NFT art marketplace extends range with sports and staking partnerships

A peer-to-peer marketplace for NFT artwork is expanding its horizons, partnering with a project forming farming pools and a fantasy sport site that uses NFT player cards.

A new peer-to-peer marketplace for NFT artwork is branching out, having formed partnerships with a sports gaming site and a decentralized farming pool as it prepares to launch.

Polkally is primarily creating a digital art bazaar intended to make it easier for independent and amateur artists to showcase and sell their art, while offering galleries and collectors an inexpensive venue. It supports both direct sales and dynamic auctions of artwork created as nonfungible tokens.

Calling NFTs “the natural evolution of art,” Polkally CEO Chloé Bigot said: “Polkally is at the forefront of this great revolution, providing the interoperability and seamless experience that the ecosystem lacks.”

Polkally has moved out of that niche in announcing a partnership with UniFarm, a decentralized staking solution that pools groups of DeFi protocols together into “cohorts” that allow to stake any one of the participant tokens to farm all the others. Polkally is part of Cohort 11, which also features OpenDeFi, UniFarm, Idavoll Network, Ispolink, and Chromia.

UniFarm incentivizes stakers to keep their fund locked by adding tokens from another cohort member to that farmers reward pool each week. It also diversifies their holdings as their returns come in a number of different tokens.

“UniFarm is building great DeFi products for a more decentralized world,” Bigot added. “Were very excited to be working with them!”

An important by-product of the UniFarm staking partnership is that it gives Polkallys token its first use case, where hodlers can stake their KALLY.

Playing the game

The second recent partnership, with Rage.Fan, is not just a matter of expanding from art NFTs to the sports-themed NFTs that have been among the most commercially successful categories of the digital collectibles. While it uses NFTs, Rage is more of a blockchain-based sports fantasy league site, focusing on season-long and daily leagues.

Rage is also creating NFT-based collectible players cards of varying rarity that can be used in its fantasy sports leagues — holding the card of a player on your team can bring bonus points when they score, for example — as well as being traded. It is also building a sports oracle.

Polkally and Rage will work together on technical and artistic matters, and cross-sell NFTs on each others sites.

“We are firm believers that NFTs are the most ideal solution for mass adoption of blockchain,” said Satheesh Ananthasubramanian, CEO of Rage.Fan. “Polkally makes it easy for sports NFT gaming platforms like ours to reach new audiences invested in this space and bring new value to them.”

The art of the token

One of Polkallys strengths is the ties it has and will make with artists. A unique feature of the platform is a planned network of artists and galleries that will trade NFTs for tangible works.

Polkally will use a strict but decentralized KYC process to verify artists‘ identities. But it and the project’s decentralized database will be based on the peer-to-peer IPFS protocol powering the decentralized Web 3.0.

The Polkally Foundation promises no hidden fees, and sees three revenue streams supporting the marketplace and its KALLY token. First, it plans to sell exclusive, limited-edition NFTs to fund its activities. Second, the site will sell advertising space to NFT artists who want to highlight their work.

Its roadmap calls for staking, farming, and a token generation event, as well as listing KALLY of the Uniswap DEX, to take place by the end of June.

Polkallys first iteration, a minimum viable product, is scheduled for release in late summer 2021. It will initially be compatible with Ethereum and then Binance Smart Chain, with other networks including Polkadot, EOS, Tron, Ethereum Classic, Polygon, and TomoChain added over time.

Polkallys KALLY token will anchor the decentralized platform as the Polkally Foundation transitions the project into a decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO, in Q3 2021. While KALLY will act as a governance token, it is also the sole currency of the marketplace, used for buying and selling artworks and all fees.