NFTs for everyone: Students break down NFT price barriers
Non-fungible tokens have taken the world by storm in recent years, and Blake Asherian, a senior majoring in business administration, noticed. These NFTs are digital assets, such as artwork, that have become collectibles.
Asherian observed the most popular and sought after NFTs came with “crazy price tags.” After an expensive NFT caught his eye, he asked 10 of his roommates to split the cost. This birthed the idea for Moonlight, a platform aiming to be “the world’s simplest Fractional NFT marketplace.”
“Everyone just put their money together within 30 seconds,” Asherian said. “It’s pretty lucrative, the idea of splitting the cost of something to collectively purchase it.”
Using a GoFundMe-type model, Moonlight allows users to fundraise to purchase expensive NFTs. Those who donate become co-owners, each of whom own a part of the NFT equivalent to the portion of the total cost that they purchased.
“It’s really cool because people want to feel like they’re owning the cool stuff, but they’re not able to sometimes with the price barriers,” Asherian said. “We developed a crowdfunding technology to allow people to essentially crowdfund everything.”
Beyond crowdfunding, users will be able to sell shares of an NFT whenever they want to. In fact, the technology Moonlight has developed allows owners to give up ownership instantaneously. In all, users will be able to crowdfund, collect, trade and sell NFTs.
Moonlight’s website outlines the project’s mission of lowering the barriers of entry into the world of digital currency: “The digital future is reconstructing culture by putting the power in the hands of the many, not the few,” a blurb reads.
Moonlight’s current development is in website form. As the team is in its early startup stages, this is a way to “test the concept,” Asherian said, and once the idea gains traction, the project will transition into an app.
Moonlight was created and marketed by Asherian, Gabriel Perez, Matt Hausman and Can Toraman, who all met through mutual friends. Perez, a junior majoring in economics, leads the team’s social media, publicity and outreach. Hausman, an alumnus who studied computer science, was tasked with building the website and Toraman, a senior majoring in computer science, is a technical advisor.
“The four of us on the team have a really solid understanding of how blockchain technology works behind the scenes and what it can be used for in the future. I think that creates great communication opportunities between the four of us,” Perez said.
In the development phase, Asherian was influenced by his work with his cousin Sean Rad, a co-founder of dating app Tinder. Rad was also an angel investor in Web3 companies at the time, so while Asherian was working with Rad he became seriously interested in NFTs.
“Sean was all about building very simple products that everyone would want to use, which is a huge inspiration to what I started doing,” Asherian said.
Both Asherian and Perez said it took a significant amount of time practicing and learning about the complex world of buying and selling NFTs to develop Moonlight. Their target audience is those who are interested in the space but lack the funds to get deeply involved.
“We’re delivering a product to NFT-passionate people who feel like they’re very early to the space but somehow can’t afford anything,” Perez said.
Beyond helping people raise funds, Moonlight hopes to increase the simplicity of the process for those who don’t understand how to buy and sell NFTs on their own.
“I didn’t really know what I was doing in the beginning when I got into NFTs, and I just wished there was a site like this where I was able to get the coolest stuff in a simple way,” Asherian said.
Moonlight also has a special feature called “liquidity providing,” through which people can lock their ownership in a certain token. By signing a pledge that they won’t sell their shares in an NFT, they earn a percentage of the trading fee that Moonlight collects.
“We’re once again hitting the audience of people that would want to hold and then also hitting the audience of people that would want to sell immediately and liquidate their position,” Asherian said.
The website is currently finishing its final phase of development to ensure security before entering beta, a testing phase to check for errors. Once it’s ready, the team plans to do a soft launch and get the first NFT crowdfunded successfully.
While Moonlight is only going to be used for crowdfunding NFTs at its start, the team hopes the platform will be a place to crowdfund for everything involving cryptocurrency.
“We see this as bigger than just NFTs; we see this as just allowing people to come together for a greater good,” Asherian said. “We’re targeting a very small audience, which is just the NFT audience. And once we have a proof of concept and we’re able to scale, we’re gonna be hitting each industry one by one.”