Name of project: Oort Digital
Team Website: https://oortdigital.tech
Proposal Wallet Address: 0x3e0852Fe3254B3EB934f7c6d23a4EB8c4493451d
The proposal in one sentence: Oort Digital is a DeFi aggregator for NFTs, a super account that allows people to do anything with their NFTs without a bank.
Which category best describes your project?
- Build / improve applications or integrations to Ocean
- Outreach / community / spread awareness
- Unleash data
Project Overview
Description of the project: Oort Digital is a DeFi aggregator for NFTs, a super account that allows people to do anything with their NFTs without a bank.
What problem is your project solving?
Valuation
It is quite difficult to value a particular NFT. Imagine you have a Decentraland parcel called Dragon and it is close to Dragon City. The parcel is currently on sale for 19,998 MANA. The parcel has no historical transactions. How can you fairly value the parcel and make sure it is not overpriced? You might have to compare the parcel with other similar parcels nearby and see if any of these parcels have recent purchases. However, it is a very time-consuming process.
Liquidity
Due to the difficulty to value a particular NFT, NFT marketplace has much lower liquidity than cryptocurrency marketplace. If you own the “Dragon” parcel above, and plan to sell on Opensea, what is the fair price you should place? If you list the price too high, you might never find another buyer.
An efficient valuation mechanism will greatly help to facilitate the overall liquidity in the NFT marketplace. On the other hand, enhanced liquidity will also help to increase the valuation of NFTs, therefore leading to a self-reinforcing cycle.
User Experience
- The decentralized application is difficult for the most people to access. In the majority of cases users must download the Metamask Chrome extension wallet, generate an address, sign up with an exchange, buy ETH, send ETH to their wallet and then they are about to use the application. To a crypto savvy person this might not sound too complex, but for average Joe this is a complete turn off.
What is the final product?
This is V1 of our platform, we have 3 more iterations to complete. [https://app.oortdigital.tech]
How does this project drive value to the Ocean ecosystem?
Decentralized NFT data marketplace
At Oort, we aim to build a DeFi aggregator for NFTs (an NFT super account), and it cannot be achieved without a dynamic and effective valuation mechanism. Therefore, we decide to build the dynamic NFT valuation mechanism, a decentralized NFT data marketplace on top of Ocean to serve as the heart of the whole NFT DeFi ecosystem.
We start with leasing and will have the infrastructure ready that can instantly curate the financial data from leasing and fractionated trading to monetize via Ocean Protocol. With the initial NFT data input, we can gradually build more DeFi protocols / applications or aggregate existing DeFi protocols/applications, and those protocols/applications will generate more data to further enrich the whole ecosystem.
The key is we should keep the data marketplace decentralized and secured with efficient governance. We believe Ocean’s technology will greatly help us to achieve the goal.
We start with the NFT debt marketplaces to both allow users obtain loans from their NFT and lease out their NFTs for passive income. We believe by keeping the marketplace open to customization for both parties, the market will eventually settle the fair value of NFTs.
What’s more, NFTs that have a good revenue stream record will be more attractive to investors and therefore gain higher valuation. We can think of it as using a credit card to build your personal credit history. Your credit history will determine your capital accessibility from banks. By leasing out the NFTs and document the revenue history, we can build “credit history” of each NFT and therefore determine the NFT’s capital accessibility from crypto banks.
Liquidity for NFT, virtual lands and tokenized physical goods, collateralized loans
By allowing users to lend any NFT we create new liquidity for digital collectibles, virtual land or tokenized goods that empowers users to put overcollateralized loans and add new price history entries for NFT.
Overcollateralized loans can be achieved when borrower puts NFT initial worth and interest in our proxy contract so we are sure that lender at least will get the worth back, however, wrapping or extending NFTs with our contract would allow undercollarerized loans to happen as our extended NFT contract would contain additional method that is attached to lending time and with its call NFT ownership can reset safely.
Project Deliverables - Category
IF: Build / improve applications or integration to Ocean, then:
• App will be live, at: https://app.oortdigital.tech/leasing-pool
• Is your software open-source? Project can be found (with permissive license if necessary) at: https://github.com/orgs/oort-digital
The Oort project will bring NFTs data to Ocean. We will firstly curate transaction data from NFT leasing, collateralized loan and fractionized trading and bring to Ocean. The initial data input will help to build an NFT valuation mechanism. With more effective NFT valuation, more DeFi applications can be built which will bring more data to Ocean to further enrich the whole NFT ecosystem.
How crucial is the problem being addressed?
