PawnHouse AMA#2 Review
The second AMA of PawnHouse in Telegram finished on Aug 12. Team leader Meruto showed us the big picture for everyone. Next, let’s review what information is in this AMA:
1. How to get a fair price for my NFT on your platform?
For this question. Here are my thoughts. So on our platform, there are two main functions that will be developed and delivered: NFT collateralized loans and Simultaneous Multiple Round Auction (SMRA). SMRA is a new type of auction that helps to price your NFT, where you can auction your NFT in the SMRA with similar NFT types with other sellers.
SMRA is a better pricing mechanism compared to the traditional English auction, normally the final prices for non-standard assets get a better price. Also winners can avoid “winner’s curse.” You can read more on our Medium page on why SMRAs are a good choice for sellers.
2. How to solve the investment risk problem of investing in NFTs? I am very interested in this kind of collection, but I am worried that it will be difficult to sell in the future.
So for this one, I think there is always risk for any type of investment. For NFTs, I would recommend people to view it as a hobby collection instead of serious investment. For crypto art-related works, it is better to buy and hold, exchange it with people who share similar hobbies or tastes with you. If you need cash for other investments, you can collateralize your NFTs on our platform to get some liquidity there.
For collectables, I think you should think twice before you enter into any of them, because most of the quick projects are just a ponzi that gets you FOMO, only few such as Cryptopunks and Artblock are really crypto-native and community- centered.
Our platform will try to attract more high-quality assets like punks or Bayc on board.
3. Most investors focus only on the short-term price of the token instead of the actual value of the project. So what are the benefits for long-term investors in project?
Every serious project in crypto now wants to attract long-term holders. Back in 2017 or 2018, yes, we saw lots of irresponsible ICO grabbing money from communities and are dead right now. But also we see some DeFi and NFT projects teams hanging in there for more than 2 or 3 years, and since DeFi summer, most of them have taken off and welcomed the Spring.
So, for long-term holders of the tokens, I think time will give them a good return, on the premise that users are involved in the projects’ governance and development. Projects that connect deeply with communities survive in the bear market.
Also, of course, for long-term holders, a staking plan gives them more return than normal users.
4. How do users make money from their NFT ? And what are your criteria for choosing game developers to create NFTs within your platform?
It is hard for me to give you any financial advice on NFT collecting. Personally, I collect crypto art and some collectables, buy and hold. I am not planning to sell in the short term but sometimes just exchange them with other collectors that have similar taste or hobby. I think NFTs with good art value and robust communities can last longer than low-quality 10k fomo projects. Those projects will only hurt collectors, as they are even worse than bad ICOs, because after all, NFTs have worse liquidity than Fungible tokens.
We are not choosing creators, we are a free platform that welcomes all kinds of NFT holders. We currently do not support NFT minting, so we just provide a price discovery mechanism for existing NFTs.
5. What are your plans in place for global expansion, are you focusing on only market at this time?
We value all markets, but are focused more on the Asia markets for now. We are in talks with around 30–50 influencers in areas like Japan, Korea, China, South East Asia and also English-speaking areas too.
For our current plan, we are doing our second round of fundraising, collecting VCs or influencer’s interest first, and slowly progress in the fundraising while at the same time developing our SMRA platform. Our focus for now, will be welcoming more communities and users to try our collateralized loan function first, there you can also mine PH tokens too.
6. What are the key milestones on your roadmap, both things you have already achieved and things that we can look forward to?
Yeah, lots of people are asking questions about the roadmap.
Let me briefly describe how we got here, so back to 2019, at the Eth Dev Con, there were some friends of mine in crypto. We were discussing the possibility of DeFi, where back then it was like the darkest time for crypto. The market was dead cold.
But we still were confident about the DeFi and NFT stuff. So from 2019, several of us started to pay attention to DeFi and also I remember it was at that time Dapper labs started to do fundraising for their public chain (Flow).
Well, of course, nobody expected the DeFi summer and NFT crazy FOMO time would arrive in 2020 and 2021.
