The Hinata Story
Were not far from launching our alpha marketplace for everybody to trade the best anime NFT collections. Let’s take a moment to introduce our team and founders, many of whom have been working on this for over a year now!
We currently over 20 core and staff working on Hinata.io full time. The development of our flagship marketplace platform was well underway before our seed raise of $2.5M in December, 2021.
The Founders Journey
Both of our co-founders have been involved with the crypto space for over 10 years combined. Junaid Ansari has deep experience in anime commissions, artists engagement, and early stage projects from an investment and advisory perspective. Elias Moose has been a contributor and community member for several NFT projects since early 2018, and has a background in tokenomics advisory, creative consulting, and general launch strategy.
By spring of 2021 it was clear that there's plenty room for competition in the space. New entrants such as LooksRare, X2Y2, and others are proof that teams are hungry to introduce better UI/UX with token incentives to match. However, what no project has yet to do is target niche for anime NFTs. Our approach was simple: find the best projects, restrict minting to only verified artists, and keep users safe through curation and moderation.
The vision for the Hinata Marketplace was born out of a desire for an exchange for primary and secondary sales focused on quality content while preventing the bloat so many other NFT platforms have experienced in the past year with the explosion in digital collectibles (and no restrictions or curation). The idea was quite simple: while there are several places to mint, buy and sell content, there were few guidelines or training wheels for creators, traders and collectors. Our aim is to provide a solution for these as we scale up our feature list and technical team.
The Hinata Team
We’ve built our decentralized team over the past year and half to include a variety of key talents. All of our talent is committed to our long term growth, with several core members and developers holding equity in the Hinata Foundation.
Foundation
Co-founder: Junaid Ansari
Co-founder: Elias Moose
Metaverse Director: Sanzen Itachi
CMO: Timothy McCloud
Artist Evangelist: Christopher
Community Moderator: Boggs
Community Content: Jordan
Graphic Designer: Yapein
Dev Ops
Project Manager: Joel
Project Manager: Leo
UI/UX Design: Carl
Full Stack Engineer: John
Full Stack Developer: Anhnt
Solidity Developer: Peter
Back End Developer: Kento
Quality Assurance: Stefan
Quality Assurance: Ivan
Solidity Developer: Giang
Front End Developer: Pavel
Front End Developer: Petar
Front End Developer: Jakub
What’s Around the Corner
We have a ton of community events planned for the foreseeable future, including movie, game, and other themed nights where folks can pile into our DCL headquarters and sit in our virtual theater. You can even earn a free Proof of Attendance Protocol (POAP) badge just by interacting with our digital vending machine in the HQ!
The next big step is getting Hinata.io launched for the public, and it’s coming soon! Stay tuned to our socials for more information on our upcoming platform release.