Skillet: The One-Stop-Shop for NFT Liquidity
Coming October 21, Skillet launches Open Beta v1. Skillet aggregates offers across NFT marketplaces, as well as NFT liquidity pools, to allow you to immediately sell your NFTs at the best price across Web3.
Think Expedia or Kayak for NFTs. They show you the cheapest deals on hotels/airlines/car rentals. We show you the best deals so you can get the most money for your NFTs when you’re ready to sell them.
Don’t have any NFTs yet? Skillet aggregates data on the actual liquidity backing collections to help inform your buying decision. Want to know the viability of flipping your JPEG for profit? Skillet displays how much actual money is behind all the offers of a given collection alongside a real-time liquidity curve so you know the potential exit opportunities when it comes time to sell.
And for the whales looking to sell multiple NFTs at the same time, Skillet will save you upwards of 50% on gas fees through bulk liquidation.
Why does this matter?
Let’s be honest — we’re in the middle of an NFT winter. In times of a bear market, users want a more realistic measure of what their NFTs are worth today. Listing your NFT at a collection’s Floor Price comes with the risk of other users undercutting you, or waiting a few days for your asset to hopefully sell. Offers and NFT liquidity pools, meanwhile, give users instantaneous, permissionless liquidity — no strings attached, no sweating a potential market crash.
Flash back to 2010, and you could count on one hand the amount of websites that let you trade BTC. Fast forward to today, and you can buy BTC on one of hundreds of apps on the smartphone in your pocket. We think the same is going to happen with NFTs. Even though NFTs (basically) became mainstream in 2021, there are already several marketplaces that have real liquidity backing them — OpenSea, LooksRare, Sudoswap and X2Y2 commanding the most volume, each with differing fee structures.
Further, the advent of NFT liquidity pools have made quite the ~splash~ in the space. Rather than having to find a buyer for your specific NFT, liquidity protocols act as always available and competitive offer makers. NFTX allows you to deposit your NFT into the pool in exchange for a wrapped fungible token (ERC-20) that tracks the collection’s Floor Price. These tokens can then be swapped for ETH on exchanges like Uniswap or Sushiswap. Even attempting to explain how that process works made us break a sweat.
Alleviating User Headaches
To sell an NFT today, users can scan through each of these platforms to find which marketplace presents the most competitive price. Some quick mental math on marketplace fees to calculate the net take-home after the sale can’t hurt either. As BUIDlers continue to build and more marketplaces pop up, Skillet is here to be the one-stop-shop for users to find the best deal to sell their NFTs without having to jump through hoops upon hoops.
We don’t expect you to know what a liquidity pool is or how to navigate these protocols’ confusing UI’s. Skillet is here to do all of the heavy lifting for you. We know that users don’t care where the liquidity comes from, as long as they are getting the best deal on their NFT. Skillet will process all of the transactions and swaps in the background for you, so that it looks like a regular old NFT-for-ETH sale.
Oh and by the way, on Skillet — what you see is what you get. All marketplace fees are baked in already. You can say goodbye to the world of completing a transaction just to see less ETH than you were expecting in your MetaMask.
The Team
Our team entered the NFT market in February 2021 and could tell there was something special here. We knew we wanted to play a role in how NFTs evolved, but we needed to learn first, so we spent the past 18 months studying the space. Over these 18 months, we wore many different hats (degen minters/flippers/HODLers, high-frequency algorithmic traders, liquidity providers, market makers, creators). It’s been a roller coaster of a year: we’ve won, we’ve FOMO’d in, we’ve been burned, and we did it all over again.
That’s why we’re building Skillet. As degens, developers, and everything in between, this tool would have made our lives 10x easier if it was around when we first entered the space.
But we knew that being so deep in the NFT liquidity game also came with confirmation bias. We found ourselves asking: What does a professional JPEG flipper want to see when deciding whether or not to sell their NFT? What confusing processes can we streamline to make life easier for our users? Before launching this product, we had 100+ customer interviews with friends, whales we met through Twitter/Discord, and randoms to understand what features were necessary to include in our Beta v1.
Looking Ahead
Right now, Skillet is designed to accommodate the current NFT landscape for JPEG flippers, Blue Chip HODLers, and other NFTfi platforms alike. Notwithstanding, we are passionate about the future of NFTs beyond the current use cases.
What comes next? Tickets to concerts and sports games without an intermediary like Stubhub taking a 25% transaction fee. Gaming marketplaces where you can trade a Fortnite skin for a Madden Ultimate team pack. Nike shoes for your Metaverse avatar (and a real pair in the mail to go with it). Deeds to houses. Tokenized securities. Derivatives traded on top of NFTs. While the space continues to evolve, we will be here to aggregate all of the varying liquidity mechanisms backing the increasingly segmented classes of NFTs.
As the NFT ecosystem develops over time, the demand for developer tools will only become more prevalent. The devs at Skillet know how hard it can be to build in Web3 which is why we are also launching a public API and SDK to interact with our liquidity engine. We believe that the projects that embrace developers and interoperability will win in the long term. Whether you are creating your own front end, trading tools, or custom dashboards, our API will be open for all.
With this in mind… we want to hear from you. Going forward, we will be hosting AMAs, customer interviews on customer interviews on customer interviews, and will be looking closely at our feedback tickets to ensure that every functionality on the platform is exactly what you are looking for.
We’re called Skillet because it’s the only instrument in the kitchen that gets better with time. As the NFT space continues to develop, we’ll continue to watch, learn, and speak with you so that this platform ages like a fine Skillet.
