Today is a day of celebration as we release the Genesis Developer NFT in a gesture of thanks to our developer community that has built the foundation for an explosive and successful first year for Metaplex projects, and the blueprint for new makers and creators to come.

As we thought about the best way to share Metaplex’s success with the community and deliver our first NFT, our risk management team saw only one path forward. The irony of today’s launch, built to celebrate you, is that the safest approach is to release an NFT only claimable by recipients geolocated outside the US. We realize that airdrops and miscellaneous launches in the web3 space are rarely transparent or delivered with much context, so although we can’t say much, sharing that we’re aware of the possible sensitivity on this project seemed like the right thing to do.

What is the connection between a geolocated NFT and possible benefits in the future, and why were we OK with this approach? We can’t offer more detail at this time as it’s ‘a legal thing’ again, but stick with us and see. 

What we can say is that the Metaplex team views risk management as a necessity when building a category and the new chapter of the web. As the standard for NFTs on Solana, we will be the challenger and test limits in areas that are foundational to building the universe we want to operate within, one with optimal visibility and fair practices for creators of all kinds. But we will never take on an existential risk to the ecosystem and architecture that our developers have created and that our creators rely upon; our operational and strategic decisions are always made with them in mind.

Metaplex is building for the long term, but given the position that we occupy within the ecosystem, when regulatory policies are outdated or opaque, we will likely choose the more cautious path while advocating for better definition. With so much of this governance uncharted, these interpretations vary across web3 teams, and there is no definitive best practice other than everyone doing their best.

With our one year anniversary on the horizon it is a bit surreal to honor the developer community achievements and yet feel like momentum is only accelerating. We are  already identifying ways to celebrate ALL of our ecosystem and look forward to sharing more soon.