3LAU-backed platform Royal crashes during first music NFT drop, mint delayed

Royal, a non-fungible token (NFT) platform from the American music producer 3LAU (pronounced “Blau”), crashed after its first mint drop. 

The mint was supposed to start on January 11 at 1:00 p.m ET and include music NFTs from the Grammy award-winning rap star Nas but crashed a minute into the drop due to heightened user demand on their servers, the platform explained on Twitter.

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Royal has now delayed the mint to start on January 20 at 1:00 p.m. ET. A total of 760 tokens at three price tiers — Gold, Platinum and Diamond — will be offered at launch. 

For the Nas music NFT drop, Nas maintains 50% of the royalties for every NFT sale. Those who buy one of the 500 Gold tokens will receive 7% from royalties on every resale, with the 250 Platinum token holders and 10 Diamond holders each earning 21% from royalties. 

In November, Royal received $55 million in Series A funding led by the venture capital firm a16z. The platform aims to give music artists a way to maintain and share ownership over their work with fans through NFTs.

About Author

MK Manoylov has been a reporter for The Block since 2020 — joining just before bitcoin surpassed $20,000 for the first time. Since then, MK has written nearly 1,000 articles for the publication, covering any and all crypto news but with a penchant toward NFT, metaverse, web3 gaming, funding, crime, hack and crypto ecosystem stories. MK holds a graduate degree from New York University's Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP) and has also covered health topics for WebMD and Insider. You can follow MK on X @MManoylov and on LinkedIn.