The rise of crypto collectibles goes back to October 2017 when the Axiom Zen team launched CryptoKitties at ETHWaterloo, the world’s largest ethereum hackathon. Equipped with a go-to-market strategy, coupled with steady fundamentals, CryptoKitties gave rise to the ever growing crypto collectibles market. According to Nick Tomaino of 1 confirmation, crypto collectibles have the potential to be as big as the ICO boom of 2016 and 2017[1].
Though Cryptocurrency has served as a means of fundraising before the ERC-20 standard was created, it has been one of the major catalysts for the huge growth in ICOS which led to over $5 billion being raised in 2017.
Source: Coinist.io
This can be compared to the collectibles niche, which according to Forbes has a market cap of $370 billion[2]. Collectibles have always been an interesting industry from a generic viewpoint. Factoring blockchain technology and its immutability into this industry represents masses of untapped opportunity.
What started out as a hackathon project has paved the way for an entire niche industry to emerge. Rarebits is a secondary market where people can trade their non-fungible assets without any fee. Dubbed as the “eBay for digital assets”, since launching in February they have already raised $6 million in series A investment [3]from influencers in the tech industry such as Justin Kan, founder of twitch. Other investors include Spark Capital, First Round Capital among others.
Similar marketplace, Opensea.io which launched in January have recently announced that they’ve raised $2 million.
Within a month of launching, Rarebits announced that they had processed over $100k in transactions. While this sounds like a small number when considering Ethereum’s daily transaction volume, in time this could potentially give rise to a massive marketplace for digital assets including digital game assets, art,
