Shortly after raising $2.6 million USD from investors, AdaSwap launched their NFT marketplace, ADANFT. Acting as a community-driven content marketplace, this project seeks to overcome the barriers of poor curation that are notorious with other marketplaces.
We sat down with the founder of AdaSwap, Itay Levy to discuss the release of the NFT marketplace
You’ve recently announced the launch of AdaSwap’s NFT marketplace (ADANFT), what are your hopes for the newly-launched NFT platform going forward?
ADANFT’s launch was very successful overall, we have got 1300 new registrants for the first airdrop on the platform, we have encountered minor issues at launch that have been addressed very fast from our tech team.
Our plans for the coming weeks are adding more attention to the community surrounding us.
We are hiring community managers as well as a new NFT drop expert to better serve the upcoming community that is growing at a crazy pace.
To solve the issue of poor curation on NFT marketplaces, you’re turning to the community. Why do you believe that community engagement is such an important part of the NFT space?
By allowing the community to choose which collections to vote in, you effectively are making sure that the upcoming drops are the most favorable and valuable in the eyes of the public.
It also gives better reputation for the artists that enter the marketplace, showing that they weren’t picked by a centralized entity but rather it’s a choice of the community.
You’ve previously stated that your goal is to change the way NFTs interact with traditional finance protocols, why do you believe that creating a tier-based categorization marketplace is essential in doing this?
The tier system at its current form is still in the works of adding improvements and features.
Right now the tier system only works by the amount of $ASW tokens held by a certain user, but we plan to improve it by allowing very engaged community members, community members that are picked by the community and contributors that help improve the marketplace to get better tiers as well as more control over the platform, that will make the platform governed in a more decentralized way allowing the public to do improvements along the way without a central authority/foundation to control over future initiatives.
With this tier-based system, how will you stop crypto whales from heavily influencing the NFT platform?
I think that the term ‘whale’ has got a bad rep in the space as more and more VC and institutional money has started to flow into the Crypto and NFT space making what was very decentralized in terms of distribution of power to giving the power to a few wealthy actors, but that doesn’t make it anything bad, without many of those whales, the crypto adoption would be much slower, most of them have similar goals and it’s to change the current financial system.
With that said, I think the tier-based system of ours will improve transparency to the community and bad actors (whales or not) will have less power to influence the future development.
Do you see the implementation of Hydra to Cardano impacting AdaSwap in the future?
Hydra is a L2 solution to Cardano (developed by IOHK that isn’t yet available for the public), as of now there is another L2 solution called Milkomeda that has gained popularity lately as it allows for easy contract deployment in a EVM environment that we as well as other projects on Cardano are building on. I believe that Hydra together with its zero-fee structure for the end-user could be a gamechanger in the crypto space, the only question is: how long will it take?
Projects like Ethereum’s Casper/2.0 Upgrade was something that was delayed by years and the same could happen for Cardano’s Hydra, it’s not a straightforward process implementing changes to a top-tier blockchain as any flaw could be damaging the current existing infrastructure, a lot of stress-testing must be done prior.
With that said, Cardano in the past 2 years has done a lot of development and progress at an unimaginable pace and it might be just around the corner.
With $2.6 million in recent funding, what’s in store for the future of AdaSwap beyond the NFT marketplace?
The goal of the fundraiser was to give us space for burn rate before generating positive cash flow from operations to ensure the product and brand can adequately be deployed and protect the token. Our next stage of development will be focused on finishing and deploying the DEX as well as creating new innovation for the NFT marketplace.
More information about AdaNFT will continue to roll out over the coming weeks. In the meantime, follow their project on Twitter to hear about any new developments before anyone else.
