Some non-fungible tokens (NFTs) come with exclusive benefits. A project helping owners monetize those benefits – while maintaining long-term ownership – raised $ 1.5 million in a startup round led by Animoca Brands.

ReNFT announced the roundtable on Friday. In addition to Animoca, the year-old Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) behind the laudable NFT platform is now backed by Lattice Capital, Play Ventures, MetaCartel Ventures, Scalar Capital, LongHash Ventures, SkyVision Capital, Fedora Capital and Maeve Ventures.

The Ethereum-based project recently facilitated the loan of Stoner Cats, an NFT collection whose holders have access to a library of video shorts, and Animetas, whose holders rented their tokens to give temporary access to a private Discord event. .

A growing trend in the NFT industry is that projects include community benefits that come with owning their tokens. ReNFT offers owners a way to monetize these benefits without selling the underlying asset.

How it works

Lenders can send the NFTs they want to rent to a smart contract after determining the daily rental price and maximum rental period. Borrowers then enter the length of time they wish to “own” the NFT, paying the cost of the rental plus an amount of collateral equal to the price of the NFT, which they recoup once the NFT is returned.

While the NFT industry is still in bloom, ReNFT sees the future of its lending protocol expand into the metaverse, where users could rent their playthings, intellectual property, and even digital real estate.

It’s not entirely unheard of in the crypto world: Yield Guild Games also runs an in-game asset rental program that generates financial returns, whether they are revenue-generating GameFi characters or of virtual land plots.

While ReNFT is currently working with the peer-to-peer rental of ERC-721 and ERC-1155 tokens on the Ethereum mainnet, it is working to extend compatibility with Solana and Polygon, co-founder Nick Vale told CoinDesk in an interview.

“ReNFT offers an alternative to speculative NFT trading by enabling owners of valuable digital assets to generate income over time,” said Regan Bozman, partner of Lattice Capital, in a statement. “This is a valuable new primitive in the web3 and particularly in the rapidly growing gamefi space.”