Dust Labs raises US$ 7M as its y00ts NFT collection launches

Solana-based NFT startup Dust Labs, the maker of the hyped-up DeGods NFT collection, launched its new y00ts NFT collection on Monday. y00ts is a collection of 15,000 NFTs of a sheep mascot each with differing characteristics and attributes on the Solana blockchain and requires users to use DUST, the company’s native token to mint the NFTs.

On the same day, Dust Labs announced they have raised US$ 7 million in a strategic funding round. Participants of which included, Solana Ventures, Foundation Capital, FTX Ventures, Jump, Metaplex, and Chapter One.

Dust Labs’ first product is a ‘scholarship’ minting system that serves as a whitelist and allows winners to mint a y00ts NFT. 

However, the mint kicked off with a slight glitch as whitelisted users found themselves unable to mint their ‘t00bs’ NFTs on time after the team detected a blocker bug in the software. 

T00bs are the NFTs from the mint and can be burned in exchange for the y00ts NFTs PFP. The process will begin on September 9. Each NFT costs around 375 DUST to mint.

Holders who get their hands on an NFT will gain commercial IP rights as per industry practice. However, y00t NFTs does not support that. Instead, y00ts was set up as a marketplace of customized traits called the y00ts store. To gain customization rights, holders are required to stake their y00ts NFTs for 30 days for a token to be added to the y00t’s metadata. Then they can use the obtained token to apply for customized traits.

Photo: y00ts