Drops is a platform that brings decentralized finance (DeFi) infrastructure to non-fungible tokens (NFTs), providing essential utility to unused NFT assets.
The developers’ aim is to merge NFTs and DeFi, creating a platform that focuses on NFT assets and their use; it is built on the second-layer scaling solution Polygon. Drops users can use their NFT assets to receive trustless loans and yield farm, thereby reducing the opportunity cost of long-term storage.
The platform is developed by the Node Runners team. Drops directly connects digital art collectors with art creators. The platform will host limited-edition artwork releases that users can take part in via a raffle. The mechanism ensures fair competition and increases accessibility. Everyone is able to view the artworks, but in order to purchase one, a user has to take part in a raffle.
Drops was first announced in February 2021. In early May 2021, the platform announced the end of its private funding round, having secured nearly $1 million from private investors such as Axia8 Ventures, AU21, Bitscale Capital, D64 Ventures, Blocksync, Drops Ventures, Genblock and X21.
Besides Polygon, Drops’ other strategic partners include Polkastarter, Quantstamp, 0xb1, Biconomy, Kyros Ventures, PetRock Capital and Blockstar Technologies Inc.
Drops was founded by Darius Kozlovskis. He is also the founder and CTO of Vizituentr, and, formerly, a director of ICO Bulls. Kozlovskis has seven years of experience as a developer and product manager.
His co-founder Nikita Ufimcev has banking and finance background, having previously worked for Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. Since 2016 he has been an active entrepreneur, having joined crypto space back in 2017 as a business developer.
The creators of Drops have set out with a goal of building an infrastructure that will preserve the value of NFTs in the long term and allow users to generate income from their non-fungible assets. To achieve this, Drops offers DeFi solutions that allow holders to fractionalize NFTs, obtain trustless loans and earn yield.
Drops integrates NFT assets with the DeFi ecosystem by using the dNFT fractionalization protocol. It combines NFT assets and converts them into ERC-20 tokens.
With dNFTs, users can access fungible liquidity backed by NFT assets, borrow cryptocurrency using dNFT tokens as collateral, and profit from assets by participating in real crop growing strategies via dNFT vaults.
In the future, the platform plans to accept governance tokens of major NFT projects as collateral in order to give users more opportunities.
