I know: That headline seems like clickbait. Nothing but hype. Jeff trying to “pump his bags” while FUDding a different project.
Not true, 100%. I own Decentraland — have since $MANA was in the low $0.20 range. I have precisely zero interest in FUDding $MANA down from north of $4.80 as I write this. That just hurts my wallet. Decentraland is a fine project, and it has a big, bright future that I will be a part of.
But…
Let me tell you about Portals and the NFT that minted this afternoon (Nov. 26) on the Solana network.
Before we begin, though, allow me to offer one bit of advice: Go buy a Portals NFT on Magic Eden.
Seriously.
GO.
BUY.
A PORTAL.
Now — while the price floor is still unstable and bouncing around as the weakest of paper hands are happy pocketing tiny little gains of between 0.3 and 0.5 SOL. Anything under 5 SOL and you’re gonna be a happy camper, long-term (and right now you can snap ’em up in the 2 SOL range).
I’ll wait… (Insert: Jeopardy! theme song here.)
Got it?
Good.
Now, grip it so tight in your wallet that you make diamond hands seem like they’re made of gossamer.
In short, Portals promises to be a monster in the metaverse.
(Note: I want to be clear that I get paid by no one to write what I write. This is all based on my own research and analysis as someone who’s been involved with crypto since building my first ETH mining rig in 2017. What I write about are projects that I’ve bought with my own cash and still own, or that I am looking to buy. And I can promise you: I’m not writing to pump my bags so I can exit. I’m writing to share with you the opportunities I come across and which I am holding despite the price. Might as well build wealth together, right?)
As for Portals … I spent some time recently talking to the founder, Chris. I went into that conversation excited about what I thought Portals represented, and eager to participate in the minting of 5,000 Portal Access Cards. For the record, I did get in on the mint, luckily enough. I minted three at 1.5 SOL each, including an Onyx Access Card, the second rarest (wanted four, but my WiFi apparently moves at the speed of a baked octogenarian. Then again, Portals sold out in 5 seconds, though it took 4 minutes to process all 5,000 mintings, so maybe my WiFi didn’t fail me in the end).
Those three are a permanent fixture of my wallet … which speaks to the fact that I hung up from the call with Chris fundamentally changed by my realization of what Portals can become.
What was excitement is now borderline euphoria.
Frankly, there’s just so much going on inside Portals that I don’t have enough bandwidth yet to process and analyze it all. What Portals will become will take place over several stages, and some of the stages are months away, maybe a year away, so it’s hard to piece together every component just yet.
Instead, I’m just gonna bullet-point some stream-of-consciousness so you have an idea of what was going on in that conversation. This is in no particular order of importance or roadmap evolution.
1. Portals will be a metaverse in which you basically own a room, not unlike The Tower. Only, in Portals you can fully customize your room. Bring whatever furniture you want into your room. Hang up pictures of your favorite NFT art that you hold in your wallet. You can even put a Pacman machine in your room, click on it, and gain access to a whole drawer of classic video and 80’s-era arcade games you can actually play — Pacman, Angry Birds, Donkey Kong, Sonic the Hedgehog, many, many more.
2. The NFT you own (you did go buy one, right??) is your key card to access your Portal. There are three types of Access Cards: Ivory, Onyx, and Vision, in order of least to most rare. The only difference is the amount of space you get in your portal. That said, Portals will be a free-to-play site for those without an Access Card. They’ll be able to hang out with friends in their friends’ Portal (assuming they’re invited), and they’ll be able to head into Downtown Portals for all the experiences there — shopping, gaming, education, news, whatever. Without an Access Card, though, they just won’t own have a Portal to themselves.
3. Hang out in your Portal and watch live-stream YouTube, sporting events, movies, whatever. You can invite friends into your Portal and chill together (as avatars). Again, you can watch TV/movies together, and through the voice-chat feature, you’re talking to one another in real-time, even as you’re interacting together in your Portal. Imagine getting a bunch of friends together in your Portal for Netflix-and-Chill from an entirely digital perspective.
4. You can import your own avatar into Portals (that’s a Metahero $HERO play, by the way. And to be 100% transparent, I own a small bag of $HERO that I am not letting go of any time soon). It also means that we’re very likely to see a much larger universe of NFTs emerge very soon that allow owners to morph into those NFT characters as their avatar, and to use them all over the metaverse. Imagine a room filled with Bored Apes, SOLgods, Solana Monkey Biz … God, what would a SOLparasite do in that world?
5. Last week Portals announced a collab with Audius, the Spotify of blockchain. That will allow Portal owners to imbed and stream music into their room. Audius, as well, will operate its own Portal, in which there is a 24/7 DJ spinning tunes — basically, envision a Portals nightclub where Portalians — Portalites? What do call a citizen of Portals? — can hang out together, as if they’re hanging out at Treehouse in South Beach.
