Rarible look to enlarge the NFT marketplace with new aggregator feature
Rarible adds a unified NFT marketplace to combat reduced trading activity.
Rarible’s new aggregated marketplace is the company’s response to a changing NFT market. The updated website, called Rarible 2, allows users to view items from collections listed on multiple marketplaces on a single page.
Announced as part of a series of updates, Ethereum-based collections of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) listed on centralized and decentralized marketplaces – including OpenSea, LooksRare and SudoSwap – will be listed on Rarible’s website according to price.
“This is how the market works,” says Alexander Salnikov, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Rarible. “Buyers just want to buy something [that is] efficient with the best price.”
Rarible, currently the fifth largest NFT marketplace according to decentralized app analytics firm DappRadar, has seen a decline in monthly users since the beginning of the year. The trading volume in the last 30 days is slightly more than 10% of the market leader OpenSea ($323.78 million).
The idea for NFT aggregation comes largely from the company’s desire to bring more collectibles, users and ultimately liquidity to its own platform. The hope, he says, is that by targeting short-term traders with the aggregation, Rarible will see an increase in returning users. The aggregation approach makes more sense for Rarible than its four larger rivals, mainly because it is large enough to merge the marketplaces, while still being small enough to see a significant benefit from NFTs listed on the platform.
With no additional fees when viewing collectibles on the aggregation platform, Salnikov says they will be encouraged to re-list their NFT on Rarible instead of their previous marketplace.
“We give users the best window into the market, and at the same time we build a reward that creates a vortex of liquidity to our own order book,” he adds. “It’s like moving listings from other places to our own marketplace.”
Salnikov says the most common type of NFTs traded on aggregators are blue-chip profile picture (pfp) collectibles like Bored Apes, Doodles and Crypto Punks due to their popularity and liquidity. Although each collectible has unique characteristics that determine its price, the dominance and relative price stability of these series have placed them in several NFT indices. Indices such as Bitwise and Coinbase track the average price of NFT collections, and are seen as indicators of the state of the market.
There are two main customers for this type of collection – those looking for a specific NFT with certain desired attributes (many choose those who look like them) and those who want to be part of their communities, simply seeking the best priced images .
“This is our strategy to capture that market,” Salnikov says of the price-conscious buyers.
Rarible uses tokens for a reward system similar to that of the native tokens of major crypto exchanges. RARI, the marketplace’s original reward token, allows users to bypass a 1% coin fee and gives them voting and governance access to RariDAO, which is also getting an update. The company is introducing a voting escrow model, where users who pledge not to sell their rewards during a lock-up period will receive additional RARI tokens, effectively giving them more voting rights. The longer the lock-in period, up to two years, the more tokens they receive.
“A lot of crypto is derived from very short-term decisions,” Salnikov says, adding that traders are encouraged to vote for short-term, high-reward decisions. “The way to disincentivize that is just to give the opportunity to vote to people who can’t leave quickly.”
Although the NFT market has largely shifted away from pfps and into gaming, Rarible’s update is the company’s attempt to grow despite headwinds in the NFT market: the aggregated marketplace brings in liquidity, the rewards provide “a gamified experience,” says Salnikov.
While Rarible hosts NFTs minted on various blockchains including Tezos
