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Kevin Rose’s Proof Acquires Divergence Engineering Team
The entrepreneur's NFT project, which is responsible for the Moonbirds collection, is gearing up for a “social universe” launch later this summer.
By Eli Tan
Updated May 11, 2023, 5:42 p.m. Published Jul 14, 2022, 5:00 p.m.
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Three months after the successful launch of the Moonbirds non-fungible token (NFT) collection, entrepreneur Kevin Rose is expanding his Proof team with the acquisition of Divergence, a London-based engineering firm.
Divergence is known for its Ethereum smart contract ability, acting behind the scenes of projects like Brotchain, The Kiss Precise and G-Money’s Admit One collection.
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Divergence co-founder Arran Schlosberg will become Proof’s vice president of engineering, and the company’s other co-founder, Angharad Thomas, will be Proof’s director of product, according to a press release.
“If you rewind a couple of months, Kevin was one of our investors,” Thomas said in an interview. “We thought, ‘Why are you building over there and we [are] building over here?’ Why don't we do it together and combine the technical R&D lab with Kevin’s incredible product vision and community building.”
Proof is bolstering its staff in preparation for the launch of its “social universe” later this summer, which the company has been teasing since the release of its Proof Collective membership NFT in April. (The cheapest price for one of the NFTs on the open market is now 83 ETH, or about $93,000).
While full details about the social universe will be revealed at the company’s keynote "Future Proof" conference next month, Rose teased the product as being its own line of Web3 services for the larger Proof community, not just a 3D metaverse game like Yuga Labs’ Otherside project.
“The tools we’re all using for curation and communication are not built for Web3. Discord was made for gamers, Reddit is an early Web2 product,” Rose said in an interview. “We’re trying to build something where we can interact with the rich data behind the scenes. The universe and the social tools that we're building will be in a phased approach, where we'll see these very small wins over time add up to a pretty compelling social product.”
Rose’s effort will come with no shortage of capital. The Moonbirds launch and its hefty 2.5 ETH (around $2,800) mint price garnered $200 million in sales in just its opening weekend. The collection now has a 27 ETH (around $31,000) floor price and sits near the top of weekly collection volume rankings.
Read more: Moonbird NFTs Are a Bet on Kevin Rose's Rep
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