The Candy 2023 Digital Community Report

In 2023, 689K digital collectibles were minted on Candy, as communities used tokens for ticketing, in-world experiences, and IP creation.

Since the Internet’s earliest days, we’ve been using technology to share who we are. Web3 signaled the start of a new era. More than just using digital tools to express ourselves, we could own who we are online. Your imagination belongs to you. So then, does the future. 

Today, fans play a key role in shaping culture. We built Candy to help communities connect over what they love. Here, you can own your place on the field. You can make comic book history. You can become a superhero. Or, you can meet your real life heroes for the first time.

2023 marked a year of massive change across our industry. And it revealed a simple truth, too. Fandom isn’t speculative - it’s connective. It’s about building the experiences that bring people together. Above all else, it’s about the power of fans.

This year, Candy joined forces with Palm NFT Studio, bringing together two of the largest Web3 community platforms. We saw over 689,000 mints. We saw over 2 million secondary marketplace transactions, and more than 100,000 new users join our platform. Fans spent over 500,000 hours on in-world and platform challenges. And fans left their imprint on culture, as DC Bat Cowl collectors became the first community in comic history to create an original DC Super-Villain. 

Decentralized fandoms are rapidly reshaping entertainment, as communities like ours invent new ways to play, participate, and be heard.

You can collect the free mint commemorating 2023 here. 

Here’s what we learned together over the course of the last year:

The year that baseball fans changed the game. 

From the stadium to the screen, digital collectibles can be a powerful way of preserving the moments that matter. In the last year, more than 100,000 baseball fans collected commemorative tickets on Candy. They brought the game home with them. And, they inscribed each ticket with their own memories. More than 29,000 fans added unique recollections to the tickets they collected. 

This year, baseball fans on Candy got even closer to their favorite players. Over the course of the 2023 season, more than 150 fans got VIP access to MLB player IRL and virtual meetups with Pete Alonso, Jazz Chisholm Jr., Michael Harris II, Corbin Carroll, and thousands of Candy MLB collectors were rewarded with MLB tickets, signed memorabilia, exclusive digital collectibles and event game-worn equipment. 

And increasingly, fans got to experience baseball in new ways, with the launch of new games like CodeBreaker that put your knowledge of baseball to the test. In 2023, Candy’s top 100 collectors competed in over 17,000 Candy League challenges—earning their place on the leaderboard, and their rank among fans. 

In 2023, DC fans made comic book history.

The launch of the Bat Cowl project in 2022 was a watershed moment. An iconic superhero was reimagined. And a new community stepped up to heed his call, stand for justice, and create their place in Gotham City. Over the last year, this community has done something unprecedented: shaping the trajectory of an original comic series, Batman: The Legacy Cowl across three chapters and 57 votes, and launching a new original DC Supervillain, The Legacy Cowl; becoming the first fan community to create canon with DC.

As collectors contributed to a new, emergent storyworld, they also began to explore it, too. Over the last year, Gotham City District Knightwatch and Harley Quinn collector factions have faced off in four challenges, spending more than 500,000 hours playing in-world experiences, as Gotham City’s Underground was mapped for the first time. 

Online, and in real life, collectors unlocked new rewards: including access to early previews of The Flash, exclusive access to a San Diego Comic Con signing and merch with Jim Lee, dinner at Park Row Restaurant, digital events with DC artists and writers, and more. 

And this year, DC3 celebrated its very first anniversary, with 70 new comic drops. From modern comics to legacy grails: from the reveal of Batman: A Death in the Family’s alternate covers to time-traveling with The Flash, in 2023, DC fans made history, and their mark on the DC superhero universe. 

Imagining new design and production  infrastructure. 

In 2023, fans minted more than 689,000 digital collectibles on Candy. That’s a lot of assets. :) Designing at scale requires generative infrastructure: systems that  allow us to imagine, and bring to life, millions of potential outputs.

This year, we introduced RealTimeCandy (RTC), the first scalable web3 production platform. Built in Unity, RTC provides real-time rendering and AI tooling for large, game-ready editioned asset libraries, representing 219 MLB product lines.

We also released the Palm Generative Art Maker, the first generative art pipeline built in Unreal Engine. The Palm Generative Art Maker is designed to open up access to generative 3D design: providing creators with a powerful resource to build customized asset libraries and interactive artworks.  In 2023, the free application was downloaded by more than 35,000 creators.

Creating an on-chain record of culture. 

Over the last decade, the introduction of blockchain technology  has opened up new worlds for creators. Critically, it has also provided a new framework for preserving cultural artifacts, and art historical  movements.  

In 2023, Candy and Getty Images launched Exposure, a new platform centering a conversation about how we use technology to tell stories. From portraiture to street photography, from supernovas to the supernatural: every image also acts as a record of its audience, the holder just out of frame. Artists participating in companion digital projects as part of Exposure receive 100% net royalties.

A commitment to our environment. 

Candy was built to support, uphold, and nurture digital environments. This year, we launched Palm Garden, a social impact platform that charts the emergence of a young planet. The experience launched with a collection of 3,000 Inklings: the building blocks of life on Palm Garden. Over the course of 2023, we saw their world take form, through missions, quests, spaces, and the very first votes.

And this summer, we began to see their impact, through Palm Garden’s first donation-based campaign for the Rainforest Foundation, Epiphytes. 

A platform for the future. 

As our communities evolve and grow, so does our footprint. In 2023, Candy merged with Palm NFT Studio, launching a new unified platform for digital collectible communities on Candy. Along the way, we introduced new features, including enhanced marketplace filtering, CodeBreaker games, fan challenges, and leaderboards.

And our ecosystem is evolving with us. Over the last year, the Palm Network has undergone a series of monumental changes as it transitions to an Ethereum Layer 2 (L2). These critical updates will further improve the network’s interoperability and scale, better resourcing the communities we work in. 

Now and forever, we believe in the power of fans to change the game. 

In 2024, our journey is still only just beginning. And it begins with you all: the fans. Our mission is to help communities connect with their passions. To empower fans to create their place on the field. To help fans bring the game home with them, through ticketing and highlights. To craft with their digital collections. To build their dream team. To bring their identity with them, to any platform, through self-custody.

A new universe awaits ❍ Create your place in it.