The deal will enhance Floor with analytics and get it closer to its aim of becoming the app for NFT collectors.
Floor, the company that made the NFT portfolio app with the same name, raised $8 million last year and claimed that its token-gated app has grown a lot even though the NFT market is in a bear market. Today, the company announced that it has bought the NFT analytics platform WGMI.io. This is the next step in the company’s plan to add more features and reach more people.
Floor provides a simple method for NFT collectors to monitor and track their holdings, whereas WGMI.io focuses on market activity and trading trends analytics. Together, they intend to provide greater services for Floor users while potentially expanding the audience for WGMI’s analytics features.
Maddern also said that WGMI founder Thomas Mancini showed “a real interest and passion” for expanding the platform’s features and functions beyond its small audience of “degen” traders, and that there was “a ton of alignment” on a single way forward. The terms of the deal were not made public, but Mancini has become a full-time member of Floor.
Floor debuted in October 2021 to an initial audience of customers with Generation I membership pass NFTs, granting access to the token-gated iOS and Android app. The platform grew through traders’ word-of-mouth and subsequent NFT mints 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), who had been the COO at Robinhood Crypto, had joined as COO and co-founder. Maddern and Sid Dabral, who is also one of Floor’s co-founders and the company’s CTO , started the ecommerce company Button together.
Building in the bear
At the time that Floor’s funding was revealed, the NFT market was in the midst of a precipitous decline in trading volume and asset prices, concurrent with collapsing crypto prices and high-profile collapses. The NFT bear market conditions worsened throughout the year, with the addition of a slight increase in December sales.
Even as broader momentum and hype around NFTs decreased late last year, Maddern and Hall said that Floor steadily grew its user base, even while remaining gated behind an NFT access pass. It partnered with major projects like Doodles and Proof to provide NFT holders with access and let existing users airdrop passes to friends to onboard them into Floor.
During the bear market, this led to a 700% increase in users. There are now more than 10,000 active users who have connected more than 22,000 crypto wallets to track their assets. The company also says that Floor users made up 8% of sales on the leading NFT marketplace OpenSea in December.
Floor’s long term plans
Maddern says that Floor’s long-term goal is to become the place where NFT collectors go to not only see their own assets and track trends, but also stay in touch with projects, get updates from the community, and get a feel for how the market is feeling.
Due to centralized institutions and regulations, there is “a lot of formality” in traditional markets around how corporations disclose information with investors, according to Hall. Floor’s long-term goal is to consolidate and present information and “community signals” to NFT collectors in a decentralized way, a transition she described in gaming terms as going “from single-player mode to multiplayer mode.”
This is also a shift for Hall, who left the corporate world of public company Robinhood for an NFT startup. However, she claims that the past year has been “probably the most fun year of my career so far.” She enjoys constructing outside, experimenting, and “getting your hands dirty.”
Floor wants to reach a much bigger audience in the future, but when and how are still being worked out. Maddern said that the invite-driven model will stay the same for the foreseeable future as Floor keeps building in the bear market and gets ready for what it thinks will be another growth cycle in the NFT space.
“What’s fun for us in a period like that is that we can really understand the core use cases of people that are here, and who are still engaged and active,” said Hall, “but also spend a lot of time building for what we do believe will be the next wave of growth and adoption.”
