Benzinga Exclusive: Rarible Rolls out a New Open Protocol to Help you NFT Better

Interviews with one of the co-founders of Rarible on the future of their platforms and the NFT space.

Whether you personally like NFTs or not -- as art, collectibles, or just an efficient way to keep records -- it looks as though they are here to 

According to DappRadar, Trading volumes of top NFT collections such as Axie Infinity, CryptoPunks, and ArtBlocks have increased by more than 300% over the past month, and the NFT industry had a record-breaking July, exceeding $1.2 billion in total sales.

Morning just wouldn’t be morning if we didn’t wake up, make some coffee, and read about all the new NFT drops that are sent as announcements in our inbox. And brands and notable individuals are finding all manner of ways to get on board the NFT train. 

This week alone, NASCAR partnered with Zed Run to release NASCAR-branded digital horses; luxury clothing brand Burberry introduced a shark character called “Sharky B” at Blankos Block Party blockchain; Megan Thee Stallion signed a deal with virtual reality company AmazeVR; and British auction house Christie’s has announced it will auction Cryptopunks.

When Ahmet Zappa’s press contact reached out to me about his new AXS TV series “Rock My Collection”, you will forgive me, I hope, for assuming he was pitching an NFT drop. Hopefully, Zappa will forgive me as well. I will use that interview. 

The point is, NFTs have hit a high water level that brings the buyer a groundswell of new buying options virtually every waking moment.
In this environment, it’s hard to pick one voice to reflect the growing nature of NFTs as part of a new class of digital assets. Does Beeple speak for NFTs? He made his place in NFT history with his sale at Christie’s, but price is arguably the least interesting thing about NFTs.

We took the time to speak with Rarible. It is already a strong force in NFTs and has competed with OpenSea for the #1 spot in NFT Marketplaces.
In the past 24 hours they introduced a raft of new features, celebrating the launch of a new Open-Source NFT Protocol, dubbed “Rarible Protocol”, which will have cross-chain benefits in creating NFTs.

Key features of the protocol include:

• Decentralized exchange and fee splitting -- This allows use cases like the co-creation of NFTs.
• Shared Order Book and Liquidity -- Applications built on the Rarible Protocol have a shared order book. 
• Lazy Minting of Single (ERC721) or Edition (ERC1155) NFTs -- This one is really kind of a game-changer. It allows you to mint an NFT without paying a transaction fee. Instead, gas costs are paid off when the NFT is sold. This is a really solid and interesting idea -- it’s potentially better for the environment, as only sold inventory is getting minted. And it allows creators to offer up dynamic content like tweets, Twitch streams, and TikTok videos. For example, we could offer every glorious tweet we make as an NFT and just mint the ones we sell at the time of sale. 
• Royalties Standard - Every NFT sold on Rarible has to adhere to their royalty standards no matter where it was minted. 
• Open Source Indexer -- Apparently, the first of its kind, this will open up a trove of data for developers who want to index NFT metadata. 

Rarible also promoted its status as a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), which they believe is philosophically aligned with their mission and approach to NFTs.
We spoke with Alex Salnikov, one of the co-founders of Rarible. 

Alex Salnikov, Co-founder, Rarible 

What have you created here that has never been available before?

“So we've been working for two years on the Rarible marketplace…. We created a special task force and split some part of the Rarible team to work just on the protocol. We understood the value of this developer-friendly product and we created a separate unit that worked for six months, and now we're releasing that. 

And as for the things that have never been seen on the market, there was no open-source API for NFTs available on the market these days. Because we created this product for developers, it's an open layer for everyone to be able to build on. 

...If anything happens on Rarible protocol, it's open-source and you have certain guarantees that it will be there the way you want it. Because if it's not, you can continue the work yourself as a developer, and just build on top of all the open things that we gave you,” Salnikov said. 

How many NFTs have been sold on your platform up to this point?

“So overall $156 million of total volume came through the Rarible marketplace. In terms of NFT, is that more than 50,000 NFTs sold…

Has there been a dip in buying activity vs. the peak in March 2021?

“March was a peak month and since then, art prices are a little bit down. So this section of the market becomes smaller art accounts for maybe 10% or even 5% of the market now while in March, it was 60% of the market, as per our and what has surfaced to the first is the collectible segment. All sorts of collectibles are dominating the market heavily. They account for 90% of the market, and their prices actually went significantly up. And the overall market also went up from where it was in March. So there has been a shift in the market dynamic, more mainstream part of the market was collectibles with crypto art with celebrities with brands, it remains in the experimentation phase. They're going to come back with something new with new mechanics on the market and in collectibles. More and more crypto native part of the market is above all the metrics of all times,” Salnikov said. 

