Rarible Raises $1.75M to Become the “Uniswap for NFTs”

Rarible, the community-owned non-fungible-token (NFT) marketplace, announced a $1.75M seed round from investors including 1kx, ParaFi Capital, Coinbase Ventures, and Coinfund.

Rarible token RARI jumped 60% to $8 on the news yesterday.

Rarible intends to use the funds to develop a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) structure which facilitates NFT trading.

Central to the structure will be the RARI token, 75K of which Rarible currently distributes to the platform’s buyers and sellers each week, to incentivize use of the platform.

Right now, governance votes cast with RARI are considered “advisory votes,” meaning they’re non-binding. The new funding will allow Rarible’s founders to develop a more robust governance process with binding votes.

Front-Running the Future

The platform still has a ways to go towards broad adoption.

Rarible’s 24-hour volume stands at $293K according to Dapp Radar, compared with Uniswap’s which exceeds 1B$.

Still, the platform has come a long way in the year since celebrating its first 100 users in Feb. 2020, with rapper Soulja Boy and business mogul Mark Cuban minting NFTs on the platform in the last week.