People buy NFTs for various reasons. While many may go in hoping to flip the purchase for a quick buck, some are here for other incentives. They may be attracted by the artistic value of the project, the community the project has built, or even the utility the NFTs provide. With the various potential NFTs use cases in the future, flipping is probably the initial phase of the NFTs development only. As the ecosystem gets more mature, projects with true value will stay and fully utilise the characteristics of NFTs to create a new business and consumptions model.

Hence, one of the key questions is, what’s next after people buy the NFTs? What could you do with the things you have purchased and owned in the digital world? Currently, most of the user journey stops after people bought the NFTs from Opensea or other marketplaces. The NFTs you bought are probably just sitting on your wallet (or at most you are changing your Twitter PFP), as the NFT infrastructure is not fully developed for you to play around with it as much as the cryptocurrency you owned.

But after the purchase, many of us actually want to share or even showoff the NFTs with your friends or community. (we will discuss other use cases next time) You might have tweeted about the purchase, posted an IG story, or even opened an IG page to show your collections. But these may not be the most genuine medium for NFTs showcasing.

To tackle this, there are various startups working on solutions for you to showcase and share your NFTs collections.

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NFT x Gallery

Comparisons across different NFT galleries

OnCyber

OnCyber is a platform that provides 3D & VR experiences to show your NFTs. By connecting your wallet with the platform, you can then choose a gallery that you like to use to show your NFTs. The gallery set-up process is relatively simple and intuitive, where you just have to choose the NFTs you want to include in the gallery to incorporate them. You can also browse the gallery set up by other users. The NFTs shown are also connected to Opensea for people to purchase easily.

The platform uses a freemium model where they offer galleries with minimal design and limited NFTs upload for users to use for free. For other environments that have different designs and can incorporate more NFTs, users would have to buy them via Opensea before integrating them as their showroom.

Example of an OnCyber gallery

Moon

Moon aims to become the all-in-one platform for NFTs across multiple blockchains (great for those of you that own NFTs across Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, etc.). What’s cool about them is that their platform is supplemented by a premium metal card, Moonpass, which allows users to show-off their NFT galleries with a simple tap to an NFC-enabled device. In the future, Moonpass is also expected to facilitate real world application of NFTs that have utility (i.e. ticketing, POAP, etc.).

The platform promises to be fully-loaded with features well-beyond a simple gallery showcase. This includes direct listing (think NFT trader), so that you can buy / sell your favourite NFTs without needing to go through a traditional market place, saving significant transaction fees; and an innovative “share-to-earn” mechanism, where users can earn their native tokens by having people visit their galleries — the tokens can then be staked for a share of platform revenue.

The platform is still under development but the team has quietly opened up a waitlist for their cards. For a limited time, the first 250 users that sign up to their waitlist will receive a free plastic NFC-card, be the first in line to buy the metal version when it becomes available, and receive an NFT airdrop when the platform goes live in early April.

Moon’s landing page

RareRooms

RareRooms is a 3D/VR enabled metaverse that allows collectors to curate and showcase their NFTs as well as allow brands to have amazing virtual storefronts and customizable spaces that allow their fans to truly experience their NFTs. As the room owner, you control what appears in the room, customizing the experience to your preference, the story you want to tell with your collection or quite simply, the stuff you want to show off. You can also discover other people’s collections and follow as they create new rooms and add new pieces of art to their RareRooms. They have also added a basketball shooting game for you to gamify your NFTs.

Spatial

Spatial was an early player in virtual reality workroom apps. Since the latest funding round in Dec 2021, the company is shifting its focus to become the metaverse for cultural events such as NFT exhibitions, brand experiences, and conferences. It started with focusing on collaborations with artists who want to show off their NFT projects. The latest iteration connects with cryptocurrency wallets and lets people see a catalog of the NFT art they own. They can then place the images into gallery spaces like virtual paintings, letting guests mill around and talk to each other with avatars or live videos that float above the avatars’ heads. Moreover, Spatial will let artists either sell NFTs directly through the platform or import 3D spaces and mint the actual spaces as NFTs, which they could then sell.

The company closed a US$25m fundraising round in Dec 2021. Investors include Pine Venture Partners, Maven Growth Partners, Korea Investment Partners, KB Investment, Mirae, Balaji Srinvasan, with participation from existing investors iNovia, Whitestar and Lerer Hippeau.

Virtual gallery on Spatial

Lazy.com

Lazy.com is the platform owned by billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban for people to show off their NFTs. Users can easily integrate their NFTs on Ethereum, Polygon and Solana into the platform and share them with the community in 2D format. You can also browse other people’s collections on the platform.

Shil.me

Shil.me is an easy, link-in-bio solution for displaying your NFTs. They are currently collaborating with an amazing NFT collection for holders of these collections to have exclusive access to Shil.me and its premium features.

Example room at Shil.me — Different layout the most of the competitors

Artiva

Artiva lets you build your own NFT platforms. They are more focused on artists and curators as the creators for them to build out their own galleries/collections. For artists, the platform helps them to collaborate and craft an experience around the artists’ artworks. While curators can use Artiva to quickly build a platform, onboard artists and collect platform fees.

NFT x Social

Showtime

Showtime is an NFT social network that aims to offer a familiar social media interface to the crypto community, enabling them to discover and share NFT art. It could be seen as the Instagram for NFTs. The company raised $7.6m from Paradign and DJ 3LAU in May 2021.

DSCAPE

While the project seems to be still at the development stage, DSCAPE is planning to sell limited “residence” NFT which has the utility where the owner could use it as a showcase for their NFTs on DSCAPE platform, especially on their mobile app. Each residence is unique and owner can invite their friend over to their residence to enjoy the things in the space together.

