A Barcelona-based team is dynamising their city by connecting online stories with offline spaces. Their most recent endeavour, Pelai Virtual Gallery, brings together local contemporary artists, AR experiences and NFTs.

Explorins is a spatial story-telling app creating interactive, immersive & locally sourced experiences for brands. These experiences are organised in what they call “Universos”; that are almost like pathways through real stories, people and places, thus deeply connected to the identity of their audience.

Pelai Virtual Gallery is one of these universes. With the initiative, Explorins aim to unite the online and offline worlds in a “magical symbiosis”, promoting the intersection of art, culture and technology.

Visitors of the virtual gallery can walk the streets of Pelai and discover the work of emerging artists of the city and purchase their works through phygital NFTs.

Tokenization & phygital goods

Explorins & Pelai Virtual Gallery are providing a unique experience through Augmented Reality, with which they intensify the visitors’ experience, detaching it from a closed environment and opening it to the public space.

They’re connecting the experience with new sales and marketing channels through decentralized marketplaces — enters Mintbase — for the sale of digital art in NFT format. Some of the NFTs sold include also the physical artwork, that can be redeemed by token holders.

For this, Explorins deployed their own smart contract through Mintbase and then integrated the marketplace in their app through our SDK. This is a prime example of what can be done with Mintbase’s tools.

Blockchain technology and NFTs provide artists and content creators with a unique opportunity to monetize their products. Thanks to advanced royalty mechanisms embedded into the NEP 171 standard, the token standard for NEAR NFTs, artists may receive royalties for life every time an NFT is sold — regardless of the token being sold in a different platform to the one it was minted on.

In the case of Pelai Virtual Gallery in addition to the lifetime profit for the artist, when an NFT is sold, a 4% goes will go to Tot Raval Foundation.

A virtual experience with IRL impact

Explorins put a high focus on delivering a positive impact on the local communities.

Thanks to mining their NFTs on Mintbase & NEAR Protocol — certified by South Pole as carbon-neutral — they guarantee their marketplace is climate-friendly.

Then, driving cultural and economic impact locally. Besides sharing a cut of the profits with for-good organisations, the collaborative format of their project helps promote the local art community, while making this type of technological and cultural experiences more accessible and diverse.
Innovation and dynamization of the commercial axis: By dynamizing the physical space of Pelai we bring users closer to the commercial fabric thanks to experiential marketing.

Besides this, they hope the Virtual Gallery will bring dynamisation to the street of Pelai, bringing users closer to brick & mortar retail in the area.