With $15 million in financing, “Arcade” wants to open up the NFT lending market with huge potential

Arcade, an NFT mortgage lending platform, announced the completion of a $15 million Series A round of financing led by Pantera Capital, with Castle Island Ventures, Franklin Templeton Blockchain Fund, Golden Tree Asset Management, Eniac Ventures, Protofund, Probably Nothing Capital, Lemniscap, BlockFi chief Executive Zac Prince, Quantstamp CEO Richard Ma and others participated in the investment.

With the explosion of NFT, in addition to the endless content innovation, some projects have also begun to try the financialization of NFT, hoping to liberate the financial attributes of NFT assets and revitalize this huge market with trillions of potential in the future .

However, unlike homogeneous tokens (FT), as a non-standard asset, NFT is difficult to find an accurate, real-time unified price indicator, such as the most classic NFT series of works Cryptopunks, different works within the same series often There will also be large price differences. This feature makes it difficult for the market to directly build a general-purpose solution similar to the DeFi protocol when conducting financial experiments around NFT.

Arcade's solution in this regard is peer-to-peer matching, allowing the lender (the party who holds NFT and wants to lend funds) to set the details of a single loan, and the borrower (who holds funds and wants to lend and earn money through interest) The party that takes the benefits) and then evaluate whether it is worth matching. In this way, without a unified price standard, borrowers and lenders can reach a consensus on the value of a specific NFT asset, making further lending possible.

Specifically, the reception process at Arcade is as follows:

• Lenders first need to package their NFT assets into a unified format (wNFT) that can be used for contract transactions, which will be the collateral required for subsequent loan transactions;

• The lender needs to initiate a loan request, set the details of the loan category, loan amount, repayment period, and loan interest rate, and sign a binding transaction based on this;

• The borrower can directly see the unmatched loan request on the platform, and after confirming the wNFT status and loan details, the transaction can be confirmed in the wallet to complete the loan matching;

• Before the lender receives the borrower's funds, the loan demand can be canceled at any time and the wNFT can be recovered. After unpacking the wNFT in these packaging formats, the original NFT assets can be obtained.

• After the loan expires, if the lender can fulfill the repayment and interest payment as agreed, wNFT will return to the lender in the original way. If not, Arcade also has a set of default handling procedures similar to DeFi to protect the interests of the borrower from loss.

At present, Arcade's products are still in the private beta stage, and it is expected that they will be officially launched in the first quarter of next year and will be officially opened to the public. When talking about the significance of this round of financing, Arcade co-founder Robert Masiello said that the purpose of this fund is to help Arcade expand the team size, accelerate the product launch process, and promote this new lending product to more users.