Rowan Zwiers
NFTX has been described as a real nothing-to-something innovation, as it solves this fractionalization problem which was becoming an issue with the growing NFT market.
What do you think about that first statement?
Alex Gausman
Our main purpose has definitely evolved from our original vision which had to do with making non-fungible assets fungible and being able to combine them into higher-level “index funds”.
Basically, we will continue to play this role, but we have observed that the funds which got the most traction were ones like the MASK fund, and the way people actually were using was as a means of instant NFT liquidity. So people would “sell into” the fund at the going rate by minting, and then “buy random items” when the going rate was low.
So that was an unexpected benefit. And we have also observed an unexpected disappointment, which is in general people don’t seem to have *that* much interest in trading these index funds we’ve created, or using them as a means for getting exposure to NFTs.
Like I thought people would love the GLYPH token, but turns out people that like Autoglyphs are people with enough money to buy a full one, but that the GLYPH vault is still getting used by people to mint and redeem.
So we are now viewing vaults more as a means to a larger use case which is basically turnover for inventory providers. And in our version 2 coming soon, it will be possible to “target redeem” specific items for an added fee instead of getting a random one.
As an example, I believe the PUNK-BASIC token is trading around 14.8 ETH today, and there are about 97 CryptoPunks in that vault, and we are planning on having a 10% target redeem fee, which means in our version 2 it will be possible for anyone to buy any one of the specific 97 CryptoPunks for about 14.8*1.1=16.3 ETH, which is actually super competitive. Earlier today the cheapest Punk on Larva Labs was about 14.9 ETH, but there was only one more that was under 16.3 ETH and the rest were all priced higher.
Then we will split those turnover fees between our DAO and the inventory providers. But it’s cool because our original use case will still exist. People will be able to hold tokens like GLYPH for Glyphs exposure just like before.
