Entertainment and culture newsletter Dirt announced Monday that it has received $1.2 million in seed funding to build out its Web 3 infrastructure.
The round was led by crypto investment fund Collab + Currency, with contributions from Offline Adventures, Flamingo DAO, Spice Capital, Unicorn DAO and Matt Hackett.
Dirt maintains its media ecosystem through NFT sales, but its network of freelancers doesn't just cover crypto topics. Still, with Web 3, Dirt wants to build community through non-fungible tokens, its $DIRT governance token DirtDAO, which will oversee access to exclusive content for token holders.
"Web3 creates additional pathways to fandom beyond buying a subscription or tote bag - it transforms media into a two-way street where subscribers can make appropriate decisions about the direction of the publication," Dirt staff said in a blog post.
Freelance journalist Kyle Chayka founded Dirt last year and began selling his content as NFTs in partnership with NFT platform Mirror. According to Axios writer Sara Fischer, he made $20,000 in NFT sales on day one.
Dirt's NFTs have generated four times the ETH trading volume on OpenSea since September.
Chayka did not respond by press time.