Fractional Art - trade fractions of NFTs

The craze for Non-Fungible Tokens, or NFTs, has grown exponentially in the last few years. Everyone from influencers, athletes, and celebrities to giant media houses participated in the NFT game to make it even more popular.

As popularity grew, more people want to get into the NFT game and collect them. Since every NFT is unique and cannot be replicated, we are limited in what we can do with NFTs. This increases the demand for iconic, rare, and high-value NFTs.

This led to looking for ways so that more people can own NFTs. And a concept of fractionalizing NFTs was innovated. In today’s blog, let’s discuss Fractional NFTs and dive deep into Fractional.art, a platform that allows collective ownership and governance of NFTs.

First, let’s understand what fractional NFTs are.

What Are Fractional NFTs

The concept of a fractional NFT is very simple. The original NFT is split into multiple smaller fractions allowing more than one person to claim its ownership.

The NFT is fractionalized using a smart contract that generates a defined number of tokens linked to the indivisible original token. These tokens give each holder a percentage of ownership. The ownership can later be traded or exchanged on secondary markets. The owners of such fractioned tokens are called fractional owners.

Fractional owners take on all of the benefits and losses related to the NFT. They share their income, rights, and access with other fractional owners. If the value of the original NFT increases, fractional owners make a profit. Similarly, if the value decreases, they face a loss.

What is Fractional.art

Fractional.art is an Ethereum-based fractionalization protocol that provides collective ownership and governance of NFTs. NFT holders can create tokenized fractional ownership of their NFTs.

The tokens work in the same way as standard ERC20 or ERC1155 tokens. This enables governance of the NFT to be implemented.

Fractional.art makes it simple to purchase and own a piece of an NFT. This has two major advantages:

1. Users who have previously priced themselves out of specific NFTs or artists can now purchase a piece of their work.
2. The original curator can gain some liquidity from their asset without having to sell the entire piece.

Fractional allows you to split an NFT and include it in a vault. These split NFTs are ERC20 tokens with a limited supply. You can then list these tokens on the DEX pool and begin a 'live swap'. You can also put numerous NFTs into an Index ERC271 basket token.

These fractions are bought by other individuals and become a fractional owner of the specific NFT.

Features

Both NFT owners and fractional owners benefit from fractionalizing original NFTs. Let’s discuss the main features of the platform.

• Accessibility - A wide variety of NFs are available for everyone to collect. You can become a partial owner of collectible NFTs you otherwise could not afford.
• Freedom - You are free to do anything with your NFT fractions. Adding them to the underlying NFT to a digital gallery and delivering to contest winners, selling or trading them in external markets, just to name a few.
• Diversity - Deliver imaginative distribution events and novel post-purchase community experiences for your fraction owners.
• Creativity - You can choose from various iconic digital art collections. This will make your NFT portfolio unique and creative.

How does it work

An NFT owner can have a single NFT or a basket of NFTs in his wallet. They can set up an NFT Vault on the platform to keep their NFTs (either single or the basket of NFTs). In exchange, the vault will give the owner 100% of the fractional ownership tokens.

The NFT Owner is free to do whatever they want with the fractions received against their NFT. For instance, sell them in a Dutch auction, add liquidity to Sushiswap, or give them to frens. Fraction owners have collective ownership of the locked-up NFT.

An auction starts when a buyer appears and wants to buy fractions. The buyer must send ETH  that is greater than or equal to the asset's reserve price. After the auction, the winner receives the NFT, and fraction owners can claim the ETH paid.

How to Use Fractional Art?

Enough of explaining about the platform, protocol, and its working. Let’s get our hands dirty and see how to fractionalize our NFTs with Fractional.art.

We won’t be going into detail as its blog is well-maintained and explains everything nicely.

Fractionalizing NFTs

Follow these steps to make fractions of your NFTs:

1. Navigate to fractional.art and connect your wallet.
2. Select the NFTs you want to fractionalize. Then set their name, supply, symbol, reserve price, and annual management fees. This will create a vault.
3. Mint the NFT basket. You need to approve the NFT basket and then each individual NFT. Once done, you can fractionalize your NFTs.
4. The vault is created when the fractionalization transaction is confirmed.
5. Make changes to the vault or redeem your NFTs by going to the Settings & Actions section.

You can find the whole tutorial on fractionalizing NFTs here.

What after fractionalization?

You have all the fractionalized ERC-20 tokens in your wallet. You are free to do anything you want! Here is what you can do to get its full benefit:

• Send them to your frens!
• Airdrop them to community members.
• Provide liquidity to a decentralized exchange.

Fractional has a wonderful blog on this topic as well. Make sure you read it before doing anything crazy.

New Horizons!

Fractional rebranded itself to Tessera a few months ago**.** Tessera is a platform where people can come together and own the world’s most sought after digital collectibles. It allows unique ownership and governance experiences via a hand-curated selection of NFTs.

Tessera is a topic for another blog that we will publish some other day (Stay tuned by subscribing to our newsletter). But here is what you need to know about Fractional from now onwards:

1. Fractional.art remains a destination to explore, manage and discover existing vaults and vaulted collections.
2. Users can vote on the reserve price of their vaults. Someone can still buy them if the owner doesn't want to own their fractions.
3. There won’t be any more updates to the platform.
4. Eventually, the platform’s front end will be made unavailable. However, contracts and vaults will continue to exist.
5. The fractionalize feature, along with an option to create a vault, will be discontinued. However, anyone will be able to fractionalize directly via the smart contract.

We haven’t covered the nitty-gritty aspects of these new changes. Fractional has already done it for us!