because most of the platforms that tried to become the next minting marketplace are either already gone or will probably be gone in the next year or two. And again, unfortunately, this means that these artworks will be gone for good due to lack of maintenance and support.
A big reason why things turned out this way was because of the way investments were done from the VC/grants side - most places were simply imitating the success of Cryptopunks and failed to see the steps beyond it - raising money for teia.cafe was difficult because we couldn't convince anyone that secondary markets were the key to unlocking NFTs' true potential - since that's where most of the money was in the arts/entertainment anyway.
I know we're not the only place that got a lot of pushback for doing this - almost every place and person we talked to insisted that we have our own minting contract, even when we clearly said we don't want to do that - and that's where the markets as a whole went. (And failed, as we see now.)
I get that it's every investor's dream to bet on the next "unicorn" but when there's a big opportunity (objectively bigger than minting itself) just sitting right there, it seems kind of unwise - but eh, it is what it is. There's kind of an arrogance in assuming that you can build communities and movements from scratch - but it is a lesson that the tech industry re-learns every cycle because they find out the hard way that it's not that easy. If people come for the money, they leave when the money is gone - something that finance people seem to have trouble understanding, no matter how many times it happens.
Anyway, our next focus for teia.cafe is to integrate the work directly into @TeiaCommunity's main site (teia.art) in it of itself. With limited resources progress has been slow - but the work we've done is still valid because it was built in the correct way and putting it to use is just a matter of migration and adapting it into an ecosystem with a real community - which TEIA definitely has.
This is the moment many of us has been waiting for - and we're going to show them how it's done. I hope the artists in the space understand this, too...nobody is coming to save us, we have to save ourselves. The tools to do so are right there - we just need to pick it up and take control of our own destinies, otherwise we're just waiting around for promises that will never get done. 🚀