We are building on top of Ocean Protocol to solve the NFT valuation issues, and it is extremely important. The traditional DeFi ecosystem is getting robust because cryptocurrencies are being traded 24/7 globally and it is fairly easy to get price of cryptocurrencies. If the same robust DeFi ecosystem needs to be built for NFTs, valuation is the top priority that needs to be solved. With fair valuation, we can bring more liquidity to the NFT space, and eventually onboard billions of people into the crypto space.
What is size of the opportunity?
NFTs to crypto is like smart phone to internet. There are over 2.5 billion gamers around the world. It is easier to understand video games than understand money. We believe NFTs will onboard billions of people around the world into crypto.
Project Deliverables - Roadmap
Any prior work completed thus far?
Yes, we have a Mainnet V1 beta version of our platform LIVE. https://app.oortdigital.tech/leasing-pool
We are working on our own generation of NFT Heroes that will bring awareness to the project, provide value to the use of the platform and lastly become a DAPP to upgrade, trade, and play with the Oort Digital NFT Heroes.
What is the project roadmap? That is: what are key milestones, and the target date for each milestone.
Heliosphere
Current Phase – in progress
Improve current NFT leasing + pricing products, to become the “Zillow for NFTs”, and introduce native Oort NFTs for incentives.
Kuiper Belt
Upcoming Phase – 3 Quarter 2021
Continue building, aggregating existing DeFi protocols for NFTs and leasing, including collateralized loan, trading, fractionized trading, derivatives, fiat gateways to become a super DeFi account for NFTs. Launch $OORT yield farming in this phase.
Interstellar Space
Next Phase – 2nd Quarter 2022
Finalize Oort token economic model and launch Oort DAO. Build NFT interoperable tools and start onboarding 3rd party game developers for Oort native NFTs. Build bridges to connect with existing blockchain games/metaverses.
Oort Cloud
Final Phase – 2nd-3rd Quarter 2022
Continue seeking for more opportunities and expand the ecosystem. Onboard traditional games into the Oort ecosystem, for being the DeFi layer on top of the whole Metaverse.
Project Details
If the project includes software:
Are there any mockups or designs to date?
LIVE mainnet beta platform located here
https://app.oortdigital.tech/leasing-pool
An overview of the technology stack?
- Sabiler
- Solidarity
- Lend721
If the project includes community engagement:
Running the campaign on social media for how many weeks? 4 weeks
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We have been running a 10 mission campaign engaging with the crypto community to read, learn and share our efforts, as well as learn more about Ocean. Those that get though the challenge will earn rare, founders NFT Characters.
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We have a large Discord and Telegram following.
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We also are building out our LinkedIN presence.
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We post consistently to our Medium account.
Team members
For each team member, give their name, role and background such as the following.
Roger Jiang
• Role: CEO
• Has been involved in crypto since 2017. He has been investing personally and also been working for a Chinese blockchain game distribution platform as Head of Business Development for overseas market.
Deimantas
• Role: CTO
• Has around 3 years of experience on building service and products around Pillar wallet, plus around 1 year of experience of solidity with successful launch of whole lend721 contract and Dapp around it.
James DiMeo
• Role: COO
• James has over 20 years of experience working in IT, as Project Manager and Sales/Marketing Professional. He has been involved in NFTs/VR for several years, and had experience running his own VR startups. Has lead multiple development team in the gaming space.
Raphael Cannavacciuolo is our head of design;
• Role: Product
• He has 5 years of experience with design in 2D and 3D. He has a lot of experience in the gaming world, he worked as a 3D artist on 2 professional game titles with one title having more than 25 million downloads on google play and ios store. He has also been involved in the blockchain space as an investor for the past 4 years and the last year focusing more on NFTs.
Sam
• Role: Developer
• Currently serves as our smart contract developer. He has been working for JD.com, one of the largest e-commerce companies in China as a senior blockchain developer.
Evgeny
• Role: Lead Graphic Artist
• Currently serves as Heroes character and game theory creator.
Additional Information
How we are aligned with Ocean’s Values
Yes, the project is aligned with Ocean mission and values. At Oort, we aim to build an NFT super account, which will be the key to help build the Metaverse, a virtual world where people across the world can live, work and get around each other. We believe the next center of innovation will not be Silicon Valley or any other physical geographical areas, but Metaverse.
We believe people across the globe will build a better society on Metaverse. Human right to personal data privacy & consent is one of the core values of the Metaverse law. NFTs and blockchain technologies such as Zero-knowledge proofs and homomorphic encryption play a vital role in allowing Avatars to retrieve information such as credit scores and validation results without revealing the contents of a message.
With Oort Digital’s active participation in NFTs and blockchain technologies, we will help the spread of power and wealth in the Metaverse, and ultimately lead to a more fair and transparent virtual society, a second life for the human beings.