Last Wednesday we hosted a Rarible Protocol Fireside chat at RARI Foundation Twitter page. Eugene Nacu and Kevin Noessler from the Protocol’s product team shared some foundational facts about the Protocol, as well as exciting insights with the community.

We put together the key takeaways:

1. How Rarible Protocol started and how it works

Rarible Protocol originally started as the infrastructure for Rarible marketplace – and quickly become something more. It is a foundational layer for NFT applications that enable users to exchange, transfer and mint NFTs. In other words, it’s an open-source, free and community-governed NFT Protocol for web3 experiences.

An important part of the Protocol is an API layer, providing access to data all these projects needs, as well as an SDK that enables to work with a wallet.

2. Rarible Protocol ecosystem is growing rapidly – with constant support from the Protocol team

Several major brands have recently launched their community marketplaces on the Protocol, including Mattel – a major entertainment company behind Barbie and Hot Wheels.

These projects takes months to prepare, and it’s never just over and done with when the launch happens: Rarible Protocol team continues to do extensive maintenance and support work behind the scenes.

3. Creating an API key is one of the best ways to support Rarible Protocol

The end goal of the Rarible Protocol is abstract the complexity and be close to the user. To better serve the community, Protocol team rolled out API keys to understand what end points are being called the most and what applications require more bandwidth.

If you are using Rarible Protocol, one the best ways to help improve the infrastructure is to create your own dedicated key. To do it, simply head over to Rarible Protocol and press the “Get an API key” button.

It only takes two minutes and helps the team have better insights and improve the experience accordingly.

4. Future improvements (and ideas)

An exciting new feature Rarible Protocol team is currently working on is a credit card check out 💳 🎉

Future improvements the team would like to see are built-in analytics and having Protocol used in wallets more (it allows to add NFT functionality easily and add monetization through fee structure.

5. Moving towards decentralization, one step at a time

Currently, all the development is still done by the Rarible Protocol team. The end goal, however, is to have it fully community-driven and community-governed. Work packages are potentially a good way to start having some of the development tasks outsourced to the community.

A big part of this process is community participation in the governance process. Check out this article for the basic information on how you can get your veRARI to get started:

6. Funding is available to projects built on Rarible Protocol

RARI Foundation has a treasury that can (and does!) allocate funding to innovative projects building on the Rarible Protocol. A great example is a Rarible Twitter Bot built with Rarible Protocol API.

This article takes breaks down the application process: