EXCLUSIVE: Rarible Building Custom Decentralized NFT Marketplace for Pixel Vault

For about two years, OpenSea has been the dominant NFT marketplace. In many ways, the OpenSea experience has lived up to its name: vast, inescapable and uniform in appearance, with page after page of colorful images floating by like so much debris on a sea of ​​digital ownership.

Rare RAR/USD does not have OpenSea’s market dominance, but it is an innovator among marketplaces. Since launching its open protocol in 2021, Rarible has focused less on being a single destination for buying NFTs and more on being a means to help people everywhere create and execute NFTs better.

In an exclusive with Benzinga, Rarible announced Friday that it will soon launch a new custom marketplace for Pixel Vault, a Web3 development platform that has produced popular NFT lines and related IP for properties like PUNKS Comics and Metaheroes.

The Pixel Vault marketplace will serve as a home for the properties. It will provide a customized user experience that supports the value of the PUNKS Comics and Metahero brands, aggregates all valid entries and offers reduced transaction fees.

We spoke with Rarible co-founder and Chief Product Officer Alex Salnikov and David Litskcommunications manager at Pixel Vault, about the upcoming new marketplace and creating custom, community-focused NFT buying experiences.

Image: Used with permission from issue #3 of PUNKS Comics. This is the moment where PUNKS crosses over with the Metahero universe.

BZ: What is Rarible’s goal here working with Pixel Vault?

“We are super impressed with the innovation of the Pixel Vault team. Creative companies like Pixel Vault are evolving into multimedia companies, which

The Walt Disney Co HAZE of the digital world. It feels weird if you’re a big company, which has created tons of IP, and you’re sending buyers to a centralized marketplace controlled from a single office,” Salnikov said.

“Rarible offers a protocol that is open source and decentralized. We have a vision for all major intangible companies to have their own marketplaces, built on top of the protocol, so they control the experience. The marketplace is available on their own website, in their own domain, with their branding, on the infrastructure that’s decentralized and that they have a stake in. So that’s why we approached Pixel Vault. We also give them some governance rights to the protocol that it’s built on, to really make it a divisible piece of infrastructure.”

What has been Pixel Vault’s trajectory since its launch in May 2022?

“Pixel Vault aims to be the world’s first multi-franchise Web3 beta development platform. So the best way to explain what our ecosystem looks like today is that there are two separate IP pillars. We have PUNKS Comics, which was born out of the desire to bring NFT entities to life – and it began with the 16 CryptoPunks recreated by Chris Wahl. And that’s what created the 16 Punx characters. With the expansion of the Metahero universe, it is ultimately a decentralized and community-driven social gaming platform. And there are several parts to it. Metahero has both core and generative identities, which are PFPs, which will also be usable in the upcoming gameplay experience. The planets represent nine planets and one moon where the Metahero characters exist. And each token represents one vote for planetary governance in a soon-to-be-launched social gaming platform. So that’s the updated platform. We hope to see that launch in the next couple of weeks,” Litsky said.

Why don’t more big NFT creators use custom marketplaces?

“There are a lot of eyes on the big marketplaces, and if you get traded there, there’s a chance someone else will find your collection. So your listings have a better chance of being sold. And when you buy, you’ll have greater chance of buying something at a lower price.

“We’re giving projects the ability to build their own marketplaces that aggregate listings from all over the place. So when users go to the project’s website, they’ll find all their assets, including those that are cross-listed from other marketplaces. If you go to Pixel On Vault’s page you want to see everything that’s for sale on OpenSea and everything that’s for sale on Rarible,” Salnikov said.

What makes Pixel Vault a good partner for this custom marketplace?

“They’re one of the core collections that actually really needs a custom marketplace because they have so many collections, divided into sub-collections, comics, one type of asset and another type. There’s no specific part of the OpenSea website that you click on to see all of the Pixel Vault collections. Because Pixel Vault is very innovative, they need their own custom solution that reflects all of their assets,” said Salnikov.

Has Pixel Vault always primarily visualized itself as an IP holder?

“Yes, that’s how it’s always been visualized. A lot of the projects that came up in the last year started with a profile picture or as a cartoon, but this has always been the way,” Litsky said.

What were the benefits of working with Rarible to create your custom marketplace?

“One of the benefits of working with Rarible is that it allows for heavy customization. I don’t know if there are any other products out there that would be able to handle the heavy customization that Pixel Vault needed to build the right experience for their collectors.

“The Pixel Vault ecosystem is complex. And having a custom community marketplace will allow us to curate how we present our various collections to our collectors to make it easier for them to find exactly what they’re looking for. Without having a custom marketplace, it’s very difficult to cure that with the standalone solutions that are currently out there.As a media and IP company, we tell stories, and there will be more stories to tell in addition to what we currently focus on when we see down the road,” Litsky said.

What should people be excited about now that 2022 has taken some of the ferocious enthusiasm out of the NFT market?

“They should be excited about all the new technologies that are being built. There’s a marriage that’s happening between multiple blockchains. So there’s actually a lot of brewing going on behind the scenes. In a year, we’ll suddenly have some areas growing as if out of nowhere, bring in new innovation. And people who stay below the bear market and carefully listen to what’s going on will be rewarded for buying undervalued assets that are long-term sustainable,” Salnikov said.

Have you seen any changes in buyer behavior during the downturn?

“We can see a lot of retail buyers going for safer assets. But I can definitely see the trend for professional traders. Hedge funds that have been trading crypto, stocks and bonds are now starting to develop teams that want to trade NFTs. It’s a good thing because the market will become much more liquid. And retail investors and buyers will have to compete with it. That means it will be much more difficult to make money in the market because professionals will definitely take some of the margin for themselves, Salnikov said. .

Any advice for true believers in the NFT space?

“Recently I was talking to a co-founder and he told me about an adventure park in Dubai where every attraction has a note on how to best experience it. And it said something like, ‘[keep your] bum up and sit tight.” So that would be my advice to all the true believers,” said Salnikov.

The last word

Rarible isn’t the first marketplace we’ve spoken to to expand through small, specialized marketplaces. A few months ago we wrote about >SuperRare Spaces, which has many of the same intentions.

While SuperRare developed marketplaces that serve specific interests, such as poetry and female artists, Rarible is focused on serving the needs of established, proven NFT collections with complex IP to manage.

Rarible potentially makes the simpler case for the need for a custom marketplace—helping creators who otherwise struggle to present their multi-story multimedia universe as a single, consistent experience.

And while other marketplaces use the star power of notable people and media outside of the NFT space to attract attention, Rarible can rely on the popularity of the project itself to attract attention to the new custom marketplaces.

Examples of other custom marketplaces that have already launched on the Rarible Protocol serve all established, multifaceted NFT and IP projects, including MFers, Degenerate Ape Academy, and Rektguy.

The Pixel Vault Marketplace will include the following collections: PUNKS Comic 1, 2 and 3, Origin Stories, Metahero Universe: Core Identities, Metahero Universe: Generative Identities, Metahero Universe: United Planets, Metahero Universe: Gear Pods, Metahero: MintPass 1 , Metahero: MintPass 2, Pixel Vault Founder’s DAO, PV IRL, Elite Ape Coins, Elite Apes – Apes Out on the Town, Ape Madness, Heroes Follow Heroes and Bloot Comic.

Pixel Vault isn’t ready to share many details about the game development timeline. Still, they’ve previously shared that they’re looking for some kind of alpha or beta test “around the end of the year.”