Burnt Finance, which gained infamy from burning a physical Banksy artwork and listing its NFT version at twice the market price, raised $8 million recently in a bid to launch its DeFi-based NFT marketplace.
Animoca Brands, a creator of blockchain games, led the funding round. Multicoin Capital, Alameda Research, and DeFiance joined Animoca in what is a popular bet to bring a high-powered, versatile NFT platform to the blockchain Solana.
While the Summer of SOL brought popularity to SOL NFTs and aided the creation of heavyweight Solana marketplaces like Solanart, Magic Eden, and Digital Eyes, the blockchain (and neither its cousin Ethereum) has not seen a DeFi-based marketplace that employs permissionless principles.
This gap in the marketplace may allow Burnt Finance’s NFT marketplace to outpace some of the others or at least gain in market share. The company seeks to launch its marketplace soon, capitalizing on a newly present NFT bull market that started in late December.
The marketplace will include popular DeFi hacks like NFT lending, liquidity mining, staking incentives, and fractionalized ownership. It has “160,000” users on the waitlist and has done $100 million in trading volume in just seven days on the Spark testnet.
Perhaps equally intriguing is Burnt Finance’s plans to expand the marketplace to include other blockchains such as Terra. This integration of other blockchains could create the first multi-blockchain platform featuring Solana and integrate the NFTs from other blockchains that are not yet as popular.
This functionality could grant NFT artists from those blockchains more exposure, creating competition in the NFT market as a whole.
Solana and these other blockchains are the preferred homes for some NFT traders due to their low fees and fast transaction speeds. In fact, an employee in Bank of America mentioned that Solana might become the “Visa”of blockchains due to its fast transaction speeds.
This context may be well-suited for the NFT world’s first DeFi marketplace, as users won’t have to deal with the burdensome gas costs of the Ethereum network. As of now, users who wish to engage in DeFi practices with NFTs on the Ethereum network are forced to go off marketplaces to specific sites that cater to Ethereum DeFi practices.