At just 25 years of age, Patrick Tobler is the CEO and founder of the successful software platform NMKR in the Cardano ecosystem. In fact, he is so successful that some 25% of all projects in the ecosystem use his software, or more rightly termed infrastructure. Since its foundation a little over two years ago, NMRK has earned $6 million, raised a further $2million in an ICO, and in the last quarter 52,286 NFTs were sold by their users (an increase of 20,000 over the previous quarter), paid out more than three and a half million in ADA to their creators and still managed to help launch 636 projects – although that is down by 150 projects in the last quarter.
Despite these successes it’s currently tough back at the ranch and employee numbers are down to seven. The company is treading water and is not in profit, but as we sit on the edge of a harsh bear winter and are staring down the barrel of the next bull run, it’s not a bad place to be.
The tech is in place, it’s robust and tested. Moreover, Tobler has moved from NFT creation to tokenization. It’s basically the same tech but with compliance attached. Now, when projects launch with real world assets (RWA) they sell out. Example? Tiamonds and NMKR came together before the Cardano Summit in Dubai at the start of November to sell 20 tokenized diamonds. The plan was to sell NFTs which directly correlated to real diamonds. The owner could then keep the NFT, sell it or redeem it for the real asset.
What is spectacular was the 20 diamond NFTs in question sold out in just two minutes before the Summit began and before any promotion. When you have a product that is in demand and sells without any publicity, then you have a platform that works. NMKR works.
At the end of our interview, I asked Tobler about being a young entrepreneur. He worked as an intern post college for one of the big four, before founding NMKR. He made every mistake in the book and then some: none of them fortunately fatal. He did make one move, however, that proved invaluable: he hired his father as the CTO.
“My father has had his own company and is an excellent programmer. I can trust him 100 percent and there have been times when I’ve called in the middle of the night looking for help. You can’t do that with every CTO.”
It’s hard to dissect such a short career, even if stratospheric, but Tobler lets slip that he did try and make money in Bitcoin back in 2017 – which didn’t work.
“It wasn’t until 2020 that my real interest in the technology got me properly hooked. I was reading and watching everything I could find about ‘blockchain the technology.’ From the beginning I thought it was very important that a layer one blockchain was secure. I saw that in Bitcoin and then I saw it in Cardona.
“I really liked that approach.”
Before setting up his startup, Tobler had a short stint in PWC; a term which cured him of wanting to work for a large corporation, although he admits it was a lot of fun and he learnt a lot.
“It confirmed that I wanted to try my own business. I couldn’t cope with the politics and general weirdness of large corporates.”
While writing his bachelor thesis, NFTs became possible and big in Cardano. He pivoted his studies into building a simple solution – the genesis of NMRK – and wrote it in a week. It was the first NFT tool on Cardano and it became popular very quickly.
“I released it one day before my birthday and it just blew up. Of course, there were lots of bugs too so I jumped in to fix it – hiring lots of friends from university to help me – and my dad too – and we built a more professional toolkit around the minting of NFTs.”
Tobler’s father is an equal shareholder to Tobler and it makes for some robust debates.
“But to have my father in the business whom I trust has been fabulous.”
So NMRK was born. It started off as a tool to mint one NFT at a time, then expanded to handle full collections.
“We decided to build an API tool, a software as a service, and open it to the masses. In 2021 there was a lot of hype and our main issue was scaling. We quickly realized we needed to make the tool very simple so that people did not need to know it was a crypto-based technology.
“At the same time, we also began to approach real-world projects; projects where people are looking to solve real world problems, and not just limited to the Cardano ecosystem.”
Expanding the features included incorporating fungible tokens in case anyone wants to set up a meme coin right the way to real world asset tokenization. They have also incorporated airdrops, white label secondary marketplaces and worked with big names as the UN refugee platform UNHCR, leading actors such as Martin Lawrence, big tech giant Google and disruptive publishing platform Book.io
NFTs may have crashed and burned but the technology remains.
NMRK has partnered with two companies, one to offer compliance and the other XXX and the result is a dynamic platform that can allow tokenization of anything in a compliant fashion on Cardano.
“Early next year, we are going to launch a project to tokenize a hotel in Spain so that people can invest in the real estate and earn an income depending on how much they purchase. We are opening the doors to real world assets in the same way people can invest in shares.
“Everything will be tokenized.”
