Rarible marketplace insights
Rarible is a marketplace where you can mint, buy, sell and exchange NFTs (Non-Fungible tokens). It is enhanced by its native cryptocurrency, the RARI, which is an essential part of its governance system. Indeed, Rarible is both a marketplace for NFT assets, as well as a distributed network built on Ethereum that enables their trade without a middleman.
The NFT Rarible marketplace has already accumulated over $208.39 million in transaction volume since its launch in early 2020. Rarible's native governance token, RARI coin, has also grown in value. The live RARI price today is $21.17 USD (at the time of writing) with a 24-hour trading volume of $8,362,907 USD. The current CoinMarketCap ranking is #389, with a live market cap of $101,073,078 USD.
Table of contents
Who created Rarible?
Key Features of the Rarible protocol
How to create your own NFT on Rarible?
Introducing the Rari token
Difference between Rarrible and OpenSea
Closing thoughts
Who created Rarrible?
Rarible was co-founded by Alex Salnikov and Alexei Falin based in Moscow. Rarible is not a pilot project for its founders, as they have a strong educational background and even more experience behind them, having founded and co-founded several companies.
Salnikov has been working in cryptocurrency since 2013. He has founded more than five successful companies in the past and has considerable experience as a product manager. His main projects were Zenome, a blockchain-based service leveraging genetic data as health predictors, and Humaniq, another blockchain-based project aimed at providing financial services to people without bank accounts. Falin had earlier co-founded a marketplace for digital stickers that can be used on chat platforms. This is a software company that facilitates mediation between artists and consumers seeking to purchase stickers.
With Falin as Rarible's CEO and Salnikov as a product manager, the Rarible team currently has close to a dozen employees.
Key Features of the Rarrible protocol
Rarible intends to become more than just a marketplace for digital collectibles and art through the implementation of the blockchain technology. The Rarible platform and protocol is an autonomous ecosystem that is governed by RARI holders, who are empowered to vote on governance proposals. Thus, at the core of the Rarible Protocol lies a decentralized exchange. One of the protocol’s most powerful features is its ability to split fees during the exchange process allowing some interesting use cases such as NFT co-creation.
Rarrible protocol features minting of single (ERC721) or edition (ERC1155) NFTs which opens up the possibility of NFT minting to mainstream audiences such as the minting of a Tweet or a TikTok video. Applications built on the Rarible Protocol have a shared order book. The practical implications of this are that once an NFT is listed for sale, it is listed for sale across all applications built on the protocol.
One other interesting feature of NFTs, in general, is the ability to program royalties - rights to future cash flows into these assets. Just to contextualize, this is a major feature that attracts creators to this technology, because unlike with traditional content platforms, NFTs can be designed to pay out royalties immediately. Creators on Rarible can set a percentage of future sales and collect them automatically by issuing a token. In other words, whenever you create a collectible you can set a certain percentage as royalty for secondary sales.
For instance, if a piece of digital art listed a 10% royalty, the creator would receive 10% of any consequent sale of that art. However, Royalties set on OpenSea don’t carry over to rarible.com at the moment. Currently, the team is working on a cross-platform royalties implementation.
How to create your own NFT on Rarible?
The platform allows you to create or mint NFTs through a simple process that makes it very accessible. In fact, to turn their work into an NFT, creators must first mint a token using Rarible’s software. For a better understanding of this process, you may Join the Rarible Discord channel and explore further funding opportunities. Currently, it counts over 26 k members.
However, here is a brief guideline:
Go to Rarible.com and connect your wallet (i.e. Metamask)
Click the blue CREATE button at the top of the page
Select whether you want to mint a Single NFT or an NFT with multiple editions
Upload your image, video, or music file
Specify a price, name, description, royalties, and other info
Click create item
Your wallet will ask you to sign and pay for gas fees.
Introducing the Rari token
As stated, the ultimate goal of Rarible is to evolve into a fully Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), where all governance and decision rights belong to the platform users. Therefore, RARI was created to empower the Rarible community to influence decisions and encourage active participation.
RARI is the native governance token of the Rarible marketplace, intended to reward active platform users with a voice on the platform's future. Additionally, RARI rewards distribution on Rarible.com and is calculated dynamically each week.
As RARI holder, you are entitled to:
Submit on proposals regarding Rarible’s trading fees, new Rarible features to be developed or implemented by the team and the use of RARI to further decentralize the governance and development of Rarible
Vote on proposals
Moderate creators on Rarible
Curate featured artworks
Difference between Rarible and OpenSea
In terms of getting started on either of the platforms, OpenSea has a more comprehensive beginner's guide, without relying on the user to know anything about crypto-currencies, wallets or NFTs. While Rarible has a similarly structured FAQ section, but is framed under the premise that the user already has some basic knowledge.
OpenSea does not charge a fee for minting an NFT, however, you will pay a fee based on the final sale price of your NFT. On rarrible you must have a Metamask wallet already set up and you must already own Ethereum that is held in that wallet in order to begin minting an NFT on Rarible. In other words, on OpenSea you mint the NFT when selling the item.But on Rarible you mint before the sale.
You can view the collectibles you have created on rarible.com on OpenSea and manage them there as well. Additionally, it is possible to list your collectibles on OpenSea not only in ETH but also in RARI.
Closing thoughts
The difference between Rarible and OpenSea is that they have different integration and features that technically vary from each other but still both serve the same purpose. With all the options available, it can be difficult to choose one. All we can suggest is that you take the time to consider the features and feel comfortable enough to experiment with a few platforms to find the one that works best for you. Rarible is still a young project but it seems to be very promising.