Overview

Troop makes it easy for groups of people to buy NFTs together and manage fractional ownership. We're calling it "Troop", which means "a group of apes".

The core mechanic is simple: start a “hunt” with a target NFT, share the link with your friends, add funds, and complete the purchase. You can think of it as a single-purpose DAO, without all the hassle of multi-sig wallets, writing smart contracts, and pricing tokens.

To start, we support “Buy Now” NFTs listed on OpenSea and are focused on private hunts.

Try it out at troop.gg. We really hope you like it! 💚

The problem

Some people like to talk about sports. Others about stocks. Other about politics. We like to talk about NFTs. Yes, there’s money involved — but it’s also just fun. It feels like a massive multiplayer game across the Internet.

Unfortunately, the dynamics of the market keep a lot of people from participating.

NFTs follow a pretty dramatic power-law distribution. Most NFTs are not worth anything, while the top 0.1% get all the attention, volume, and liquidity. As a result, the top NFTs can soar in price and quickly become inaccessible. Look at “blue chip” NFTs like Cryptopunks, Bored Apes, Autoglyphs. They all cost upwards of $100k, with Autoglyphs’ floor hovering around $1.3M+.

Because of this, many people are staying on the sidelines. Some want exposure to the asset class, but they don’t feel comfortable spending $100k+ on tier-1 NFTs. Some have the capital, but want to diversify their investment across many NFTs, not just one or two. And some don’t want to risk buying a new, cheaper NFT that is not proven yet.

And this trend is only going to continue: as more institutions and DAOs continue to buy NFTs, the prices of top NFTs will become more unreasonably expensive for individuals. Even for individuals with a lot of money.

With that context in mind, we noticed a nascent behavior start to emerge: buying NFTs with friends. The idea is simple: a group of friends pitch in and become fractional owners of an NFT they like.

But the existing solutions require too much faith and/or effort from people. You might need to trust one of your friends with a substantial amount of money. You might need to set up a multi-sig wallet. You might need to use complex software designed for full-fledged DAOs with hundreds of members.

Given that, we saw an opportunity to build something useful for the community (and ourselves): an easy way to buy NFTs as a group. And so Troop was born.

The solution

Troop makes it easy for groups of people to buy NFTs together. Anyone can start a “hunt” with a target NFT, pool funds with a group of people, and share ownership of their favorite digital assets.

Partial owners have the freedom to sell some (or all) of their “shares” in the NFT at any time. Moreover, if the group later decides to sell the NFT to a third party, all owners get paid out, proportional to their shares on the NFT.

The entire process is orchestrated by smart contracts in a trustless way. Learn more about how things work under the hood here.

We see this as the first step in our quest to democratize NFTs and make it easy for people to invest in the asset class — without needing to spend ridiculous amounts of money on one single NFT.

The future of NFTs is social and fractional.

Instructions

Check out this post for instructions on every action you can take in Troop, from starting a hunt, to joining, to selling your ownership tokens:

Under the hood

Check out this post for a technical deep dive on how Troop works under the hood, including links to our smart contracts:

FAQs

What fees do you charge?

Zero — we currently don't charge any fees. As we continue to make Troop more useful and reliable, we may introduce a small fee in the future to help fund product development.

Is this like PartyBid?

Nope. While some mechanics are similar, the use case is different. We are huge fans of PartyBid and how they have made it possible for groups of hundreds of contributors to beat out even the largest whale at public auctions. However, PartyBid's emphasis on large, public, on-chain auctions didn't address our needs around buying NFTs on OpenSea with our friends. That is what Troop aims to address.

Is this safe?

Yes. During the hunt, we rely on smart contracts to secure your funds and ensure they can only be used to acquire your target NFT or be reclaimed by the original contributor. For fractionalization, we've partnered with Fractional and are leveraging their battle-tested protocol. Check out our Under the hood post to learn more about the system.

For our full FAQs, check out this post:

Leaving feedback

We'd love to hear your thoughts on Troop and your ideas of how we can improve the product! Please message us in the #feedback-💚 channel in the Troop Discord.

Founders

Bruno (bru.eth). Stanford alum. FingerprintsDAO member. Previously worked at Instagram, Attentive, Token, and Google. Brazilian living NYC. Twitter: @bdmartino.

Michael (mjdouglas.eth). Previously worked at Instagram, Facebook, A Thinking Ape. YC W15. Twitter: @mikedouglas.

Join our community

Discord: Troop

Twitter: @troop_gg

If you’re interested in joining the team, please email us at founders@edition.xyz.