Keeping one step ahead of the NFT pack
Some ideas make sense, especially once you hear them, like the infamous luggage-on-wheels for instance. Why did no one think of that before 1972?
Others require a bit more imagination. Such as the touch screen and pinching to change the size of images. If hindsight is 2020 vision, it makes utter sense that these developments took place, but the trick is being the first to have the vision before everyone else. For our example today, enter the reNFT platform which offers the rental infrastructure for the metaverse.
Co-founder and CEO Nick Vale initially came across NFTs in the form of Crypto Kitties. Unlike others who first dismissed these loveable digital assets or even those who later saw art with a capital A as the sole preserve of NFTs, that is the provenance feature, Vale saw much more.
It probably helped that he came with a gaming background, working in the traditional indie video game development realm. He helped create Total Miner, the first port of Minecraft to Xbox which went to be the number one, best selling indie game on Xbox. Afterwards he worked on Miner Duty, a shooter game using a lot of UGC components, which climbed to the number three best seller position.
In 2014 he went down the crypto rabbit hole, so by the time Crypto Kitties arrived in 2017 these digital identity assets made perfect sense to him. He then met his co-founder Nazariy Vavryk at a hackathon while he was working at Sandbox and the relevance of the Sandbox land began to crystallise for him.
“If you own land, you can rent it out.” Basically Vale and his partner hit upon utility as a notion for NFTs some two years before it became a thing. “We just knew that there was more to NFTs than just art, but we also realised it needed a lot of tech to enable the financialization of NFTs.”
They hit upon the idea of the NFT being a token, a representation of something digitally on blockchain.
“It’s not just a monkey picture.”
Linking it back to his gaming background, Vale quickly saw that NFTs provided an answer to the perennial issue of in-game assets belonging to the game producer, not the player.
“I’d seen it happen where players had spent thousands of hours and dollars building their content within indie games only to lose everything when the game close down.”
Vale could see use cases in virtually every direction. In the Axie Infinity, a player needs three Axies to begin which can be too expensive. The platform runs a scholarship programme where people can loan their Axies to players in return for taking a percentage of the earnings.
“But it is really just a Web 2 solution where the owner of the Axies shares their account details with the player. They become like a property manager or the trusted middleman. And that is where blockchain can offer a trustless, automated solution.”
Right now, Vale is talking to lots of games across all blockchains. reNFT is blockchain agnostic and he is talking to games on Polygon, Avalanche, Solana and many more.
“I personally have lots of in-game assets, but I don’t have time to play the games all the time. Nor do I want to sell them. Indeed, nor do I have the time to become a property manager – that would be a full-time job in itself. So, instead we are offering a platform that offers that service without the need for middlemen.”
But it’s not just gaming, Vale is looking at ticketing. Again, as tickets gain greater utility other than just access to a single event, he sees the holders as desiring to hold them, but also to rent them to others – in a simple fashion.
“We see these token gated access NFTs holding a lot of uses for communities, fan clubs etc. And they will have value to rent them to others.”
It’s the same with virtual land, the original genesis behind reNFT. Metaverse land is increasingly expensive so a brand could lease land for a fraction of the underlying cost to host events. Or increasingly as people use avatars into metaverses, fashion items will become more common.
“If you need a blacktie suit to attend an event, you might not want to buy it for one night – you’d probably prefer to rent it, as in the real world.”
Right now, reNFT is offering a white label protocol infrastructure and integrating it with different platforms. The initial focus is on gaming platforms and reNFT is offering this service free of charge to build out its use cases and community.
“In time, we have built in a revenue model where we take a percentage of the lenders’ rental income. Already this approach is making sense as the gaming platforms want to turn on their fees to build a treasury and so we’d take a small percentage of that money.”
reNFT is also being built as a DAO. This makes sense as income will be typically derived in the native token of the gaming platforms. Where reward systems are baked into these platforms, it makes sense to Vale to have the community vote on how the various payment dynamics are executed.
The core focus for Vale and his team is integration. Some of the integrations with games are near live and will be announced soon. He is also scaling his team to handle the integration with all the major blockchains.
This work is facilitated by an early seed round led by Animoca for $1.5 million which was recently topped up to a $5 million raise led by Lattice Capital and gumi Crypto. Having the funding allows Vale to continue to integrate without having to look for revenue upfront.
“We have a strong financial runway to allow us to continue to scale.” Anyone wanting to get involved can join the reNFT discord and there are opportunities to earn bounties as well as apply for positions.
Anyone for wheels on their suitcase?