Galaxy Pass Origin Story | Interview with Co-Founder Brett Calapp

An interview with co-founder and CEO Brett Calapp about the motivations behind the RareMint Galaxy Pass.

Let’s start with a quick backstory. Why did you and your co-founder Niko start RareMint?

It started at a place of passion. Summer of 2020. Pandemic in full effect. I’m a sports collector. I grew up around athletes and sports manufacturing as a kid, and I was internalizing how I could make a business out of my hobby. Niko would complain to me that it took forever to get Pokemon cards he bought off eBay to show up at this house. We started talking about collectibles and blockchain. We are both big Seattle Seahawk football fans so naturally the conversation focused on sports collectibles. Although Niko kept complaining about his Pokemon delivery dilemma so we agreed we’d find a solution at some point. Niko being a 7 year full stack blockchain architect and developer started talking about NFTs (realize this was right before they exploded onto the market) and how we could leverage them to create utility for collectibles. We both agreed backing the NFT with a physical asset was something novel we could build and execute on. RareMint was born.

What was the motivation to create the Galaxy Pass?

Niko and I wanted to create a way to reward the people that have been super influential in creating RareMint. The energy and input has been so important. By creating the pass, we created the ability to thank them in a special way but also give our most loyal community members and early adopters a chance to participate alongside us. Personally, the most important growth in my life has come from giving back. Karma plays a big part of my belief system and if I can help people in business and just in life, it always comes back to me many times over. We foster that belief into RareMint and the Galaxy Pass.

What is your favorite benefit?

Easy. Drop Swap. Because you get to offer insurance on the drop. If you get an undervalued card, you can swap it from our Galaxy Pass drop bucket. If you buy one of the first 10, you get an automatic Drop Swap in our first Slab Series drop that will be the last week of June. Which happens to be Pokemon and someone’s going to rip a $28,000 Charizard. By the way, don’t swap that! In the future, we’ll give away additional Drop Swaps to random passholders. I love that on any given drop, all passholders will have a shot of picking up this benefit.

Why 10?

We wanted to set the precedent that the Galaxy Pass is about the community. It’s about slowly growing a passionate group of like-minded collectors, enthusiasts, and good humans. We’ll drop more passes in the future but it will always be in small, limited quantities. We plan to open up pass windows where passes will only be available during a specific time. Once the window closes you won’t be able to mint any more until the next open window of time. We will also cap the number of passes minted during a window. Again, our focus is about creating a dynamic and engaged community over time. In the long term, there will be a total of 1,000 Galaxy Passes issued.

Are there any benefits personal to you?

The private AMAs and live streams are really important to me and Niko. It’s a great time to personally connect with passholders. We really want to hear their input on how we can make RareMint and the Galaxy Pass great. I also look forward to having some amazing guest drop in from crypto, business, athletics, collecting to share insights, experiences and their views on the future.

What is the future of the pass?

Great question. We are really into the concept of group collecting. So passholders work together, sharing knowledge to create asset-backed NFT vaults where everyone can benefit if they choose to participate. Then the passholder community can vote on certain aspects of these digital vaults. It reminds us of having a baseball card or comic club in the treehouse (which we had as kids). Its channeling the passion of collecting from our youth but now we can also create real meaningful profit. We are also currently experimenting with creating metaverse versions of our 1 of 1 asset-backed NFTs for owners and also exclusive metaverse drops for passholders. Nick, who runs our studio and brings 20+ years of Hollywood experience to RareMint, has been running a lot of tests on how we can create an amazing metaverse companion product for all owners. We’re really excited about these future products from RareMint.