Hello again, Proton family!
We’re delighted to introduce the second project for this month’s campaign, Proton June #BetterBlockchain. Our goal is to introduce the incredibly talented developers behind the projects you know and love.
As part of the campaign, we will publish a ‘Meet The Builders’ interview, alongside their giveaway, so you can find out more about their project, the inspiration behind their vision, what’s next for them, and why they chose Proton.
Please meet the team from this innovative project, Soon.Market!
Meet The Builders – Soon.Market
To start, can you briefly introduce Soon.Market?
Soon.Market is a non-custodial NFT marketplace with a special focus on NFT auctions. Its awesome UX makes exploring auctions and sales with different payment methods simple. Our SOON SPOT utility NFTs allow anyone to promote any auction on the front page of the market!
What problem is Soon.Market trying to solve?
Proton already has a strong NFT ecosystem thanks to the AtomicAssets and AtomicMarket contracts and corresponding APIs provided by Block Producer Pink. Additionally the official team provided an open source NFT marketplace template which everybody can use to build their own marketplace.
Unfortunately we haven’t yet seen a marketplace that was able to show the full potential of all features the contracts provide while making no excuses in terms of user experience. We’re trying to fix that and want to provide the best UX ever seen in the NFT space powered by our own API and UI!
We’re also in close and continuous contact with the Proton community. Every feedback is taken seriously. If high demand for a specific feature is raised, we try to ship it as soon as possible.
How does Soon.Market make the blockchain experience more user friendly?
We aim to provide a UX where our users don’t even notice that they are interacting with a blockchain. The Proton blockchain along with the WebAuth wallet provides the best foundation to achieve that. At the same time we want to provide 100% transparency – if needed we will help and educate our users about specific parts of the blockchain.
Can you tell us a bit more about the Soon.Market management team and their background?
We’re all old colleagues and friends based in Germany. Over the past years we participated in various Hackathons and developed open source tools and dApps for the æternity blockchain. Now we finally decided to found kryptokrauts GmbH – the company behind Soon.Market.
We have an incredible and awesome mix of skills in the founding team and additionally external support for Marketing topics.
You should be aware that Soon.Market currently still is a spare time project as everybody in the team is still working for other companies.
Marco (Team Lead, DevOps & Quality Assurance) is a Senior IT-Consultant with 5 years hands-on experience in Blockchains & Decentralized Networks, including Smart Contract development. Marco loves to manage the complete life cycle of a product. He is a future-minded person with many innovative ideas that he wants to realize together with his team.
Mitch (Software Architect & Backend Dev) is a Senior IT-Consultant with 12+ years experience in developing and managing software projects. Since the last 5 years, Mitch has been engaged in the crypto space. He loves clean and simple solutions and is looking for ways to unite blockchain and business software development in terms of added value.
Jan (Software Architect & Frontend Dev) is a Senior Software Engineer with 10+ years of experience in Software Development, Architecture and Agile Coaching. Jan has been working in the blockchain space for more than 3 years creating dApps in various areas including Blockchain Explorers and Digital Identity.
Andi (UX Designer, 3D Artist & NFT creator) is a digital designer that feels at home in many creative areas and aims to deliver the best possible experience to the user. He loves creating NFT stuff.
Marv (Marketing Advisor) worked at Ada Health, Siemens, Axel Springer, and Google and specialized in performance and brand marketing. He is consulting companies on digital growth strategies, branding and monetization.
Can you tell us more about Soon.Market’s vision?
It’s quite simple: we want to build the best NFT marketplace in the entire industry that ships with the best UX possible 😉
Apart from that, we will build services and tools around the NFT marketplace which, we think, are needed and add value to both – the community and us. One example is “Soony” – our notification bot which is currently available for Twitter and Telegram, Discord will follow 🔜! We’ve already got a lot of great feedback and will further improve this service and add more features.
Tell us about what led up to building Soon.Market. Why did you start this?
Actually some of us have been part of the community since day one. When the focus of the official Proton team shifted and NFT development was stopped we made ourselves familiar with the AtomicAssets and AtomicMarket contracts. We did not have ANY solution to run NFT auctions back then – so we decided to build a dedicated solution. We released our first solution in October 2021 and hosted the first NFT auction ever on Proton that accepted XPR as payment. The NFT was donated to us by ProtonPunk (creator of the Cypher Gang) and sold for an incredible amount of 259,400 XPR (~10k USD back then). This event motivated us to dig deeper into the NFT game and build a generalized platform everybody can use.
If you want to know more about the project history, the term Power of Soon and why we called our marketplace Soon.Market, we recommend you to read our blog article “Power of Soon – origins”. We have also created a video back then: Power of Soon – strong believers in the Proton ecosystem!
Why did you choose the Proton Blockchain to build Soon.Market?
We believe that Proton has everything necessary to enable mass adoption and that it is perfectly suited for NFTs. The WebAuth wallet is extremely user-friendly and transactions are free for all average users. In the future, it will even be possible to buy crypto instantly via debit or credit card. We believe it is only a matter of time before Proton is identified by individuals and companies worldwide as one of the most important networks for financial transactions of all kinds – including NFT transactions. In case of NFT auctions we believe there is no decentralized platform available right now that provides a better user experience than Soon.Market.
We have written a dedicated blog article where we explain “Why we strongly believe in the Proton ecosystem”. We recommend everybody to read this article – it’s a great introduction to the Proton ecosystem!
What benefits do token holders have with Soon.Market?
Currently we do not have any plans to launch a token as we still need to tackle a lot of other things. That being said, we are seriously considering launching a SOON token in the future and we have great ideas in terms of utility. Be assured that we will make sure that we will reward early adopters and buyers/holders of our own NFTs 😉
Can you tell us a bit more about what’s coming next for Soon.Market?
Initially we started with NFT auctions and now we aim to become feature complete with the AtomicAssets and AtomicMarket contracts. There is a lot of work ahead of us, but we won’t stop until we support all features. We have a clear internal roadmap and our design for the feature complete marketplace is 95% ready. Our own API that is specifically designed to serve the UI is in active development and we will continuously work on releasing new features and enhancing the platform.
Project Details
Main Website | https://soon.market
Twitter | https://twitter.com/soon_market
Telegram | https://t.me/soon_market
Discord | https://discord.gg/KtVVaYy6b3
Snipcoins | https://snipcoins.com/soonmarket
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/soonmarketnft
Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/soonmarket
YouTube | https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVL9KgvqnhAcDznJNcl6nIA
Medium | https://medium.com/soonmarket
