“Ʉnlock is the best way to enable time-based NFTs that allow you to token-gate content.” -Jennifer Tran, Co-Founder, Mintgate

Mintgate’s vision is to build a platform that empowers creators and communities to create content that they can monetize. Mintgate co-founder Jennifer Tran describes Mintgate as “the Shopify for tokenized content,” where creators can both mint and sell gated NFTs to their communities.

Mintgate is committed to providing a superior user experience to its users, and is obsessively-focused on UI and UX. While Mintgate focuses on the frontend experience, they rely on Ʉnlock to provide and manage the behind-the-scenes magic to gate content with time-based NFT access tokens.

About Mintgate

MintGate is a one-stop platform focused on creating unlockable content NFTs and token-gated access to content. With Mintgate, creators can generate token-gated links for tokens already minted, as well as create new NFTs with or without unlockable content.

Mintgate users can create NFT access passes to video, audio, and other types of digital content.

The Mintgate platform can be white labeled, and creators can use Mintgate to set up their own branded NFT storefronts with unlockable content.

Objectives

Mintgate’s current implementation allows a user to token gate YouTube videos, Soundcloud audio, and many other types of content. Mintgate wanted to continue to enhance the overall functionality they offered to their users, including must-have features like limited-time access tokens, the ability to accept credit-card payments for access tokens, and more.

Additionally, Mintgate was looking to get better visibility into how creators were using its platform. This included gaining visibility into usage of the platform based on the number and types of keys purchased by members.

Challenges 

Mintgate excels at creating a rich and intuitive frontend user experience for creators. However, managing the backend details of NFT access tokens, especially in the area of time-bound NFTs, is a particularly thorny issue.

After hearing about Ʉnlock Protocol via the Tachyon Accelerator, Mintgate began exploring the integration of the elegant frontend experience of Mintgate with the powerful capabilities of Ʉnlock Protocol.

Results 

Ʉnlock provides time-based NFTs for Mintgate, which enable token gated content for a specific amounts of time. Mintgate had received a number of customer requests to provide time-based NFTs, and Ʉnlock solves that problem natively.

One subtle, but important, additional benefit of placing the time-based lock on the NFTs (rather than on the link that Mintgate generates) ensures that the lock will exist for as long as blockchains exist.

A novel example of the partnership between Mintgate and Ʉnlock was seen at EthPortland in 2021. Mintgate was used to token gate content using Ʉnlock. This body of content included presentations from the conference, as well as the recording of the Twitter Space conversation between Jennifer Tran of Mintgate and Amber Case of Unlock that lead up to the session.

“Ʉnlock approaches token gating and has native integrations with many different platforms from the backend side. When partnered with Mintgate’s frontend experience, it just made sense,” concludes Tran.