NFT x Metaverse

The Neighborhood

The Neighborhood wants to create a beautiful place where its inhabitants can have fun, engage with other residents and grow their own portfolio. It offers virtual homes as NFTs that allow you to take it with you to any other 3D world and well as bring your other NFTs to The Neighborhood. The first thing in the roadmap is adding the function that allows you to add and display your NFTs into your virtual home.

Highstreet

Highstreet is an open-world metaverse that incorporates shopping, gaming, NFTs, traditional and crypto brands in an MMORPG game. Users can play-to-earn by completing quests, attending social events, socializing with players, shopping for NFTs from real-world brands. Highstreet is created by LumiereVR, a computer vision based VR retail company established in 2015. The company has a good mix of the traditional and crypto investor base, including HTC, Palmdrive Capital, Cherubic Ventures from the traditional side, and Mechanism, Jump Trading, and NGC from crypto side.

Portals

Portals is a browser-based metaverse with a focus on a dense city center and zero-friction user experience. With easy drag-and-drop build tools and built-in communication features, the company makes it simple to customize immersive virtual spaces, which includes functions to integrate your NFTs into your room.

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I am definitely missing out on some of the great platforms and solutions out there. Examples above are mostly focusing on the sharing and social elements of NFTs. Hence, how to bring in network effects into the platform, especially when NFTs adoption is still infant, is going to be one of the key differentiators for all these platforms when they scale up. Potentially some sort of tokenomics could be the way to go.

Another key differentiate point would be on the ways to bring and connect NFTs into the physical world. Although NFTs are all virtual, people still want to have channels to interact with the NFTs in the physical world. It could be in the format of merchandise, a gateway to share their NFTs, or even to use their NFTs in real life (i.e. ticketing, tokenised membership etc.), just to name a few. It is exciting to see how the virtual and physical worlds intertwine together through NFTs.

How the platform works

LooksRare is an NFT marketplace where buyers and sellers can trade NFT on the platform. For every transaction, the platform would charge 2% platform fee in WETH (vs Opensea charges 2.5% + charge on private sale). As a decentralised marketplace, the platform fee earned would be redistributed to people who staked LOOKS (vs Opensea who takes all the profit)

Tokenomics

With the massive airdrop, I was curious how the Tokenomics work and why each stakeholder would have the interest to participate in the ecosystem. More importantly, how are they able to support such high staking rewards.

The above shows the token allocation between the team, the investors, the protocol and the community. Focusing on the community token:

Airdrop: 12% of the token is used in Airdrop.

Here’s show the stats for the Airdrop. At the time of writing, >70% of addresses have claimed the reward, which means the price has been rather stabilised if we factor in those who would immediately sell after claiming the rewards.

Staking rewards: 18.9% (189m) of the tokens are distributed as staking rewards.

In the short run, on top of the trading fee that you could earn when you stake LOOKs, you could also earn an extra staking rewards distribution from the project. This serves as the extra incentive for people to stake LOOKS at the early stage of the project. This is also why we could see a staking reward goes up to 1000%. In fact, roughly half of the staking reward comes from the staking rewards (LOOKS), while another half comes from the trading fees (WETH)

Note that the staking rewards are distributed based on the below schedule. As there is a finite 189m token to be distributed as staking rewards, the extra staking rewards distribution would be finished after 721 days.

Trading rewards: 44.1% (441m) of the tokens are distributed as trading rewards.

Similarly, there are extra trading rewards to those early adopters and trade NFTs via LooksRare. The distribution follows the below schedule and runs out in 721 days.

From the above, we can see that in the short run, users are encouraged to use the platform as there are extra trading rewards for users who have transacted on the platform. People who believe in the platform would also buy and stake LOOKS so they can share the transaction fee from the platform.

What gives the value to LOOKS

In the long run, the extra trading rewards or staking rewards would be gone. If the plans work out, the airdrop and these extra rewards should merely be incentives to attract people to use the platform in the first place. In the traditional business model, these are just customer acquisitions strategies. The key is whether the platform/product provides value and retain the customers.

If so, in the long run, as more and more people use the platform, people would want to buy and stake LOOKS on the platform as they could earn the trading fee from the platform. As the transaction volume goes up, so as the 2% transaction fee earned by the platform that is then shared with users who staked LOOKS. Hence, LOOKS price would go up when the return from staking increases as transaction volume and fee goes up. In other words, people who own and stake LOOKS are similar to the shareholders of the platform, where they will be able to share the profit the platform generates.

Incentives of the team

As the team also owns the token, they are incentivized to keep building the platform and improve the product, as the value of the token is hinges on the transaction volume/fee of the platform.

We can also see the commitment of the team through the vesting schedule. The team is not receiving any LOOKS tokens until half a year. This signals the team actually plans to build the platform instead of a pump & dump project.

Wash trade

With the additional trading rewards offered at launch, there are opportunities to capture the rewards through wash trade. In this context, it means the same person trade the NFTs via his own different wallets to capture the trading rewards.

Funding rate

LOOKS has a fairly large negative funding rate at FTX, meaning lots of people are shorting the token. One explanation is that people are buying LOOKS to stake on the protocol and earn the tremendous staking rewards. To hedge the risk of LOOKS price movement, they decide to short LOOKS. Hence, they could earn the staking rewards without the exposure to LOOKS price.

Thoughts

Opensea has raised lots of funding over the last year and achieved a valuation of $13bn. It is a centralised platform that takes the Web2 approach but targets the Web3 community. LooksRare is taking the Web3 approach to solving the same problem as Opensea. It shows a lot of potentials to achieve the size of Opensea as the NFT market keeps expanding.

One concern is that the team is anonymous. To me, it always discredits the credibility of the project.