Going to pieces: Fractionalized NFT projects gather steam

Non-fungible tokens and crypto art have taken the industry by storm in 2021 and a number of projects aim to fractionalize pieces of NFTs to give collectors' partial ownership rights.

Projects that break apart, or fractionalize, non-fungible tokens are gaining interest following a number of groundbreaking sales that are beyond the reach of most investors.

With pieces such as Beeple’s “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” fetching a record-breaking $70 million, not everyone has pockets deep enough to bid on such extravagances. The buyer, known by the handle “MetaKovan”, purchased the piece for an NFT fund.

Owning just a portion of a piece of digital art is an approach becoming more appealing to collectors, after a concept called Fractional Non-Fungible Tokens (F-NFTs) was originally conceived in 2018 as a way to offer shared ownership.

A new decentralized project called Fractional will allow NFT owners to mint tokenized fractional ownership of their pieces facilitating the buying and selling of percentages of the full NFT. Additionally, fractionalizing allows for the NFT holder to realize some liquidity from their asset without selling the entire piece, according to a blog post detailing the project.

The platform will also enable users to fractionalize entire collections of NFTs and release them under one shared ownership token allowing those with less knowledge of the scene to invest in digital art complied by more renowned collectors.

The Fractional project works with NFT vaults, which takes custody of the full piece and allow the holder to break it apart as they see fit. They can then send the ERC-20 parts to friends, auction them off, or use them for liquidity provision.

When an interested party emerges, they can send ETH equal or greater to the reserve price of the asset initiating an auction. Upon completion, the auction winner will receive the NFT and token holders will be able to claim the ETH paid. The protocol did not specify a timeframe for project launch.

Another project called DAOfi has launched a decentralized exchange forked from Uniswap for the trading of fractionalized NFTs. It’s designed to solve the liquidity problem in secondary markets for NFTs whereby NFT owners have to wait for someone to bid or buy at an asking price for a single piece.

Breaking the non-fungible ERC-721 tokens into fungible ERC-20 tokens allows buyers to own a portion, much like owning a print of an artwork, the post explained.

The fungible tokens will be placed on a bonding curve on DAOfi so that the AMM will always be able to provide liquidity algorithmically for buyers and sellers at any time.

DAOfi launched its first crowd sale on Tuesday, March 16, for Marc Horowitz’s idxm_tile_001 piece which has sold 30% of the 22 tiles at the time of writing.