Group of entrepreneurs launch NFT marketplace; proceeds from sales to go towards COVID-relief

India’s startups have joined forces to do their bit in the uphill fight against the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic. Some have tried to make arrangements for oxygen cylinders and oxygen concentrators while others have been looking at ways to establish temporary COVID-care facilities. 

A group of entrepreneurs have now come together to launch an NFT marketplace where proceeds from the sale of digital artwork will go straight to the India COVID-Crypto Relief Fund created by Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder and COO of Polygon, a crypto network based on Ethereum. 

Called Fable, the initiative has been launched by IndieFolio Network's CEO and co-founder Kavan Antani; Arjun Malhotra of Good Capital; Elemential’s CEO Raunaq Vaisoha and CTO Anil Dukkipatty; and Akriti Khosla, founder of Career Cupid. 

Nailwal’s crypto relief fund was promoted by angel investor and entrepreneur Balaji S Srinivasan, who pledged upto $100,000 in cryptocurrency to the fund.

An NFT is a unique cryptocurrency-based token that is ‘non-fungible’ in nature, which means that it can not be replaced by another ‘identical’ item. Its copies cannot be created following the purchase, which makes it a unique asset for buyers. 

Almost any digital asset can be an NFT as long as there is a buyer for it.

Designs made by various artists, who have volunteered to be a part of the initiative, will be up for auction on the platform starting from tonight, Vaisoha told Entrackr. 

“There’s a lot of struggle outside and there’s just nobody helping people. So we thought about how we could use our skill set, which is blockchain, to help people out,” Vaisoha said when asked about the rationale launching the NFT marketplace. 

Also read: Crypto exchange WazirX announces NFT marketplace for India

However, not the entire amount of a particular transaction will go to charity as there will be a “small gas fee” which will be charged on every transaction, Vaisoha said. The ‘gas fee’ is essentially paid by users to compensate for the computing energy required to process and validate transactions on the Ethereum crypto network. 

Vaisoha also said that the gas fee isn’t standard and “varies” when we asked about the specific amount that will be deducted from each transaction. He said that it depends on various factors such as network activity and number of transactions, among other things. 

When asked whether he saw NFT art as something that Indians would want to own going forward, given that it’s a digital-only piece of collectable and has no physical manifestation whatsoever, Visoha said that in the next ten years, humans will be spending more time in virtual worlds than in the real world. 

Developments in augmented reality and virtual reality will allow NFT art owners to interact in an entirely different way with their digital art pieces, Vaisoha said.