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About Highlight
Highlight is an on-chain release platform for creators and brands, used to deploy NFT collections, membership passes and limited sales pages. A creator picks a collection type — open edition, limited edition, one of one, multi-token series or generative — and the backend selects the matching ERC-721 or ERC-1155 implementation, so nobody has to choose between contract variants; sales support fixed price, Dutch auction, ranked auction and English auction, with gates on wallet, holdings, token traits or currency balance.
Gated sales rely on executor-signed claims rather than an on-chain allowlist, so a collection already live can add gated drops later. The same backend exposes a dashboard, a TypeScript SDK, a CLI and an llms.txt file so AI agents can create collections, set prices and upload media on a user's behalf. It serves teams with an existing audience that do not want to build contracts and mint pages, dividing work with developer tooling that supplies raw primitives and with marketplaces that handle discovery and resale.
Highlight was founded in 2021 by former Square executives Nathaniel Emodi and Kevin Matthews to provide creators with no-code Web3 infrastructure.
In 2022, the company completed an $11 million seed round led by Haun Ventures, with participation from Polygon Studios and Coinbase Ventures. The platform initially focused on music, described as 'the future music fan club.'
In 2023, the platform expanded into generative art, launching a platform allowing artists to create and mint computer-generated NFTs. Built on the Polygon network to reduce transaction costs, its protocol architecture includes modules such as Community and TokenManagers.
By 2026 Highlight had become an aggregating NFT marketplace rather than only a minting tool. It indexes projects across Ethereum, Base and more than ten layer two networks, pulling listings and offers from other venues into one interface, while keeping creator-owned contract deployment, Arweave and fully onchain storage options, and a zero-fee structure for creators.
Tooling remains the differentiator. Generative collections run code at mint time and render from a random seed, with configurable capture delay, viewport and selector settings and GPU rendering. The Gengine developer platform breaks storage, onchain data, previews, traits and deployment into separate APIs for teams that do not want the full stack, and Highlight Protocol supplies modular, artist-owned contract components.
Future strategy and roadmap: Highlight plans to deepen indexing and aggregation, keep discovery, secondary trading and creator tools in one interface, and expand work with art institutions and curators. With NFT trading volumes down, revenue leans more on small buyer fees and subscription-style attempts around creator tooling.
Nathaniel Emodi — Co-founder & CEO; former DoorDash executive and Head of Strategy at Square.
Kevin Matthews — Co-founder & CTO; spent 7 years at Square/Block, from software engineer to Trusted Identity Director.