Overview
Yaad Labs is a studio and agency that helps Caribbean artists, businesses, and countries create NFTs, digital tokens that prove who owns an item, and build projects around them1. A brand can book Yaad Labs for advice and workshops, or hand it the hands-on work of designing, coding, and launching a project1.
Yaad Labs is based in Jamaica2 and builds on Cardano3. Draper University, a Silicon Valley startup school, describes it as building on Cardano since 20224. Its in-house projects are AniMints, an animation studio, and TripHut, a travel club run as a DAO, a group whose members make decisions by voting on the blockchain1. A third, Tipsy Turtles, is a cartoon whose main character is sold as a digital collectible5.
Key Features
- One team for the whole project. Yaad Labs offers contracted work covering artwork, smart contracts (programs that run on the blockchain), NFT minting, community building, content, marketing, project management, security, and treasury, plus help financing new projects1.
- Reusable voting and treasury code. The TripHut DAO contracts, programs on the blockchain that enforce the club's rules, are open-source under the MIT license, so other groups can study or reuse them6.
- Member votes that control the money. The TripHut DAO contracts are designed so members vote with vote NFTs on three kinds of proposals: general payouts, trip payments to a traveler and a travel agent, and upgrades to the system itself7.
- Published outside reviews. Anastasia Labs, a Cardano code-review firm, audited the vote-counting and treasury code; its May 2024 report lists 13 findings, 4 rated Critical, all marked acknowledged with resolution pending8. No Witness Labs later ran a bug bounty review of the DAO contracts, checking and classifying flaws reported by outside testers9.
- Cardano stories told as cartoons. Yaad Labs won funding from Project Catalyst, Cardano's community funding program, for Cardano the Animated Movie, a short that parodies Cardano's development eras using real community stories2. The finished film was posted in five parts on the studio's Tipsy Turtles X account10.
What to Expect
The Yaad Labs website is a short landing page. It lists the three service types, the in-house projects, a plain-language FAQ about NFTs, and a contact form1. There is no price list; the site says cost depends on the job and asks visitors to get in touch1. The blog holds short posts with examples of how Caribbean creatives, companies, and countries can use NFTs11.
Businesses and creators can judge the studio's style from its own projects, which use NFTs as collectibles and as membership passes5. TripHut is designed so that holding a membership NFT unlocks club discounts, grants, and rewards, much like showing a store card at the door5.
For developers, the GitHub organization is the place to start. The DAO repository holds the contracts in Haskell with a test suite6. A separate public repository holds a PureScript library for the app side, the code that builds transactions before they reach the blockchain12. Readers comparing options can browse other voting and DAO tools.
For founders, Yaad Labs also teaches. Draper University named it as the partner delivering technical workshops for its Cardano founder residency, a program funded through Project Catalyst4. Funding for the TripHut audit and bug bounty came from Project Catalyst as well3.
