MakersPlace 2022 Year in Review

Header Image Credit: “Manifest New Worlds” by Heather Timm

The past year saw the crypto community at large through the highest of the highs to some surprising lows. Through it all, we maintained our dedication to our community of creators, and — despite the market shifts — we are finishing 2022 even stronger than when it started.

Today we want to celebrate some of the milestones we passed along the way.

We Grew

We started 2022 with a staff of 19 people and have since grown to 49 employees, including our new CEO Craig Palmer, formerly of Fandom.com.

We Built

We’ve made a lot of platform and product improvements over the last year. To name just a few, we…

We Worked Globally

Engaged with our community, we prioritized opportunities that allowed us to shine a light on regions and people that haven’t gotten their due attention in the western art world. We’re grateful to all of our partners who made this work possible with large- and small-scale exhibitions of work from creators the world over, including:

We Gave Back

2022 was a tumultuous year; we used art to give back through charity events. We asked artists to contribute work to exhibitions like Sunflowers for Ukraine and Overturned, an exhibition for Women’s Rights, and MakersPlace donated its proceeds to charities supporting these causes.

We also partnered with Excedrin on the Equal Bytes initiative. This exclusive grant program recruited 100 female artists to the NFT space and supported the minting and purchase of their first NFT.

We Worked With Our Community

In 2022, we made our community of creators and collectors our number one priority. To do this, we launched our weekly Exhibits series, raising up outstanding creative work from across our site.

As part of our new Spotlights series, we interviewed and promoted 50+ global rising stars in the crypto art world.

For our most passionate collectors, we started our Concierge Program, an exclusive, seamless, white-glove experience for our top collectors seeking a more personalized digital art shopping experience.

And just last month, we hosted our first GIF-Giving event, which gifted open-edition GIF artwork from some of our top creators to collectors on Black Friday weekend.

This month, ran our first community-submitted, community-voted exhibition, the MakersPlace Potluck Event.

We Were IRL (Finally!)

We had an amazing time meeting so many members of our community in real life at events across the United States and the world, especially at:

Crypto Art Week Asia
NFT LA
MOCA Cleveland
NFT NYC
Matt Gondek’s Fight Club opening at Tagliatelle Gallery in NYC
NFT SF & 0xpo Conference
Miami Art Week
Marco Santini Signature Series opening at The Lighthouse Gallery in Puerto Rico

The Year Ahead

2023 promises to be a great year for the MakersPlace community. In January, we will launch our external contract support (including Manifold!) and our podcast, which will expand the Spotlights interviews so we can get to know and promote even more creators.