A One-Stop Destination for Next-Generation Digital Creators — Interview with Chris, Co-founder of Few and Far

Chris from BitCourier: Hi! Can you tell us more about yourself and the role you're playing in that blooming project?

Chris: I am Chris Gale and I am a Co-Founder at Few and Far. I am a serial entrepreneur and have been building in the web3 space since 2016. Before crypto I founded a mobile advertising business working with fortune 500 brands which successfully exited and then listed on the NASDAQ. I also co-founded Verasity and am an investor and advisor to a number of web3 projects. 

Chris from BitCourier: Thanks for taking the time with me today. Few and Far is a One-Stop Destination for Digital Collectibles - people can find all the latest NFT drops on your website or am I missing something? 

Chris: Thanks for having me! This is our tagline. We believe for mass adoption we need to simplify web3. That includes the terminology. But under the hood we are so much more. We are a marketplace, a launchpad, a creator studio and have a powerful set of minting APIs developers build on.  

Chris from BitCourier: I see. Was this an original idea or you pivoted along the way? 

Chris: My co founders and I saw the potential opporuntities for NFTs to engage communities, be adapted by brands and bring the masses to web3. We experimented with some collections across a number of blockchains. But there was one big problem. The user experience was awful. The drop off rates (using Metamask and opensea) are super high. And mainstream brands would not want to expose this to their audiences. Thats when we got the idea to build a better expernence, and its the heart of what we do today. 

Chris from BitCourier: It's not an easy time for the market at present. How do you guys deal with this? Do you see an obvious decline in the # of listings?

Chris: They often say timing is everything in Start Up world. We had the benefit to build a platform seeing what was working, what communities were wanting and most importantly, what could be improved. We were able to share our vision with some of web3's best VCs and secured plenty of funding to survive the bear market. While other NFT platforms were down sizing, we were growing our team. Besr markets are for building and we are confident we will be ready with a best in class platform once the NFT market returns. 

Chris from BitCourier: Okay, would you mind telling us about some features that differentiate you from your competitors? 

Chris: Sure. We actually have a few core concepts that revolutionise our platform when comparing to others. A lot of which we can do being built on NEAR Protocol. 

- Ease of onboarding. It is possible to create an account and non custodial without having to download an external wallet and mint an NFT. All you need is an email or connect with Twitter or Discord. You are also able to purchase with your credit card so anyone can get started with Few and Far. 

- Your wallet address created is readable. So when you use a wallet its yournickname.near vs. a 16number hashed address. So its super easy to send NFTs to your friends and see who is trading within the community. Its a game changer! 

- Cost and speed. Minting and trading NFTs on Few and Far costs a fraction of the cost of Ethereum. Way less than a penny and it is 3 times faster to sync to the blockchain. As a side note the blockchain is carbon neutral and highly decentralised which is a huge plus. 

- Royalties guaranteed. There is a war happening over royalties in the NFT industry. We believe royalties should be honored and have designed a solution to secure royalties at a protocol level for creators. Something even OpenSea is struggling to achieve. This will be a major selling point as the industry evolves and more web 2 businesses enter the space. 

Chris from BitCourier: How are the "Trending Collections" calculated? 

Chris: Good question. We use a few data points to measure this. We scan on chain contract activity plus google analytics to rank collections.  

Chris from BitCourier: Talk to me about Games on your platform now. How does this work? 

Chris: We see such a close correlation between gaming and NFTs. And game discovery plus a nurtured community is essential for a healthy ecosystem. So with Few and Far gaming, we offer the ability for developers to build NFT contracts and minting using our API, Promote them on our launchpad, launch the game on our gamestore and generate users, then have their users trade their NFTs on our marketplace. So now everything is under one roof. We have the toolbox for developers and marketing support to build their user base. 

Chris from BitCourier: Would you mind sharing your perspective on the crypto market in general and your company's goals for the next 3-6 months?

Chris: We have not been paying too much attention to the wider market as we have been sticking to our plan and building an amazing product the market will want to use. We are experienced founders and built through bear and bull markets. With a bear market, there is less distraction. 

The short term goal is to get adoption and demonstrate the potential of the future of NFTs, have developers building on our APIs and achieve scale, as we come out of stealth mode. We see the market at a turning point right now and if it continues to grow, we will see mainstream users and brands flood back into web3. 

Chris from BitCourier: Thank you for the talk. Where can our readers follow you guys? Any last word? 

Chris: We are most excited about programmable NFTs (pNFTs) and feel this is the next wave of adoption, especially amongst gaming and loyalty and rewards. We spent a lot of time and research on developing our protocol and NFT specifications differently to other protocols with this opportunity in mind. pNFTs allow creators to easily add controls to their collections such as Soul bound tokens, burning mechanisms, generative/evolving NFTs and revealing NFTs.