SpaceSeven: Discovering Tokenized Digital Art
NFT art and collectibles are still not accessible to mass-market users due to the high gas fees of predominantly Ethereum-based, crypto-only, siloed marketplaces. SpaceSeven offers a solution in the world’s first fully regulatory compliant, e-commerce scale, and user-first open NFT marketplace.
Built by Tacans on the Concordium smart contract enterprise blockchain platform, SpaceSeven allows for gas fees that are a fraction of the cost of Ethereum’s with a transaction speed that is ten times faster. Multi-chain support means that NFTs can be added to the marketplace from multiple networks. Coupled with adding support for payments using both crypto and credit cards will help facilitate mass adoption. SpaceSeven Universes then complement the open marketplace with more exclusive galleries custom-tailored for the artist all within the same easy-to-use platform.
What Are NFTs and What’s the Big Deal?
NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are one-of-a-kind exchangeable digital assets representing ownership of unique items including art, music, collectibles, in-game objects, videos, and merchandise of differing value. They contrast the fungibility of cryptocurrency digital assets, with each token, such as ETH, being the same value as any other ETH token.
Representing one of the biggest tech revolutions in recent years, NFTs are giving more power to content creators than ever before, cutting out intermediaries and allowing artists, musicians, and other creatives to provide unique, shared, and added value to their audiences directly.
They are part of our move into the metaverse potential of Web 3.0 having harnessed the power of the internet to connect information, then social spaces, and now value itself as we increasingly live out greater aspects of our lives within virtual environments and merge that experience with the real world.
As more of our lives take place online and in virtual reality, it shouldn’t be surprising for NFTs to become commonplace throughout that digital world. NFTs can be used as in-game avatars or wearables throughout the metaverse. They can represent membership of a community or be used to display art or collectibles in personal lounges and galleries. NFTs can be used for virtual concerts, movies, or sports ticketing events and merchandise, and even represent land or property in that virtual world. The opportunities are endless.
Early celebrity adopters of NFTs include the likes of Mike Tyson, Paris Hilton, and Edward Snowden who have all launched their own collections for fans, with their varied backgrounds demonstrating the widespread nature of the appeal of NFTs.
The NFT market has subsequently boomed in 2021, with a 400% increase in NFT sales volume since Q1 alone, hitting a record high of $5 billion in August, according to DappRadar. Examples of the most expensive NFTs include unique art pieces like “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” by digital artist Beeple, sold by the auction house Christie’s for a record $69.3 million. Other examples include “CryptoPunk #7523” by Larva Labs at $11.75 million, and “This Changed Everything” — an NFT of the source code for the World Wide Web by Sir Tim Berners-Lee — sold for $5.43 million.
Given an estimated total addressable market of $370 billion just for global collectibles, including trading cards, games, and toys, there remains significant growth potential for the NFT market to come.
Challenges Facing the NFT Market
With increasing numbers of NFT marketplaces opening up, of which SpaceSeven is the newest entrant, the potential of the NFT market is undoubtedly huge but that doesn’t mean there are no significant barriers to overcome. The two most pressing issues surrounding the space right now are high fees and regulatory concerns.
As marketplaces based on Ethereum are the predominant NFT platforms in the space, they tend to suffer from the well-known scalability issues of the Ethereum network that has led to high gas fees and congestion during peak periods. The average buyer gas fee on the popular OpenSea marketplace is over $50, and first-time sellers must also pay a one-off gas fee of over $150 just to post NFT listings. Rarible’s average buyer gas fees are over $10, SuperRare over $65, and Foundation over $40. These high fees, alongside crypto-only payment options, and siloed marketplaces, serve as a huge barrier to entry for mass adoption, excluding users who may otherwise be interested in lower-priced, convenient NFT transactions.
The other major issue surrounds regulatory concerns, particularly as the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has begun to crack down on DeFi applications. A crypto project’s relationship with regulators can be affected by several factors including size, value, decentralization, and identity. Disagreements with regulators surrounding the application of existing financial laws to blockchain-based protocols may lead to substantial risks for such projects and their users due to perceived non-compliance, as demonstrated by the recent SEC investigation into how investors use Uniswap and the manner in which it is marketed.
SpaceSeven’s NFT Marketplace Solution Using Concordium
So how does SpaceSeven seek to solve these issues and why is it built on Concordium?
Though SpaceSeven is a multi-blockchain NFT marketplace, Concordium acts as its primary chain with unique features that make it ideally suited to host NFTs. Concordium provides essential guarantees regarding provenance, ease, scalability, affordability, security, compliance, and trust, required for the marketplace to function correctly.
Concordium’s layer 1 blockchain works on a sharded Proof-of-Stake model that currently supports the processing of hundreds of transactions per second compared to Ethereum’s approximate 15 per second, with theoretically infinite scalability. Concordium’s transaction fees are also far more predictable as they are not linked to the value of an asset, being fixed and baked into the protocol instead. Though newer, Concordium is also shifting toward greater decentralization with the potential to become more decentralized than Ethereum over time.
Concordium differs from other blockchain platforms as it is designed to integrate with existing financial and business systems that require knowledge of user identities. As users are identifiable and every transaction is trackable at the protocol level, Concordium helps application developers, individuals, and businesses to build products that comply with local regulations while retaining the benefits of a privacy-focused public and permissionless blockchain. While it still provides for pseudonymous transactions, it has the ability for this to be revoked according to compliance requirements. Concordium was, therefore, selected to build and deploy SpaceSeven to create the first sustainable, trustable, and regulatory compliant NFT platform that protects against fraud.
These features are game-changing for buyers and sellers of NFTs, enabling a platform where all transactions can be traced and provenance can be proved. A platform that can offer the lowest and most predictable fees on the market, helping users to mint, buy, and sell art almost for free. A platform leveraging the benefits of highly scalable underlying blockchain technology with protocol-level identity solutions to ensure regulatory compliance. A platform that can attract exclusive global content for an expanding user base in an NFT market that’s rapidly gaining acceptance.
What’s Next?
SpaceSeven is aiming to become the market-leading NFT marketplace as the first mover to build such a solution on the ID-centric and regulatory compliant Concordium blockchain, with an e-commerce style user journey and payment funnel providing access to top-notch collections.
SpaceSeven has already struck a deal to be the marketplace for Enter Art Fair, an international art fair based in Copenhagen, with 61 galleries minting 1 NFT each.
The SpaceSeven platform is then set to go live in November and the team is now continuing to develop partnerships with content creators, brands, and artists in anticipation of the launch.
