PARAS — an NFT trading card marketplace built on NEAR

In 1952, a trading card featuring American professional baseball player Mickey Mantle sold for a whopping $5.2 million dollars, effectively making it the most expensive sports card of all time.

When people think of collectible cards, the first thing that may come to mind would be of course baseball. And for good reason, those little plastic cards with pictures of the sport’s most famous personalities may seem less than stellar to the regular human being, but for the enthusiast with a trained eye, those cards may be worth a lot of money, in fact, it’s good to note that the trading card industry is worth millions of dollars. What is more, that industry has now carried over to the digital world. People are now buying, selling, even trading electronic collectibles on these blockchain-based marketplaces. With blockchain technology being immutable (unchangeable) and highly secure, this creates a sense of trust and authenticity within these communities, gone are the days where people have to make sure if the collectible they are about to trade or buy is real or fake. It's no wonder then, that despite being a relatively new industry, these digital marketplaces are booming with profit and trade numbering into the millions.

This is where Paras comes in.

Paras is a digital art card marketplace built on NEAR. It offers artists more control of their creations and digital scarcity for collectors — using NEAR as the medium of exchange between creators and collectors. Its vision is to create a place for artists to cultivate and act on compound momentum.

The co-founders of Paras, Rahmat “Riqi” Albariqi and Afiq Shofy, interested in the potential for provable digital ownership and sales of NFT, decided to build a digital platform where digital artists could create and thrive.

Thanks to the low cost of minting and storage on NEAR, digital artists can build collector fanbase by selling at a low price and making a profit.

If you are an interested artist who wants to sell your art as digital trading cards. Check out their website: https://paras.id/