The Ones in the Arena: Nibbl
“There’s no community quite as skilled, engaging, and collaborative as the web3 ecosystem.” — Arnav (Founder) and Keshav (Lead Solidity Dev), Nibbl
Next up in the arena is Nibbl, an NFT fractionalization platform that aims to change the game of fractional ownership. Previously known as Nonce Finance, Nibbl strives to accomplish their lofty goals by offering guaranteed liquidity on tokens, a price-based layout, and social features. They ultimately hope to make high-value NFTs more accessible to the mainstream.
Beginning June 21st, Nibbl is sponsoring a 5-day security audit contest at Code4rena with a prize pool totalling $30k. In anticipation of their contest kicking off, we connected with Arnav (Founder) and Keshav (Lead Solidity Developer) to get their thoughts on where Nibbl is headed and the importance of prioritizing security. Keep reading to also get a peek at their valuation-based buyout rejection game!
What are you building, and what sets it apart from similar offerings in the space?
NFT fractionalization with guaranteed liquidity and price based buyout.
Problems with fractionalization currently:
i) Fractional Tokens suffer from low liquidity as the traditional xy=k type AMM model isn’t great for low mcap assets due to huge impermanent loss.
ii) Fractional NFTs are meant to transition from being owned by a single person to being owned by the community. Current systems rely on the original NFT fractionalizer, adding token liquidity on a Uniswap type AMM and then selling his tokens in low liquidity pools in order to dilute ownership of his tokens to the community over time.
iii) Buyout mechanisms needed to go back from ERC20 to ERC721 don’t actually work, read more about buyout mechanisms here. To give fractional tokens value, fractionalization shouldn’t be only a one way direction where NFTs are locked forever and can’t be used for any application. There needs to be a way to allow for someone to come in and buy out the current fraction token holders and unlock the NFT(s) as a whole and add them to their collection. Having an efficient buyout mechanism (where buyouts happen frequently) ensures that fractionalization is more of a bridge between the ERC721 and ERC20 world and it opens the door for many interesting use-cases.
Solution:
Nibbl makes it very simple for NFT owners to fractionalize their NFTs by giving them customizability on how they want to distribute ownership of their tokens as well as setting parameters for how the fractional NFT can be bought out. Token distribution is made effective via a bonding curve and the buyout is optimized using a price based buyout game.
What’s your vision for your project? What are you building towards in the longer view?
We believe that everyone should be able to own a high-value NFT. Currently, access to sought-after NFTs has high barriers to entry and is usually limited to a small pool of investors. Our main goal is to make them more accessible and lower ownership costs through fractionalization, and to make that process super seamless for our community.
Down the line, we believe that some very interesting communities and DAOs can form around revolutionary ideas and fractional NFTs enable that use case. We’re building towards making that happen.
What’s the most innovative idea in your project/protocol?
Our valuation-based buyout rejection game, which gives the community the power to come together and prevent a buyout bid from getting accepted by trading on a bonding curve.
Here’s more on how it works:
twitter.com/NibblNFT/status/1532801430658109441
twitter.com/NibblNFT/status/1524725315750490112
It takes courage to undergo a public audit by a swarm of anonymous security researchers. It also says a lot about how much you prioritize security. What advice would you give to those on the fence?
The success of the web3 ecosystem ultimately depends on its security. Projects need to seriously invest in their security as it helps build trust with your community.
It may be a resource-intensive process, but it is one that is completely worth it. The sooner you detect and eliminate vulnerabilities, the more successful your project is likelier to be.
Security has become an increasingly vital topic in Web3 and DeFi. How do you think the ecosystem needs to evolve in order to rise to the challenge?
Attacks on the blockchain ecosystem can often be more damaging than on Web2 applications, because they are irreversible. A single bug can lead to the loss of millions of dollars.
We believe that the ecosystem needs to proactively and collectively work on building security mechanisms that verify whether a transaction should be made in the first place. We need practices that are good at preventing possible attacks. And for that, we need more auditors, and the ecosystem should work to educate existing developers on becoming auditors.
What gets you most excited about Web3?
The power of community. There’s no community quite as skilled, engaging, and collaborative as the web3 ecosystem.
Our community is our backbone. It helps us improve our product with feedback, and add more features based on what they need. We build together, and grow together.
Complete the following sentence: “We wish more Web3 projects would…”
Understand the true web3 ethos of decentralization and build around it. It’s important to make your users get comfortable with self-custody and key management instead of playing around with it.
What Web3 project name do you wish you’d thought of first?
If you know the story behind our original name, you’ll know the answer is Nibbl :)
What do you geek out about, beyond Web3?
NFTs, DAOs, and DeFi.
Learn more about Nibbl
- Website: nibbl.xyz
- Twitter: twitter.com/nibblnft
Nibbl’s $30K security audit contest opens June 21, 2022, and runs for 3 days. Details at code4rena.com.
The Ones in the Arena spotlights emerging and established DeFi projects and their founders, with an eye to celebrating and learning from them. The series’ name is inspired in part by Teddy Roosevelt’s famous quote, which has a central place in Code4rena’s philosophy.
