The Niftorian NFT project is an artist-centric initiative that is helping make NFT creation and collection a team sport. Because of the project’s focus on artists over a specific fan community, our strategy logically led to creating an Ethereum-based project. The artists and collectors in our target community were overwhelmingly Ethereum users. 

However, the other Niftorian project co-founders are members of the $BOT Coin community (Owen Keefe, Sam Ryder, and Piotr Kowalski) and I am the creator. In addition, several people from the Rally community expressed interest in the project based on our innovative approach to help new artists succeed in Web3 through the first NFT Artist Accelerator. So, we wanted to create a way to leverage the Rally NFT marketplace as a bridge to our Ethereum-based project. 

Our first mint, in December 2021, featured 14 artists each creating a project-themed artwork. The debut theme was set as an artwork in the artist’s style with only one requirement: It needed to include an owl. The artwork, which you can see here on Rally or over at Niftorian.com, is really impressive.

These NFTs became part of the Niftorian Founder’s Collection, the first membership tokens providing utility within the Niftorian community. We set up an Ethereum ERC-721 policy contract that enabled the initial creation of up to 22 of each of the Founder’s Collection NFTs for a total of 308 NFTs. 

Whitelisted wallets were first able to mint in a presale through our website. At that time, we also acquired 154 of the NFTs, a total of 11 complete sets, by minting from the contact. These were set aside for the artists, other project contributors, marketing initiatives, and two full sets for sale on the Rally NFT marketplace. 

One of the features of the Founder’s Collection NFTs is access to the presale for minting an upcoming NFT project. In other words, the NFTs in the first batch also act as mint passes, which provide early presale access to the Niftorian profile picture (PFP) project. That contract is also on Ethereum blockchain, and there will also be ownership snapshots of the Founder’s Collection NFTs prior to the presale launch to determine eligibility. 

In addition, there are other gated access features based on ownership of the Ethereum-based NFTs. That meant we couldn’t just sell the NFTs in the Rally marketplace and provide a commensurate level of utility. 

The solution was to promise two NFTs for the purchase of one. We created an NFT listing through $BOT Coin with two editions of each of the 14 artworks for 28 total available pieces. Buyers would be able to keep their Rally-based NFT in perpetuity. We also committed to sending them an Ethereum ERC-721 NFT of the same design, which would be their verification for Niftorian project activities. 

After the purchase on Rally, we collected Ethereum wallet addresses for the buyers and sent them their ERC-721 NFT. It was not automated, but since it was only 22 transactions, the manual effort was not significant. I would not suggest this approach for hundreds or thousands of NFTs—at a small scale, it worked out fine. 

Things to Consider

We view this approach as a success, as it exposed the Rally Community to the NFTs and offered an easy way to use their RLY holdings to make the acquisition. However, there are some considerations worth evaluating if you plan to do a similar cross-chain project.

Sending NFTs is not free on Ethereum - When you send NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain, you must pay gas fees to the miners. The cost is not as high as minting a new NFT or buying one off a marketplace, but it can be costly. You should factor this into the price you set for your Rally NFT. We set our price at $250 at a time when the Ethereum equivalent listing price was closer to $225. Anyone minting on Ethereum was likely paying well over $300 including gas fees, so we thought it was a good deal. Our actual cost for sending the NFTs was just over $20 each. However, we also had to pay to mint them before sending. We had an efficient solidity contract that enabled batch purchases by our wallet so that added about $13 for each NFT minted. A slightly higher listing price on Ethereum gave us budgetary cushion to cover our NFT minting and transfer gas fees. 

Follow-up can be challenging - We are still waiting on some Ethereum wallet addresses necessary to transfer them their Ethereum blockchain NFTs. Currently, we are holding the ERC-721 NFT in the project wallet. This isn’t a big issue, but it does introduce some risk—we are holding assets we have promised to other people. It would be nice if we could have captured Ethereum wallet addresses at the time of sale but the Rally marketplace doesn’t yet have that functionality. 

Know your audience - Our project didn’t really overlap with the $BOT Coin community base. As a result, we didn’t market it to them. The people who were interested were mostly coin creators and a few others more broadly active in both the Rally and NFT communities. So, we just made the NFT drop known privately to a few people who expressed interest. If you are minting an NFT where the primary audience overlaps with your existing coin holders, this strategy can be even more powerful. 

Manual effort - Our approach for the Niftorian Founder’s Collection was a manual workaround.  It was not automated but since it was only 28 transactions the manual effort was not significant. I would not suggest this approach for hundreds or thousands of NFTs but at a small scale it worked out fine. 

Consider plans for bridging out - The Rally product team has indicated that bridging NFTs from the internal marketplace to the Ethereum blockchain is likely to be a feature in the future. Since it was not imminent, we couldn’t run this simply through Rally with any certainty as to when our collectors would have their Ethereum-based NFT. In addition, it was not clear we would be able to add it to an existing ERC-721 collection anyway. That made our approach logical given our timing and the unknowns. 

However, one more thing to consider is what happens if Rally does enable NFT bridge outs to Ethereum. This development could potentially create a conflict where you are inadvertently adding more items to a fixed-size NFT collection. So, if you take this approach, make sure you have a strategy to assure that the Rally NFT owners cannot unilaterally bridge their NFT to Ethereum, unless you have planned for that eventuality. 

There are many positive elements and successful approaches to using the Rally NFT Marketplace on its own today. We have another project with a community member that is doing just that with BOT Bridge. However, if you need to be on another blockchain for strategic reasons, there are ways to engage your community through the Rally marketplace. 

I am told that $BOT Coin was the first creator coin to sell NFTs on the Rally marketplace with a promise of also providing an equivalent NFT on another blockchain. Others have experimented with integrating Rally Communities with Ethereum NFT projects. Larry Johnson ($LARRY) ran auctions for the right to select mints of Giraffe Tower NFTs and Ryan Manzo ($ADHD) sold Rally NFTs with a promise of cryptocurrency proceeds from the sale of an NFT collection that spans multiple blockchains. There are surely many more ways to leverage Rally NFT infrastructure for projects that have some features on other chains.

If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me anytime. And, best of luck with your NFT project. Carpe Diem.

Trent Winslow is CEO and founder of Voicebot.ai, the leading source of research, data, analysis, and news about conversational AI technologies. He was named Voice AI commentator (2019-21) and analyst of the year (2020-21) by Project Voice. He is also founder of Niftorious.com and the co-founder of artist-centric Niftorian NFT project. Trent earned degrees from UCLA and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.