Visualizing the NFT Marketplace of the Future: An Interactive Experience
We’re announcing our intention to build NFTours, the future of NFT Marketplaces, based on our disruptive Display Interaction Technology. Will this take over the Internet?
TL;DR
(Too long; didn’t read. The equivalent of an overview)
We believe the future holds many advances in how we literally view and interact with the web. Cryptocurrencies and NFTs are getting into the mainstream and will greatly help the process.
We also build interactive virtual tours for a range of industries, but we are excited about the art market right now. This is why we want to build the future of NFT marketplaces. A platform where you could buy and sell NFT collectibles via crypto or fiat (bank transfer, credit card).
This platform will offer artists chances to sell NFTs pegged to their physical artworks and display them in their own Virtual Gallery. Here they can add a multitude of interactive features to offer a greater perspective on their essence as artists. These elements can be interviews, ambient music, social media links, bio, podcasts, visual storytelling (via captions and voice-overs), etc.
But we also need your help. Contact us at office@panorender.com, or fill out this form to help us, tell us what you think abut us or fund us.
Intro
Since the beginning of 2021, NFT collectibles and NFT websites have taken the world by storm. Every week there is a new project announcing its NFT-related features or yet another headline stating something about an NFT company raising X million USD for “becoming the Shopify for NFTs”, or for expanding to another network, or for developing 3D Avatars or a variety of other endeavors.
Maybe someday you’ll read an article that states “Panorender raised _____ for developing the NFT Marketplace of the Future”. We shall find out.
This is great for the business environment, for businesses themselves, and for the infrastructure of the future of the Internet. But an NFT marketplace is something different; it’s more than just another NFT art website. It aggregates the works of (mostly) digital artists that are embedded into the blockchain. We wrote an article about how art and blockchain fit together (plus virtual tours). If you want to know more about the NFT in the crypto space, please check it out here!
The NFT Marketplace of Today
When it comes to NFT marketplaces, there are a few big players and a bunch of other smaller players. Just like in any other market.
The biggest of them are Rarible, Superrare, and OpenSea. There are a couple of other NFT websites that are close to an NFT marketplace but not exactly a marketplace. Let’s call them ‘gamified-marketplaces’.
These are Sorare, TopShot, Crypto Kitties, and Alpaca City. They are based on breeding and/or trading NFTs. You either get these from loot boxes or you purchase them from the platform you use or from another marketplace.
The thing is, all of these are great and add a lot of value to their audiences!
Skipping the polemic around ‘gamified-marketplaces’, which is another article by itself, these marketplaces for non fungible tokens offer a way to purchase digital artworks (maybe even real estate in the future) with a proven track record.
The whole history of buyers and sellers, as well as who is the creator, is embedded in the smart contract. Moreover, every seller gets a profit (ideally) by selling it for higher than he purchased. Meanwhile, the creator will forever get his commission from each subsequent sale (anywhere from 5% to 15% on average).
The NFT collectibles are purchased mainly with ETH, WAX, BNB, FLOW, or MATIC, depending on the network. Then they are stored in your wallet (Metamask or Trustwallet for most users).
The NFT collectibles and artworks are listed on the websites in a, well… list or grid format as any other type of marketplace on the web.
Furthermore, the artworks and NFT collectibles are mainly abstract and come from a grand number of digital artists. There are few renowned artists that pushed their works onto the blockchain via NFTs.
Plus, you can only find top artists on top NFT marketplaces, and even there they are overflowed by the sheer volume of smaller artists that list their art pieces everywhere. This may be a good thing. There are equal chances for smaller artists to sell their displayed NFT collectibles as top artists.
Our Bias regarding our outlook on the future of the Internet
At Panorender we invest a lot of time and effort pushing for the idea of Interactive Virtual Tours. We believe this type of interface will disrupt the way people interact with the Internet by 2025. This especially when taking into account the rise of VR & AR products and the importance of those in our lives.
Moreover, we believe that it will play a key role for artists everywhere. It will do so because it is a way to display and market their artworks in a different environment. The works will be displayed in digital environments with interactive elements such as videos, storytelling through captions, and ambient music. These are only a few examples; anything can be embedded in such a tour, even a browser game.
A Virtual Gallery can offer great flexibility and a competitive edge, plus it’s neat. We collaborated with some artists in the past to build Virtual Galleries for them. The results were promising and the feedback was exciting to hear.
We are slowly working on developing an NFT Marketplace that will be better prepared for the masses of people (aka mainstream) as well as being more interactive and intuitive, as well as futureproof.
The NFT Marketplace of Tomorrow
Okay, good. You (hopefully) read (most of) the prelude up until this point. But now we get into the bread of the future of NFT Marketplaces.
As we already validated our idea in the market, there is only an optimization issue from now on. We observed and researched the ins and outs of the NFT market, NFT websites, platforms, blockchains, and projects to create our view regarding the future. We found a bunch of things that could be improved, but 3 key aspects are the root of our perception. Here they are:
- Accessibility
- The ‘owning artwork’ disparity
- Interactivity and Visualization
Let’s start with the beginning, which is also maybe the most important or pressuring feature.
