Renaissance people had the Mona Lisa, but today Millenials have non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Markets to buy and sell these valuable pieces are in demand.
The Hoard Marketplace made a public announcement that it has launched on the Ethereum mainnet on May 26, as promised. Its first functionality is to enable NFTs to be used as collateral to obtain loans in cryptocurrency. Low fees are guaranteed, and it supports advanced DeFi liquidity services.
The main focus is to create a space for game developers to tokenize their games on a blockchain while allowing gamers to own items they actually paid for. True ownership is the promise.
What Hoard is About?
Hoard was founded in 2018. Their vision was to build a platform where users could own and govern it in the DAO model (decentralized autonomous organization). Who is this dream team?
The CEO and co-founder of Hoard is an ambitious mathematician from Poland. Radosław Zagórowicz, is a board member at Imapp, focusing on crypto and blockchain-related IT services.
Our next player is Sławomir Bubel, 20 years in the gaming industry and a portfolio that includes games like Ultra Street Fighter IV and Dark Souls: Remastered. After sitting in the CEO chair, he now works as Hoard’s Gamedev Relations head.
You might recognize the lead programmer, Cyryl Matuszewski, from games such as The Witcher 2, Remember Me, and Mortal Kombat X.
These are the people who created the Hoard Marketplace, where users are assured they can trade, buy, sell, loan, or rent non-fungible tokens (NFTs), like in-game items, digital art, and domain names.
The goal is to empower developers with the proper infrastructure to integrate game items with the Ethereum blockchain and facilitate true ownership of visual gaming assets. The interface is simple so all users can manage their way when trading and discovering new NFTs.
The native token is HRD with a total supply of 1 billion, and 48% set to be distributed to the community. Token holders can transact, stake to receive compensation and vote. The current version supports loans in five ERC20 tokens; HRD, DAI, USDT, USDC, BUSD.
Since the launch, different NFTs were introduced, like CryptoKitties, Axie Infinity, Rarible, Superrar. This is the first project in Denmark to obtain regulatory clearance from the Danish Financial Authority for the (HRD) token sale, and the HRD is listed on the Estonian P2PB2B exchange.
What’s Different?
Considering DeFi, Uniswao, Ethereum Compound, Aave, yearn finance, and other platforms, what’s new?
Hoard’s MVP stage has three user personas – Lender, Borrower & Staker. Lenders are the ones who hold stablecoins and wish to profit. Hoard lets lenders have their money ‘work for them’ and present opportunities to acquire an NFT they like. The lender will receive the NFT used as collateral once a loan is not repaid on time.
Users who own ERC20 and ERC721 assets and wish to maximize returns can leverage their crypto assets as collateral. Borrowers deposit their NFT into the Marketplace protocol and set a minimum loan value. If a borrower repays the loan before the due date, any funds increased by interest go to the lender’s account. The NFT used as collateral moves to the borrower.
And finally, users interested in investing in HRD can stake. Staking fees are paid on tokens with strong liquidity like stablecoins. This allows users to receive double yield from the same pool of HRD tokens.
Zagórowicz claims these are just the first steps of further developing NFT utilities and protecting true ownership of virtual content.
