By Editor In Chief
This is a a very informative and educational interview that every NFT owner should read.
You can buy and own your own NFT domain for as little as $5 here.
The technology for renting out uncollateralized NFT Domains and NFTs in general has been a pipe dream for many.
I know many #UDFAM WHALES who are sitting on premium NFT Domain real estate and they would love the opportunity to trustlessly rent out their assets in a safe and secure way.
Many of us theorized that such a technology would take a few years to emerge in Web3, but lo and behold, Renfter Protocol has conjured up a brilliant solution.
Ladies and gentlemen Web3.Art.Blog.NFT presents to you the first exclusive Interview with Renfter Protocol founding CEO, @0xdevelopera Petar Popovic.
Until Renfter Protocol came on the scene, uncollateralized NFT renting has been a pipe dream. How were you able to crack this riddle?
Well, working on a Renfter Protocol and uncollateralized NFT renting solution was a real treat from an engineering perspective. When we just started there were only collateral-based solutions on the market. To us that seemed, well, let’s say, not good enough. You were required to transfer your NFT to another person and the only insurance you had was that collateral – nothing could guarantee that your NFT will be given back to you. My first thought was why relying on collateral and other people’s honesty when you have this amazing technology of programmable blockchains that have something that is for a reason called SMART CONTRACTS. We saw a problem, and we decided to offer a solution. Having more than 25 years of combined experience as blockchain developers, it was real fun for our engineering team to crack that riddle.
Uncollateralized NFT Renting unlocks Liquidity for NFT owners, allowing them to trustlessly monetize their digital assets without loosing ownership. This creates an entire NFT business ecosystem. How important is utility in NFT rentals? Will your platform be renting out any and every NFT or exclusively NFTs with proven and growing utility like Unstoppable Domains?
Our users will be able to lend and borrow any type of the NFT. We are there to provide the technology for it, but at the end of the day, it’s up to the project to provide enough utility for the NFT. It’s on borrowers to decide whether there’s enough utility for an NFT to be rented or not. For example, you can rent the NFT for Domain access, P2E Games, access to Events/Communities which only specific NFT owners can access, Walk2Earn and the list goes on, it really depends how creative you can get…
But, one utility that each project which integrates Renfter will unlock for their NFTs and community is definitely the option of generating passive income through renting.
Anyone can log in to your beta platform with an Unstoppable Domain. When you go live, will folks still be able to login with Unstoppable Domains?
Absolutely, we see Unstoppable Domains as long-term partners with whom we’re looking forward to doing great things together.
Unstoppable Domains is working on subdomains. Will Renfter Protocol allow for the rental of subdomains?
We still don’t have enough info regarding the subdomains,but as long as it’s an NFT, you’ll be able to rent it.
Should I decide to rent out my domain Onblockchain.blockchain, how will I be sure that the renter will not be able to create unauthorized subdomains like sex.onblockchain.blockchain during the rental period?
It’s still early to talk about subdomains as we do not have enough information. But thanks to Renfter Protocol, you are able to predefine sets of rules and terms under which you want to rent out your NFTs and have options to either allow or not certain NFT functionalities. This will work out of the box as long as the functionality is called on top of the token itself by the owner. In case creating UD subdomains will be different, and you would be required to send signed transactions, because that’s wallet scoped and not token scoped we cannot prevent it on our side without UD integration of Renfter protocol and solving that issue together.
If I want to give the NFT renter say a special privilege to create a limited number of subdomains for the duration of the NFT domain rental, how will this work on Renfter?
For now, you can only whitelist functionality you want borrowers to be able to execute, but you cannot limit how much time they can execute it. This very interesting idea actually that we may work on in the future. Thank you for giving us something to think about 🙂
What prevents someone from wrapping the rented asset in another contract if they’re renting it? Would the original owner still be able to have the asset sent back to them?
How our Protocol works is that basically the original NFT gets committed to our Protocol and safely stored in the vault while the borrower gets a wrapped NFT, which still has the same utility and functionality as the original one (unless differently predefined by the lender). So they could only wrap wrapped assets, and upon renting expiration the original NFT could still be redeemed by the original owner.
What if someone rents an asset and then puts it in a cold wallet storage with no internet access?
That would be a wrapped version again, the original token would never leave the protocol itself. Wrapped token acts like a key for whoever holds it which can prove that the person holding it is the legitimate borrower and has the rights of using it (in the scope defined by the lender, i.e. original owner)
IRL the owner of an asset eg an apartment can rent it out to tenants for an agreed sum with several contractual terms attached like no dogs or pets allowed etc Will NFT Domain owners be able to say in the contract that they do not want porn or illegal activities to be hosted or transacted on the rented NFT Domain?
For now, we don’t have a plan of tackling that “problem” as its solution lies more in the legal domain than technology. It’s like copyrights and intellectual property. Some collections solved this issue, some didn’t, but it wasn’t done through smart contracts or code.
Unstoppable Domains are owned not rented. Therefore renting them out is a straight forward business and entirely incumbent upon the owner. However some other NFT domain name providers already rent out their domains. How will your platform handle the subleases? For example if an ENS domain holder forgets to renew their domain name and rents it out for a duration past the renewal fees, how will Renfter handle this to avoid disappointing the subleasee?
In cases like this when we are not speaking about ENS, it’s on the borrower to do its own research. Inspect collection, renting terms, whitelisted methods. We are here to protect lenders and give renting technology to the projects. We cannot guarantee for every collection, only for verified ones. If the collection is verified you know you are perfectly safe as a borrower too. And since you already mentioned ENS as an example, in their case, as a verified and well-known collection, we would do the check instead of the borrower and wouldn’t allow lenders to set max renting duration beyond renewal expiry date. For other, non-verified collections, borrowers will still have to check everything on their own before deciding to rent.
What commission fees will Renfter be taking for its services?
This is something that we cannot disclose yet, but there will definitely be protocol fees and all profit from it will be shared with our token stakers.
NFT theft has been on the rise. Buying or Renting out a stolen asset is a crime in many jurisdictions. What if someone rents out a stolen NFT? Does Renfter have solutions to prevent this from happening?
Our technology is fully decentralized, meaning that other than giving out a warning on our marketplace, there’s not much we could do.
What if a hack or system failure on Renfter transfers ownership of the NFT to the renter? What recourse will there be for the original and legitimate owner of the digital asset?
We will steal it back 😀 Jokes aside. In the very unlikely event of that happening, we’ll have an insurance fund to cover the loss. We as well have industry standard safety mechanisms implemented into our smart contracts, such as pausing the whole system for example.
When is your protocol going live?
As soon as we collect enough feedback from our beta testers and finish with auditing.
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