Accessibility — Purchasing NFT collectibles
As we may know, when you buy an NFT, you need cryptocurrency, most likely ETH.
Cryptocurrencies are almost part of the mainstream nowadays. This is due to Elon Musk and the Dogecoin craze, plus Mark Cuban also being bullish on them.
NFT collectibles are not far from this. They are also pushed into the mainstream. Especially due to the biggest projects such as TopShot, a highly successful project that launched them close to the mainstream.
Also, media coverage is a big factor as well.
We also believe that blockchain technology is a great management system for a variety of tasks (mostly financial ones). We consider NFTs to be the best thing that happened to the art industry. At least since the engineering of the economically feasible blue painting color,(oddly specific, I know). Our belief stems mainly from the whole track record and commissions forever features.
But, for an NFT Marketplace to truly hit the mainstream, it needs a key feature:
- being able to pay with USD (or other FIAT currency) via a credit card (or debit card, or bank transfer). This is the first caveat we follow for building our project.
This adds a lot of accessibility and the opportunity for anyone to be ‘part of the movement’. Dapper labs created their own blockchain (FLOW), their own programming language (Cadence), and they developed TopShot, which is among the biggest successes in the market.
I believe part of this success is attributed to the fact that you can purchase NFT collectibles via your credit or debit card with USD. The USD is converted on the backend into the FLOW or FUSD currency (the stablecoin of the blockchain that is equal to $1 at all times). In addition, you also have the option to purchase with FLOW cryptocurrency for the NFTs if you will.
The ‘owning artwork’ disparity
As mentioned above, marketplaces host a great volume of artists and their artworks. This means that there are equal opportunities for everyone. Showcasing best-selling artists and NFT collectibles is a good thing to do.
However, purchasing and collecting artworks is a whole culture all by itself, and it has been so for hundreds of years, maybe more. There is a certain refinement that plays an important role in this practice. There are exquisite personalities, extravagance, auctions, storytelling, and most importantly: the connection between buyer and artwork, facilitated by the creator.
We believe that collecting artworks (regular or NFTs) are two fundamentally similar activities, but the target audience differs. Some people want them for their digital features, others want to physically display them in their homes or give them to museums.
This is why we believe that we need to dedicate a distinct part of the platform for each of these audiences. There will be categories/sections that are exclusive for digital artists and sections exclusive for artists who intend to sell their material artworks in NFT form.
In other words, people who like NFTs for the digital features (as digital art) will purchase them from a different part of the website than those who want to purchase an NFT pegged to a physical art piece.
So you may purchase a pegged NFT, and will receive the real artwork in a frame to your door a few days after the purchase if that is your wish.
Okay, but why divide them? You may fairly ask.
They use different tools, formats, and techniques to achieve different outcomes and reach different types of people. There are fundamental similarities; the intention is the same for both types of artists, but they play different leagues, maybe different sports.
Interactivity and Visualization of an NFT Marketplace
Now we get to the most differentiating factor between our vision and other NFT marketplaces out there. Maybe not the most important or that adds the most value to users, but the one which is the most visible (literally) is the integration with Interactive Virtual Tours.
Each artist will have his own Virtual Gallery where his artwork is displayed on the walls. The whole gallery will be a representation of himself and his (/herself and her) artwork.
There will be a wall (or whole room, depending on the artist) where his bio, followers, profile picture, links to social media, etc. will be displayed.
This ‘artist wall/gallery’ will also feature more about the artist’s essence and life such as his favorite music playing in the background, some interviews, awards, favorite art pieces, some visual storytelling, and everything else he would like to display about himself.
The rest of the gallery will be navigable intuitively and easily in real-time from any browser and device, and links to certain collections will be displayed as well on his ‘artist wall’ or ‘artist gallery’.
You will be able to interact with all the content and artworks displayed, as well as purchase them (with cryptocurrency or fiat).
There will be separate galleries for best-selling artists of the day, most trending artwork and all.
The whole architecture of how to display a search result or category needs to be fundamentally reworked, but it’s the thrill of the action. You always have to solve problems on the way to greatness.
We invite you to be a part of it!
We have great dreams and ambitions with this initiative, but we also need your support.
We are thinking every day about how to approach such a project in a better way. Maybe it should be open source, maybe we should create a crowdfunding campaign, maybe we should look for investors, etc.
If you have any ideas you believe are good for this initiative or if you are an artist, developer, or investor and you would like to get involved in building the future with us, please don’t hesitate to contact us at office@panorender.com, or you could fill out this form here.
Closing thoughts
The world is a pretty chaotic place right now. Everything is changing. In 5 years from now, there will be more things that changed than in the last couple of decades, maybe more than did during the whole 19th and 20th centuries together.
Building an NFT Marketplace that is future-proof, disruptive, offers greater accessibility to more people, and can satisfy two big categories of artists (traditional and digital let’s say) is no easy thing to do.
But we can, we should, and we will. Watch us.
Also, we are open to ideas, help, and funding.
