Dear Bankless Nation,

The team behind NFT marketplace Rarible.com just unveiled the Rarible Protocol 🤯

At its core, Rarible Protocol is a decentralized, open-source NFT trading protocol boasting cross-chain asset support. As for what the system will become from here, that’s now for the Rarible community to decide!

Indeed, the Rarible.com team may have developed this powerful infrastructure for the creator economy, but it’s up to Rarible DAO and thus RARI token holders to steer the protocol going forward.

Let’s take a closer look and get you up to speed on what this new NFT infra’s all about.

-WMP

Rarible Protocol, NFT Suite at Your Service

Today marks the arrival of Rarible Protocol, a decentralized NFT creators suite that Rarible.com’s builders have just introduced as the new open-source foundation of their popular NFT marketplace.

In an announcement shared with Metaversal, Rarible DAO’s Eric Arsenault and Rarible.com’s Alex Salnikov explained:

“The Rarible Protocol is a set of smart contracts that can be deployed to various blockchains, as well as an open source indexer. Projects can use these tools to build consumer facing applications, [and] smart contract developers can build features in the protocol that benefit an entire ecosystem of projects.”

New capabilities

• NFT decentralized exchange — Rarible Protocol functions as an on-chain liquidity protocol for NFTs. Better yet this “shared orderbook” DEX honors things like split creator fees, thus paving the way to improved monetization around NFT trading.
• More accessible minting options — Rarible Protocol also serves as an NFT minting hub that allows for easy “lazy minting” of both ERC721 and ERC1155 tokens. That means anyone can easily mint, well, anything without having to pay crypto fees up front.
• NFT data indexer — Another fundamental aspect of the Rarible Protocol is its service as an open-source NFT indexer, which allows ecosystem developers to “index NFTs and have access to information including metadata, orders, activity and ranking or sorting for leaderboard purposes.”

Take the three aforementioned capabilities altogether, and you get an NFT suite capable of powering new minting apps, Web3 storefronts, NFT analytics services, and beyond! Notably, projects already confirmed to be building atop the Rarible Protocol include Decentraland, Genies, and Zerion.

What comes next

Now it’ll be up to Rarible DAO, the decentralized collective that stewards the Rarible community, to manage and develop the Rarible Protocol henceforth.

As for immediate priorities, we know from today’s announcement that 1) support for the Polygon and Flow chains must be finalized, 2) fiat payments are being explored, and 3) an on-chain orderbook is on the slate. If Rarible DAO can pull this near-term roadmap off, Rarible has non-trivial chances of winning market share from its main NFT competitors!

Action steps

• 👀 Check out the Rarible Protocol docs to dive even deeper into what this decentralized NFT suite can do!