Rarible

Rarible offers a community-owned NFT marketplace for the creation, sale, or purchase of digital items secured on the Ethereum, Flow, Tezos, and Polygon blockchains. The platform offers thousands of art pieces from around 20,000 creators and collectors as of March 2021. Users are offered features such as flexible royalties, minting privileges, Rari rewards (governance powers for voting on features, platform development, and more), auction functions, and unlockable items. The platform supports two token standards, ERC-1155 and ERC-721, popular in NFT markets. Rarible has garnered celebrity attention, including Soulja Boy (rapper) who created his own NFT on the platform, and Mark Cuban (Dallas Mavericks NBA team owner) who sold his NFT (digital art featuring Cuban wearing a Dallas Mavericks shirt) for 30 ether (ETH), equivalent to around USD 15,000. Rarible claims to be the world's first community-owned NFT marketplace with its owners holding its DAO governance token RARI. As of January 2022, the platform had 1.6 million total users.

The company announced in early 2021 that it was developing a “multi-chain strategy” utilizing multiple blockchains—not only Ethereum—in the near term. In November 2021, it integrated with Flow to trade Flow-based NFTs, while Flow was integrated with the Rarible Protocol enabling creators to build NFTs using the fully open-source infrastructure with Flow’s developer ergonomics, and in December 2021, Rarible integrated with the Tezos blockchain, enabling users to create, buy, and sell higher energy efficient NFTs, compared to the Ethereum blockchain, due to Tezos’ proof-of-stake mechanism. As of March 2022, Rarible had reached USD 274 million in trading volume with ~405,000 NFTs created since its inception.

Rarible launched “lazy minting” (October 2021) that enables creators to mint NFTs for free. This means the buyer will pay the Ethereum gas fees at purchase, unlike the traditional method where minting is done at NFT creation and the gas fees are borne by the creator. Rarible launched a direct messaging feature, “Rarible Messenger,” (November 2021) which facilitates creator-fan communication using crypto wallet addresses instead of social network usernames—a first for NFT marketplaces. Rarible planned to launch Rarible Messenger eventually as a standalone messaging app.

Key customers and partnerships

In June 2021, Rarible partnered with S!NG, an online platform that enables creators to protect their ideas by minting them as NFTs free of charge, holding their intellectual property in a digital portfolio. The partnership will enable the monetization of NFTs created on the S!NG app, selling them directly to fans in the Rarible NFT marketplace. Rarible partnered with Adobe (October 2021) to let users create an image as an NFT in Photoshop, which will display content credentials (attribution for the NFT creator and who minted it). In September 2023, the firm partnered with Mantle Network to launch Mintle, a new secondary NFT marketplace on the Ethereum Layer 2 network.

Funding and financials

Rarible raised USD 14.2 million in a series A funding round in June 2021 from Venrock Capital, CoinFund, and 01 Advisors. The funds are to be utilized to launch an additional marketplace on the Flow blockchain and to explore more user-friendly developments such as the acceptance of credit card payments.