We know that NFT use cases will continue to expand beyond art and collectibles, but what is the important role they played in the NFT space? 

“What I see happening in the market is that collectibles are actually benefiting the community where they're so popular. For example, Twitter, created (a limited run of) 140 NFTs, there will never be more NFTs in this collection. And it minted them on Rarble and gave them away to subscribers that responded to a certain tweet…  all the people who got these initial collectibles from Twitter and then resold them, all the value of this cultural moment benefitted to the community and the creator gained brand recognition.

In this Twitter example, what they achieved is real close collaboration with their fanbase, and this is the core part of the NFT market right now as your benefit your community your NFTs are by nature free to move, so you have them directly in your wallet you can buy and sell them on other marketplaces and it's almost like you're giving out something to users now they are at the cast edge of this intellectual property and this cultural events of things that you created. So it's a really tight connection with the fanbase and with the community,” Salnikov said.

Do you have any advice for NFT creators? 

“The main piece of advice is to create a community around yourself. So set up all your social accounts like Twitter or Discord and basically be everywhere. And try to make sure that people can reach you -- open your DMS on Twitter. Then create the first set of your items and make them really affordable for the community. Make sure that you are benefiting the community with your first several drops, make them free, make them available for some affordable prices. And then continue to promote your stuff to make sure that some of the people who bought them early can resell them and basically capture this value that you're providing. This will be the core of how you secure your community and they will be your best friends from now on. If somebody was able to benefit from being in your community, they are yours forever. It is the same if businesses need to create something that they've been holding their both hands tightly and open that up creating an NFT out of it and give it to the hands on users,” Salnikov said.

What do you see developing in the NFT space over the next two years?

“Well, we recently released the mission statement for the Rarible -- to allow every person in the world to create, access, and monetize digital items. And that's what we're trying to do and how we do it, we build tools to allow people to do that. 

So the marketplace is a tool, the protocol is another tool. And over the next few years will be continuing in that direction. 

We are building tools to simplify trading. We're building creative dashboards. we're adopting Flow blockchain for creators to be able to just have more green and affordable items to create. 

We are adding support to make sure that it's easier for somebody new to onramp we're continuing to create and adopt new wallets for the marketplace. So it's easy, like login with email and password. Collectibles are a big segment right now. And our biggest goal for these two years is to work on the marketplace to continue this amplification of that. It's an easy product, accessible, super familiar for somebody just entering the space, log in with email, password, credit card, all sorts of things like that. And the second part of this protocol, crypto, native, decentralized, governed by a community, open, neutral, and building a new marketplace on top of that, like all these philosophical parts of the crypto are concentrated on the protocol part. And all the consumer joy on the marketplace,” Salnikov said.

Are you approaching your development roadmap with kind of an eye on Web 3? 

“NFTs can only live in the web 3 world. And that's where we all exist. Now, Web 3 is the world built on the principles of openness, neutrality, and self-sovereignty. When the user has the wallet that connects to the website and not the website temporarily giving the user access to things that the website owns,” Salnikov said. 

Are you concerned about the environmental impact of minting NFTs? How are you handling that?

“Of course. So one step is adopting Flow blockchain, which is much more gas neutral in terms of it uses proof of stake consensus. There are no miners using a lot of electricity and things like that. And we're adopting Polygon. It's a layer-2 network, working on top of a theorem that has the same features, making it cheaper and more green,” Salnikov said.

You know, you've built something pretty remarkable in just two years. What is the part of it that excites you the most?

“The digital native world is what excites me most. I almost don't own any physical things. My laptop is my most expensive physical thing. But in the digital world. I have a warehouse with all sorts of things.

I belong to the generation that is completely native to digital items --  you have digital toys and in your AR mobile wallet and don't even care about whether they exist anywhere else. And so enabling this world. And the beauty and ease of use is what probably excites me the most when I browse Rarible… When everything is sleek and beautiful and funny, bright and yellow... That's what I feel passionate about,” Salnikov said.

Conclusion

We are reluctant to endorse projects, but it’s hard not to be impressed by Alex and Rarible. The open protocol project has great potential for everyone entering the NFT space and any move toward sharing resources and information is a net gain for the blockchain industry. 

It will be interesting to see how Rarible grows and develops. The use cases for NFTs will continue to expand, and I’ll be curious to see if Rarible expands its use range of use cases or someone using their open protocol expands beyond art and collectibles, but, for now, Rarible is leading its space and seems to be doing so with the values of a DAO and the decentralization that the community has endorsed since the launch of Bitcoin. 

Image by A M Hasan Nasim from Pixabay