Introducing Rocket: get a loan against your NFTs

Long gone are the days where you had to deposit more money in than you get money out. With Rocket, you don’t have to put down any funds at all.

Rocket: deposit NFTs to start a loan process.

How it started

Last month, I started a Telegram chat with a few friends called Undercollaterized #DeFi. It quickly became a community for awesome discussions that I summed up in this tweet, with almost 400 members and a newly released Discord. Part of the talks were on how we should value collateral that isn’t ETH or ERC20s, so that loans could actually fulfil their basic goal: give money upfront to people. As a community, we experimented, and pushed out a survey; what shocked me is the number of people who claimed they were willing to put valuable NFTs at stake as a guarantee for getting a loan. I thought to myself “Let’s actually try. Let’s build a NFT Bank”.

Let’s build a rocket

Apart from improving upon what the crypto industry calls “overcollaterization”, a core assumption of Rocket is that the NFT market will explode in the next few years. Examples include:

• 🎟 Event tickets: the NYC NFT event where you truly own your ticket, unlike traditional platforms.
• 🖥 Domains names: ENS Domains, for easy-to-remember wallet addresses.
• 🖼 Crypto Art: SuperRare & KnownOrigin, unique pieces of art that makes artist living finally sustainable online.
• 🏢 Virtual real estate: Cryptovoxels & economically-viable VR: buy a fraction of a public world, just like in real life.
• 🎮 Video games collectibles: Axie Infinity or CryptoKitties items that you can trade and can give you games’ benefits.
• and many more use cases to be discovered in the 2020's.

Another relevant thing to mention is that enough collaterized NFTs (in most cases, users will have to put down multiple NFTs, unless it’s a very valuable one) can actually reveal someone identity: as Balaji S. Srinivasan previously stated, enough “bits” (pieces of data about yourself) can reveal who you are.

How it works

Right now, we are currently on Ropsten testnet to make sure we’re not risking anyone’s asset, and we kept it as simple as possible:

1. Users lock NFTs down, essentially “proposing them” to Rocket as collaterals. They can also fill out this form (link TBA) explaining in details why they want the loan, why their proposed NFTs are valuable, how predictable their income is, and how they plan to repay.
2. After careful due diligence, Rocket will query funds from our lending pool, which is a Moloch-based DAO dedicated to Liquidity Providers. The pool is in ETH to remain aligned with Ethereum future, and today is worth around $10,000 of potential loans to offer. Because of this, we don’t expect to accept loans for more than $4,000 in value. Feel free to become an early liquidity provider by joining this inbound chat. It’s riskier than lending DAI on classic #DeFi, but the goal is to have better returns.
3. That’s it! If we believe a proposal is a great fit, and the user agrees on our terms — which will be decided on a case-by-case basis, we will send them a loan in DAI, the most popular #DeFi stablecoin.

As long as the Rocket team does not approve your loan request, you are free to withdraw your locked NFT at any time.

Prepare for a financial liftoff, where anyone with great NFTs can be eligible for a loan.

How to get involved with Rocket 🚀

1️⃣ You can try it on Ropsten testnet today by clicking here. You can mint a test NFT, and have a go at depositing your NFT to start a loan application.

2️⃣ If you have great NFTs and want a loan when we go live on mainnet, please fill out this form. We will accept only loans up to 5,000 DAI for now.

3️⃣ If you want to provide funds with APR higher than traditional DeFi platforms, please join our liquidity providers Telegram. So far we secured the equivalent of around $10,000, and anyone is free to pledge. Profits will go back to the DAO, letting everyone proportionally share potential profits.

Finally, we are looking for talented engineers & designers to join our team!
DM me on Twitter/Telegram @AlexMasmej if you want to chat.