The community of tokenization platform Rarible has voted for the introduction of market fees. These fees serve as a way to demotivate wash traders, while in addition providing financial resources for future platform development. Buyers and sellers both need to pay a small tax on their purchase, and this fee is a bit smaller on secondary sales.
A buyer always pays 2.5 percent commission on his purchase. The seller pays five percent commission on a primary sale, and 2.5% on a secondary sale. In addition the seller of a secondary sale pays a certain percentage to the original creator of the artwork.
Based on the current weekly sales we’d be talking about approximately 40 thousand dollars per week. Rarible will be able to spend this money on development, community grants and an ambassador program. This process is not transparent at the moment.
The decision for introducing fees came from the community. Users who hold RARI tokens are able to vote on these decisions. Ultimately Rarible wants to become a completely Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO).
NFT is the new hype
The policy change on Rarible comes at an interesting time. In the past two weeks many crypto and mainstream platforms have shown interest in non-fungible tokens. This has created a new hype surrounding digital assets, which could be crypto art, game items, virtual land or proof-of-ownership over physical goods, like for example real estate.
Over the past two years non-fungible tokens have taken quite a presence within the blockchain space. A non-fungible token represents ownership over a digital or sometimes physical asset, and therefore has a certain value. The value of certain non-fungible tokens increased a lot, sometimes even adding one or more zeros behind the initial value.
In 2018 a piece of digital art called “AI Generated Nude Portrait #1” was sold for $75.74. However, at the beginning of this year that same blockchain-verified image sold for 12.351 dollars. That’s 174 times the original investment!
With virtual land in Cryptovoxels and Decentraland, the same thing happend. While pieces of land originally sold for less than one hundred dollars, some of these lands are now worth thousands of dollars. These are considerable amounts of money, inaccessible for most people on this planet. Allowing investors to buy fractions at least opens up the opportunity for the lower segment investors to get a piece of the pie.
