Few and Far, the next-generation NFT marketplace built on NEAR Protocol, has been awarded a grant by the NEAR Foundation and a partnership to significantly increase the advancement of NFTs across the ecosystem. The announcement comes on the heels of the highly anticipated NEARCON event in Lisbon, Portugal, on September 11–14th.

In the upcoming months, Few and Far will support the growth and development of NFT projects within NEAR, and work closely with the team to provide world-class launchpad capabilities to support the onboarding of top brands and major IPs from Web2 into Web3.

The team will also collaborate with the NFT Vision Group, a dedicated team focused on NFT growth within NEAR, to spearhead efforts in NFT smart contract standardization, liquidity and blockchain indexing solutions. The partnership focuses on a joint go-to-market strategy to bring new communities and businesses into the NEAR ecosystem by launching on Few and Far.

“We are thrilled to support Few and Far’s mission to provide seamless NFT minting solutions and an easy-to-use marketplace for the NEAR ecosystem and beyond,” says Robbie Lim, GM, Partners & International at NEAR. “The NEAR Foundation embraces the digital asset revolution and the importance of laying the foundations for web3 gaming, the metaverse economy, and much more.”

Minting digital assets and crypto collectibles on NEAR brings significant added value to end-users who are looking to create, buy, sell and auction NFTs. NEAR Protocol fees are usually 38 hundred percent lower than Ethereum’s. For example, the cost of transferring an ERC-20 token is below $0.01, while for Ethereum (at 50 Gwei and an ETH price of $3,000), it’s around $5.40. NEAR is also able to handle up to 100,000 transactions per second, compared to Ethereum’s blockchain which currently processes only 13.

“Building a next-generation NFT marketplace will enable more users and creators to participate in Web3 by taking advantage of a premiere user experience, low fees and fast transactions. NEAR’s easy-to-use web wallets, which require no downloads or plug-ins, and the Aurora Bridge, will enable users from Ethereum to easily convert their assets into NEAR.” said Chris Gale, Co-Founder of Few and Far. “Soon, access to NEAR NFTs will be just clicks away on our marketplace, and the integration of fiat on and off ramps within our app will enable people to purchase NFTs with just a credit card.”

NEAR and Few and Far agree that NFTs will be the future of digital asset ownership and a critical path to onboarding the next 1 billion users into Web3. In the coming months, Few and Far will expand its NFT marketplace to facilitate the growth of the NEAR blockchain through the partnership.

Few and Far, the next-generation NFT marketplace built on NEAR Protocol, has been awarded a grant by the NEAR Foundation.

NEAR Foundation announces partnership with Few and Far to grow the NEAR NFT ecosystem

> TLDR: After a successful beta release, Few and Far has enhanced its marketplace — and unfolded its master plan for the remainder of the year.

NEAR frens,

Earlier this month, we released a beta version of our platform — the first step in creating a next-gen marketplace on NEAR. The past few months have been an incredible journey building our marketplace after getting funded by the NEAR Foundation and enabling creators to keep control of how their digital assets are monetized and used. We’re excited to have cemented ourselves as one of the go-to NFT marketplaces on NEAR, one of their top dApps and are now laser-focused on helping onboard the next 1 billion users to Web3 through NFTs.

The goal of our beta release was to collect a firehose of feedback from our community and iterate on the product quickly with the inevitable optimization that occurs post-deployment. Now, we’ll a few highlights of what we’ve enhanced so far, and dive into how we’re executing our long-term vision (i.e. Master Plan).

## Product Update — August 23rd, 2022

### NEAR Indexer — Enhancing real-time performance

A common piece of feedback from users is blockchain data on our marketplace is taking too long to load. While NFT indexing out-of-the-box has been a difficult challenge for many marketplaces across the NEAR ecosystem, the team is currently moving to the NEAR Data Lake technology to facilitate faster and more accurate NFT indexing. This means faster updates for connected wallets, quicker updates on collections as well as speedy transactions.

We’re also excited to now be part of a working group in conjunction with the NEAR foundation to improve NFT indexing and search capabilities for the community at large — helping to codify upcoming improvements to NFT and core blockchain standards on NEAR.

### Partnering with innovative NFT creators

Over the last few weeks, Few and Far has partnered with new and exciting NFT projects who’ve recently minted on NEAR, including the widely anticipated and sold-out free-mint from RealBirds — the first NEAR Native Omni-chain NFT collection which has integrated cross-chain capabilities through Layer Zero Network — and Murder Mystery Collective, a community-based play-to-earn murder mystery game coming soon to NEAR. We’re excited to continue supporting innovative NFT creators launching on NEAR.

### Onboarding major brands to Web3
In addition to partnering with crypto-native NFT projects looking to launch on NEAR, our team has been working closely with traditional Web2 companies with major IPs to launch on NEAR — providing them with new revenue streams and automatic royalty payments. We’re excited to extend white-glove support and offer out-of-the-box minting with a robust NFT architecture to help these major brands seamlessly launch in Web3. Stay tuned for specific brand partnerships and incredible launches to come on our Twitter!

### Fast and simple onboarding for new users (i.e. fiat on/off ramps)
As you may already know, improving user experience in crypto and onboarding the next 1 billion users to Web3 is a huge priority for both NEAR Protocol and Few and Far. Our team has been busy developing UI and third-party payment integrations to offer the most seamless way to enter Web3, including fast and simple ways to buy and sell crypto, the ability to enter our platform with just a credit card, and fiat on/off ramps with out-of-the-box AML/KYC compliance.

In the upcoming quarter, we’ll be rolling out a release with our new onboarding flow — soon, if you think buying NFTs was any easier on Few and Far, you’ll think it’s magic.

### Developing our Launchpad
After the release of our initial beta marketplace, our product managers, engineers, and designers have been collaborating on the build-out of our Launchpad, which will be the go-to destination for launching NFT collections on NEAR. The launchpad plans to deploy toward the end of September, with full-fledged drop and mint capabilities right within the app.

Next week, an initial release of our Launchpad will be available to discover upcoming launches from across the NEAR NFT ecosystem and purchase them on our secondary marketplace. We’ve also been working closely with dozens of projects to prepare their launches for when the full capabilities are ready in the upcoming month.

### Roadmap (i.e. Master Plan)

There’s been a lot of new features we’ve been working on, so we wanted to share a roadmap for our community to keep up with us on where we are at and to get a peek behind the curtain as to what is coming — and we are making significant progress!

Thank you all so much for being a part of the journey thus far. We couldn’t be more excited about what’s to come.

### Q3-Q4 2022

- NEAR Data Lake integration
- Launchpad release
- Social bots and market API
- Creator minting tools
- Redesigned onboarding process
- Multi-wallet partner integration
- Fiat on/off ramps
- NFT sub accounts (i.e. username minting)
- FAR TGE
- Farms launch (Few and Far DeFi)

### Q1-Q4 2023
- Aurora layer-2 compatibility
- Cross-chain bridging
- Community NEAR Validator NODE
- Unreal and Unity SDKs
- Few and Far Gaming
- Mobile app for iOS and Android

Keep an eye out for more exciting Few and Far updates to come later this year — and be sure to explore your favorite NEAR NFTs on our marketplace.

After a successful beta release, Few and Far has enhanced its marketplace — and unfolded its master plan for the remainder of the year.

Few and Far Product Update and Roadmap

Few and Far is the community-first NFT marketplace on NEAR protocol with rewards for participating. It is reimagining rewards, creativity, and community - earn NEAR tokens by trading NFTs.

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