Portals: Create Spaces In Buildings On Solana

Portals is a metaverse project on Solana enabling people to create spaces in a building. It could be a room for a crypto enthusiast or an office for an organisation. The goal is to develop a platform where users can build and collectively create an experience filled environment, a city block.

People will be able to hang with friends, co-workers, DAO members, play games and express themselves with a unique avatar or the space they create. In the room, they can also showcase their NFT collections. In fact, ETH NFT integration is live already, so you can bring the ETH NFTs into the Solana Portals metaverse.

Portal NFT holders can already enjoy building their rooms in a metaverse but anyone else can use Portals demo to grasp upon what’s currently available. In the first step, it allows to create an avatar:

Once you do that you are in an empty room which you can build using given inventory. Graphics, navigation and building mechanics are very basic but the project was in development for less than a year, so what can you expect?

There’s some bugs too, you can just place a shelf across the wall… your neighbor might not be happy with that!

In the Twitter or on a website you can find more visuals but the more representative, more polished ones look very different from the ones taken from currently build spaces which are very basic and quadratic:

This one is shared on a website’s homepage:

But inside the metaverse the graphics look more like this (the graphics will also depend on a computer and settings used):

Just yesterday, Sam Bankman Fried, one of the wealthiest crypto investors and CEO of FTX was asked about NFTs in an interview at Fox Business. Interviewer specifically addressed the fact that FTX is building an office in a metaverse and while Sam was speaking about metaverse in general, a shot of FTX digital office tagged as Portals was shown.

Apparently, it seems as FTX is building an office in Portals but there are no related announcements in search results. Potentially, news will come out at some point and will bring a lot of eyes on the project.

Full video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifeqOwA9GYU&t=311s

The visual shared by Fox also looks like it was rendered with 3D software rather than constructed with the currently available builder on Portals.

NFT drop

November 26, 2021 Portals had their first NFT - Portals Access Cards drop. The cards give access to the first building of portals. There are only 5K holder cards with different rarity/valuation. The metaverse will start to expand from a center into the edges, so the early adopters will have access to the centre of metaverse. Any DAO, Company, Organization, NFT Project, Community that wants to do something in Portals Downtown will need to own or have permission to use a Holder Card. If they do not own themselves, then getting permission could require a payment or leasing agreement. This means that if you hold a card, it will give you the right to lease your building space in the future to earn passive income.

The cheapest access card at the time of writing costs 34.5SOL and there are multiple sales made in one hour. From the 2 days of data on Magicedend, it looks as if the price is rising.

30 days after the drop, the metaverse access key collection has recorded the highest trading volume among Solana NFT collections, boasting more than $9 million. At that point the price of NFT was 3 times lower than it currently is.

Tokenomics

The team is still working on a whitepaper and tokenomics. For now we just know that there will be a token.

Team

Founders Gomez and Wakawakajaq have 25+ combined technical dev experience, building games, apps, WebGL, and AR/VR experiences for brands like Disney, Blizzard, Riot Games, Microsoft, Oculus.

Gomez was previously a founder of software studio and a Twitch influencer Platform.

A community and partnerships guy chlchlchl lead partnerships with multiple Fortune 100 companies and top global NGOs, institutions, and foundations.

Other team members are from all around the world, the project keeps on looking for new talent and claims to be allocating part of the funds they already have to expand the team. They supposedly have advisors with solid metaverse-related experience too.

Nothing that is said about team members can be fact checked, no full names, no faces. The names of the previously founded companies aren’t disclosed so can’t be fact-checked online.

Very mysterious without a particular reason, if the experiences are legit, why do they hide their identities?

The Github account for the project couldn’t be found.

At least some notable partnerships can provide a bit of credibility.

FTX potentially has an office in Portals as mentioned above. Then there was a recent announcement about Binance.USs setting up shop in Portals. Solana’s DEX Serum, Blockchain Service Provider GenesysGo, decentralized music streaming platform Audius also jumped in the train and will provide experiences in Portals.

Investors

I was unable to find any funding or investor details about the metaverse. All we know about funding is that they should have raised some from their NFT sales. It’s not clear what the exact numbers are though. The mint price of Access Cards was only 1.5SOL and there were 5000 of them. The team should’ve collected more income from NFT royalties than from the sale.

There’s 30K followers on the Twitter account which was created in August 2021 and 13.4K joined in the last 30 days. The following is growing.

Engagement is good, community is positive.

Discord has 11,9K members and 3.1K are currently online, chat is active, there's a lot of excitement about growing NFT prices in recent messages.

Medium only has one post - A Guide to Portals.

Roadmap

Portal spaces, where NFT holders can build their rooms are already launched. Now the team will focus on introducing more features to the spaces, and will hold an owner contest to flood Twitter with images and bring awareness to the project.

Later, the opening of a downtown will give the ability to explore experiences built by partners.

Team also promises investor announcements in 2022, 3D avatars, and other integrations.

Summary

So the biggest red flag is the mysterious team and the biggest bull flag is the Binance and FTX as well other project partnerships. I can see more crypto projects to follow, especially if they are Solana based, as Portals is the biggest metaverse on Solana so far.

It’s a complete speculation but what if this whole thing was orchestrated by Sam Bankman or other big personalities wishing Solana to be successful. The team is spread across the world, it’s not clear where they got the funding from, and in a small amount of time they have accomplished quite a lot. Can random devs just come together and in a half a year build the metaverse platform people can actually use? It really makes sense for Solana to have a metaverse project to compete with Sandbox and Decentraland and I believe this is something the Solana community and investors would want.

Regardless, I expect the Portals name to be more and more relevant in metaverse related conversations in 2022.