6. A day later, they partnered with GenesysGO. This won’t mean much on the surface because this is mainly a back-office partnership. But GG runs Remote Procedure Call servers, which are the backbone of, well, the internet, really. GG’s RPCs are uber-fast, uber-efficient, uber-stable, and uber-adored by devs all across the Solana network. I have invested in GenesysGO — a Millionaire Maker NFT, if you care about money — so I am quite familiar with the backstory here. In a nutshell: This is a partnership that says Portals truly cares about user experience.
7. And a day after that, Bonfida partnered with Portals so that your wallet address inside Portals is your .sol (like, jeffo.sol instead of the crazy, alphanumeric string). That will make getting paid in Portals crazy simple, and it means you can move money around quickly, efficiently, and effortlessly, and without having to hop back and forth into your wallet to copy/paste your alphanumeric address. (As a brief aside, those last three partnerships — Audius, GenesysGO, Bonfida — tell you just how high-quality this project is, the how some of the most significant names on the SOL network view the Portals metaverse.)
8. Outside of your Portal, you’ll be able to wander the hallways and visit friends. Or, you can take the elevator down and head outside to Downtown Portals — a space for retailing, education, entertainment, whatever. This is just me thinking out loud here, not anything Chris told me, but… Just recently Nike announced it’s moving into digital footwear because it realizes that clothing avatars is gonna be huge (seriously, folks, avatars are going to be a massive crypto segment). So, it’s not hard to see Nike, Gucci, Ralph Lauren, Levi’s — pick a brand — open a storefront in Downtown Portals that sells digital clothing and accessories. It’s not hard to see Orca or Raydium or BlockFi own a storefront where you can pop in and do some digital banking, staking, lending, borrowing, or coin/token trading. Not hard to envision AMC or Disney put up a theater where you and friends can go watch the latest blockbuster on opening night, even if you and your friends live in different cities…or countries. In short, Downtown Portals is very likely to shape up as a major destination for shopping and entertainment in the rapidly emerging Web 3.0 world.
9. Speaking of education… the metaverse will very likely be the first mass-adoption opportunity in crypto. It’s going to do for Web 3.0 what Web 2.0 did to retailing — bring in all the stragglers who initially scoffed at internet retailing and gaming. Now, the entire world is Web 2.0. The metaverse is the next iteration — the new internet — and Portals is quite likely to emerge as the “gateway drug” for people who don’t understand crypto, or NFTs, or the metaverse itself. Portals will offer educational opportunities for people to enter and learn. Indeed, if you are familiar with Coinbase and how it offers $3 to $5 worth of crypto to learn about some crypto project, then you can see where a firm like Raydium (or any number of others) might offer newbies a chance to earn a few coins learning about crypto trading, investing, saving, whatever.
10. Magic Eden, SolSea, Solanart…we could wander into those shops and browse NFTs as though we’re browsing posters or art in a gallery and buy what we like. Or maybe there’s actually an art gallery of NFTs — the rarest NFTs, on loan from Snoop Dog or whoever. Maybe there’s a way to loan your own, uber-rare NFTs to a Portals art gallery, and generate a bit of passive income for yourself from advertising dollars that Portals brings in. Again, I am totally going “big brain” here; Chris mentioned none of this. But I can tell from our conversation that he has very “big brain” thoughts for what’s going to ultimately define Portals.
11. While you’re Downtown, you will be able to essentially teleport to other metaverses that decide to connect with/partner with Portals. So, you’d be able to, say, jump into Star Atlas from Downtown. Or maybe a smaller project hosts a mini-version of its metaverse in Downtown Portals for people who don’t necessarily hold an NFT for the project, but who might want to get a taste of what it’s about before committing capital.
12. At some point, Portals grows beyond Downtown. Land (as NFTs) opens up in the suburbs for expansion, and for Portalians/Portalites to own and exploit financially in some fashion.
That’s just the top dozen notions off the top of my head. Portals has so many more possibilities.
Right now, the early iteration of Portals — the proof-of-concept, let’s call it — is blocky, arcade-game-like graphics that are 2D; your point-of-view never changes as you move about.
But that’s just to give users a small experience. If you poke around the Portals Discord, you will see the full-on renderings of what a Portal will look like. It’s quite cool, like living inside a Pixar movie — like, maybe, Up. And once it’s in full-blown operation, your POV will move as you move about your Portal or as you wander through Downtown.
Here’s how I ultimately see this: The metaverse is the future, and that unstoppable story is already being written.
But we are in the very earliest moments here — the table contents before we even get to the first page. Great wealth is going to happen all along the process, but the life-changing wealth — what we know as “F*** You Money” — happens here.
That’s what I bought three Portals (and wanted four). And that’s why I’m hanging on to the Portals I was lucky enough to mint.