Steven Bartlett, the founder of Social Chain (with a market valuation of over $600m), and the youngest investor on BBC’s “Dragons’ Den” TV show, along with Furqan Rydhan, founding CTO of Bebo and AppLovin (valuation, $42B), today launch thirdweb – a groundbreaking new technology platform for building NFT and Web3 apps. With thirdweb, launching a Web3 project is as simple as an e-commerce store on Shopify. thirdweb makes it easy to build Web3 apps including blockchain games, NFT platforms, DAOs, and creator projects. It equips creators, artists, developers, game studios and entrepreneurs with an intuitive suite of tools to seamlessly add features to Web 3 projects including NFTs, social tokens & currencies, marketplaces (for buying and selling tokens), and NFT lootboxes & drops- in a matter of clicks.

With offices in London, New York and San Francisco, thirdweb has just closed a $5m round of funding from a pool of high-profile business leaders, entrepreneurs and A-List creators including: serial entrepreneur and prolific angel investor Gary Vaynerchuk, Ryan Hoover, founder of Product Hunt, Shaan Puri, investor in Deel & Bolt, Imran Khan & Qiao Wang – founders of DeFi Alliance, Soona Amhaz, founder of Volt Capital, Greg Isenberg co-founder & CEO of Late Checkout and advisor to Reddit, Packy Mccormick founder of Not Boring, and Christian Angermayer, founder of Atai Life Sciences and Apeiron Investment Group. Over 1,000 developers are using thirdweb in the early access stages, whilst major brands including Nike, Disney, Bumble and Meta have stated their intentions to build products for the metaverse, Web3 and NFT spaces.

Said Bartlett: “Web3 is not just the future, it’s also the present. We’re currently witnessing one of the greatest technological shifts of our lifetime; it’s happening before our eyes and it’s going to touch every major industry and everyone’s life. We built thirdweb to allow entrepreneurs, developers, brands and creators to unlock the potential of this 3rd iteration of the internet in the easiest way possible – without having to learn a brand new coding language and without needing to hire a completely new team. In the same way that Stripe made payments easy for builders and creators, thirdweb makes Web3 easy, unintimidating and accessible.”

thirdweb, which supports a multi-chain ecosystem of blockchains, provides smart contracts, SDKs, widgets and UI components for creating customized Web3 ecosystems. Adding a feature with thirdweb deploys an on-chain contract on the developers behalf which gives them full control and ownership of their projects.

Said Rydhan: “It’s inevitable that web3 will be the foundation for the next wave of the internet, and we’re excited to be providing the tools to build decentralized apps easily”

thirdweb’s essential Web3 features enable users to:

• Drops – Create a timed drop where their users can easily claim or purchase an NFT from a link on their site through marketplaces and auction experiences.
• Packs – Create and sell chance-based packs or lootboxes of NFTs.
• Marketplace – Deploy and manage an owned marketplace to allow their audiences to buy and sell NFTs from their projects.
• Splits – Control the distribution of income from their project by implementing royalty splits to multiple people.
• Airdrops – See who owns their NFTs and airdrop free NFTs into their wallets.
• Tokens – Launch their own digitized currency, custom social tokens and governance tokens to enable their users to interact with their NFTs and create an economy around their project.

The capital will be used to hire for both the technical and growth teams, with the aim of rapidly scaling the business. The company’s priority is ensuring its early customers are as successful as possible building projects using the platform.

The platform is free to use until royalties and fees are programmed into the sales of NFTs that are launched. thirdweb takes a small percentage (5%) of the royalties of secondary sales, which means the company’s compensation is in direct proportion to the success of its customers.