So back then even for Flow, not many funds really invested in them. Some of the japanese influencers (my friends) had small allocations from the OTC market.
And then the time came for the DeFi summer to start taking off, and everyone thought it was going to be short. But then people realized they were wrong again, as the DeFi success lasts even till today.
So during the DeFi summer, some of the influencers together with some crypto investment firm friends of mine, were discussing, if we see the DeFi and also the derivative market for DeFi succeeded, then the next will be NFTs.
So back then I thought maybe I should do something related to the next NFT spring coming soon.
So when we looked into the NFT market, we saw very harsh competition in primary sale marketplaces.
We see SuperRare, KnownOrigin, Makersplace, leading the crypto art market, and Rarible, OpenSea, etc as comprehensive markets in art and both collectibles. So there is less chance for new teams to compete with those giants, and there are already too many marketplaces for NFTs.
But still, even with those platforms, we are still facing the problem that the whole market scale of NFTs is far less than the Fungible Token market and DeFi market.
Why is that? We started to think about what’s going wrong with the NFT market…
For NFT borrowing and lending, even with nftfi.com as one of the very first several good platforms trying to boost the NFT derivative market, liquidity is still low.
Then after much discussion and research into the market, we realized that the low-liquidity problem is actually the price discovery problem for non-standard assets.
Basically, if you are a lender that is willing to lend money to a borrower who would like to put their NFT as collateral, the lender might still hesitate on lending the money, because they don’t know how much they should lend out.
This is because we don’t have a good price reference in the market, such as how much is the public value or common price for a certain type of the NFT.
So, as long as the pricing problem is unsolved, the market for NFTs will never thrive like DeFi.
Therefore, I started to try to structure and design a mechanism with some friends (now also our team members) to provide a good way for pricing NFTs.
There comes the SMRA.
We think auctions are still the best way to do price discovery for non-standard assets.
After we finalized the model for the product, we started fund raising, which was around 2months ago. But you see the whole journey for the team has been a long long time since 2019.
So far, if we say what we have achieved, it’s mainly that we figured out what the real problem in the market is. And after a long time of discussion and research, we finalized the product we want to deliver, fixed the product design, finished the first round fund raising, recruited and assembled the team, and are ready to continue the journey!
For next the several months, the plan is:
First, we have already delivered the collateralized loan function. We will definitely try to welcome more users and communities on board to try out the product and also launch our token on several exchanges.
Second, since our tech team is developing the SMRA product, we have also shown the product demo to our core investors, where they also gave us good advice and feedback.
Lastly, we hope to see the product live in Autumn or Winter. And exchange listings too.
7. Projects that are not traded on major exchanges remain unnoticed. What do you think about listing the token on the leading exchanges?
As I might have already answered in the 6th question, we will list the token on DEX first, and within this year, we hope to see it listed on some leading exchanges with good liquidity and long-term holders ecology.
8. Did you raise funds so far? If so, How did you handle them? Are you planning to do any future raises?
Also mentioned this question in the previous answers, yes we raised our first round and also collected some commitment for our second round, we welcome influencers and community leaders to participate in our 2nd round or public sale(might have this), please contact us with the brief intro of yourself.
9. How much does it cost me to receive NFT Pawnhouse? And can those NFTs be traded only on the original exchange or traded at marketplaces such as Opensea?
You can try out the collateralized loan function on the platform now, and get PH tokens for now. We are not a minting platform for NFTs, we are providing a price discovery mechanism for existing NFTs, so yes the NFT on our platform should be tradeable on other platforms as well.
10. During the build of your project, do you take into account any of the community feedbacks or demands to further expand the new ideas for the project?
We are for sure very open to community feedback, please feel free to contact our admins on Telegram, Twitter, or send us emails. Also, for those who helped us in the early stage, we will have a surprise reward for them.
That’s all. What are we going to do next? Please keep focusing on PawnHouse!
Our Social Platform:
• Twitter : https://twitter.com/pawnhouse_nft
• Website : https://pawnhouse.io/
• Telegram: https://t.me/pawnhouseofficial
