Introducing Gamma, a Hub for the World’s Web3 Social Identity

Our platform was launched in September of last year as STXNFT.com. In January, we shared our plans to become the leading marketplace for Bitcoin NFTs. We’re now well on our way to fulfilling the vision for NFTs on Bitcoin, and we’re ready to announce the next phase of our roadmap.

Today, we’re excited to introduce Gamma to the world: a platform built to become a hub for the world’s Web3 social identity, centered around NFTs. Gamma aims to serve as the home for collectors, creators, and investors to come together to explore, trade, and showcase extraordinary NFTs through the Bitcoin ecosystem.

View our promotional video on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/703659255

Gamma: Three Platforms for Your Web3 Social Identity

Gamma is the third letter of the Greek alphabet, for the third phase of the web: Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and now, Web3, with Gamma, a home for creators and collectors to come together, in a user-owned internet.

The Gamma platform consists of three core products:

1. A user-first marketplace to find, explore, and collect extraordinary NFTs secured by Bitcoin, the most trusted and decentralized settlement layer for digital assets.

2. A creator-first launchpad for artists to deploy fully tested, creator-owned, no-code smart contracts in minutes.

3. A social platform, bringing together creators and collectors in an engaging and Web3-native way.

Gamma is built to support your existing decentralized identity, not lock you into another one within a walled garden. That’s why we’ve supported BNS names from day one, without requiring users to sign up or give up data to use the platform. And we plan to grow to support other decentralized identities in the future, so you can bring your history with you.

Not requiring users to set up accounts or profiles unlocks a completely new way of following and engaging with Web3 identities; users can follow other users based on their public blockchain data, even if those users have never used our platform. And, when you connect to Gamma’s platform for the first time, your entire history is visualized immediately within our immersive UI. We believe this fully embodies the paradigm shift in online privacy models introduced in Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin white paper.

The Three Big Questions

When Native Bitcoin?

Gamma is built on Stacks, a programming layer that settles smart contract interactions onto Bitcoin as a base layer. Stacks’ framework and consensus mechanism not only allows it to leverage Bitcoin as a secure settlement layer, but also allows it to read the state of the Bitcoin blockchain. This means that native BTC transactions are able to trigger Stacks smart contracts interactions without ever requiring a user to hold the Stacks smart contract gas token.

Now that we’ve introduced our social platform to the world, our work continues to bring these kinds of seamless interactions to our users. Gamma’s marketplace is already among the top five most called contracts in all of Stacks, often trailing only the highest-volume DeFi token swaps. In our decentralized ecosystem, it’s our responsibility to be stewards of innovation on Bitcoin—and we’re up for the challenge. We’ve doubled and tripled our size, now with about a dozen team members ushering in the tools, systems, and technologies for what’s next with NFTs on Bitcoin.

What’s Next for NFTs on Bitcoin?

This is where we need your help. Gamma is a platform for builders, creators, artists, investors, and collectors—a platform for anyone and for everyone. Gamma will build the infrastructure and the tools to assist creators, connect buyers and sellers, and bridge communities together.

We believe strongly in the future of digital asset ownership. But we’ve also only scratched the surface of what NFTs will become. Our singular focus will be getting out of the way of builders, innovators, and artists, so that they can build future use cases for NFTs on Bitcoin, making sure they have the tools to do what they do best: create.

We’ll be more engaged with our community than ever before—and we invite you to join us. We invite you to build with us, or to share your ideas, your feedback, your criticisms, and anything else you feel will advance the pace of innovation on Web3. We’re all ears.

How Will Gamma Be Truly User- and Creator-First?

We’ve built what we hope is a great experience for users all over the world, but we know we can do even more to make sure Gamma’s platforms are user- and creator-first.

Our launchpad already ensures that creators are the sole owners and controllers of their custom NFT smart contracts—Gamma has no ability to censor contracts or prevent creators from using their smart contract on any other platform or for any other purpose. While our Create portal is still in beta, we intend to only expand the tooling available to creators as we complete the offering.

As we mentioned earlier, we also don’t require our users to create a Web 2.0 style account, and we make every effort to use the most privacy-focused methods of maintaining our services. This includes ditching tools like Google Analytics, the most popular and free website analytics tool, for privacy-focused tools like Fathom. This ethos is important to us, and we’ll continue to make decisions like this that prioritize the interests of users, even if it takes away from the bottom line.

And of course, there’s this bottom line. While we’re still early in our journey, we’re making strides here too. We hope to fully embody the principles of Web3 and align incentives with our users, so everyone can benefit from Gamma’s success. We’ll continue to innovate in ways that align with our long-term vision and share them with you when we’re confident they’ll be great experiences and outcomes for our users. 

Together, with Gamma

Gamma has commissioned a series of original artworks by a group of over a dozen creators on Stacks and Bitcoin to celebrate the ecosystem. The collection, titled “Together, with Gamma” explores dozens of artistic representations of people coming together around Bitcoin and Web3. The collection will mint at 5:00pm ET on Thursday, April 28th, where 100% of revenues and royalties will be distributed to the artists with works featured in the collection. Gamma welcomes artists and creators to join us in building the future of digital collectibles.