What is Burnt Finance?
Burnt Finance is a fully-decentralized NFT platform built on the Solana blockchain. Users are able to (1) create NFTs and collections (2) buy, sell, and trade NFTs through various auction formats (e.g. English and Dutch), and (3) in the future, will be able to lend and borrow NFTs, all with zero fees.
Burnt Finance is backed by well-known crypto investors such as Animoca Brands, famous for backing leading blockchain games, including the metaverse platform Sandbox. Other investors include Multicoin Capital, Alameda Research, DeFiance, Valor Capital Group, Figment, Spartan Capital, Tribe Capital, Play Ventures, HashKey, Mechanism Capital, DeFi Alliance, Fantom, and Terra
The origin of Burnt Finance
Burnt Banksy first came into the limelight when he burned an authentic Banksy painting and turned it into an NFT. Soon after, Burnt Finance started with the “Burnt Banksy” campaign in which the team created a non-fungible token (NFT) of the original Banksy piece as covered by CBS News, BBC News, The Guardian, and others. The team then held an auction on OpenSea and sold the digital art piece for ~229 ETH, worth ~$400,000 at the time. Despite the successful sale, a number of challenges were faced while holding the auction – from expensive Ethereum gas fees to bad actors manipulating the bidding process. After this experience, it became clear that a fully-decentralized platform was needed, and building on Solana, a blockchain known for its speed, performance, and low transaction costs, helped solve these issues.
How do you see the evolution of auction platforms?
The most well known NFT marketplaces today are inherently centralized – they intervene with users’ experiences by having the ability to remove listed NFTs based on verifying their own centralized database (where they store NFTs) and having an application process to launch collections (where they have the final say on who can and cannot list their NFTs). In addition, these marketplaces charge transaction fees (2-5%).
The Burnt team has emphasized the importance of decentralization in recent posts below:
https://medium.com/burnt-finance/why-decentralization-matters-burnt-and-the-future-of-finance-754fb7ad5c6d
The Burnt team believes other auction platforms will have to evolve or die. Users do not want to be paying high fees, getting rugged on fraudulent launches, or losing out to bots when trying to mint new collections (e.g. our Dutch Auction format helps prevent this). Auction platforms will move toward empowering creators and supporting other web3 assets outside of NFTs and are excited to be leading the charge.
How does Burnt Finance differ from other auction protocols?
Through full-decentralization, Burnt Finance provides an entirely permissionless and frictionless way for creators to list their NFT or launch a collection and for users to buy, sell, and trade NFTs all at zero fees. In the coming months, the Burnt team will be adding DeFi products such as lending. Burnt Finance will become an all-encompassing NFT ecosystem and so much more than just another NFT marketplace.
What’s next for Burnt Finance?
Burnt Finance will be rolling out new DeFi and GameFi initiatives and expanding into the other layer 1 blockchains to give users a broad offering. Additionally, the team will soon be launching a Launchpad product to allow users to easily create thousands of collections in just minutes.
How would someone get involved in Burnt Finance if they wanted to?
Reach out to contact@burnt.com, or to the BD team directly: galbi@burnt.com and chasiu@burnt.com
