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Ecosystem
February 22, 2022
Partner Spotlight: Flowty unlocks financial utility for NFTs
Guest
Partner Spotlight: Flowty unlocks financial utility for NFTs

This is a guest post from the flowty team.

Welcome to flowty! 

Flowty is a peer-to-peer (P2P) collateralized NFT lending marketplace focused exclusively on Flow blockchain-based NFTs. Flowty was founded by three NFT collectors who have been active members of the Flow community since NBA Top Shot’s closed beta: Michael Levy (https://twitter.com/mbl267_NFT), Austin Kline (https://twitter.com/austin_flowty), and Guillaume Huot (https://twitter.com/Ars0nic). 

What is Flowty and How Does the Platform Improve the Creator and Collector Experience on Flow?

As passionate NFT collectors ourselves, we are excited to bring you a platform that can greatly enhance the collector and creator experience on Flow. Our goal is to build a comprehensive and user-friendly platform that offers ecosystem participants the opportunity to unlock greater utility for their NFTs. 

Our P2P lending marketplace provides services to two key cohorts of ecosystem participants: Borrowers and Lenders

Borrowers are NFT owners who need or want to unlock liquidity. Instead of being forced to sell assets, Borrowers can secure short-term loans using their idle NFTs as collateral. There are a number of situations in which a Borrower may prefer to take out a loan rather than sell an asset, including market illiquidity, tax planning, sentimental value of assets and more. Read more on why a collector may want to secure a short-term loan here.

Lenders are ecosystem participants who are interested in generating a return on capital by leveraging their NFT expertise and experience to identify loan listings to fund. Flowty may appeal to investors who want financial exposure to NFTs but are not comfortable with the risk of buying and selling NFTs. For these investors, lending against NFTs can provide a different risk-reward proposition. Read more on some strategies that may be helpful for Lenders as they navigate the flowty Marketplace here.

We have been hard at work to expand our suite of services, tools and features well-beyond the current P2P lending marketplace to further enhance the collector and creator experience on Flow. We believe that NFTs, like traditional asset classes (stocks, art, real estate, physical collectibles, etc), can and should be used as versatile financial instruments. Flowty is at the forefront of bringing the financialization of NFTs to reality. 

If you would like to learn more, we published a number of posts on our Medium that further detail flowty and our vision. 

Meet our Team

Michael Levy (Co-Founder and CEO; Twitter)

Mike is a finance professional who has been in crypto since 2017. He discovered NBA Top Shot and NFTs in September 2020 and fell in love. Mike was a moderator in the Top Shot discord, has one of the larger collections on Top Shot and has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, CNBC, CNN Business and more discussing NFTs. He has been accused of being a “Flow maxi” many times and is the proud owner of NFTs from Genies, ICC Fancraze, NFL All Day, UFC Strike, Ballerz, Versus, Hoodlums, Matrix World, Eternal, Sports Icon, Sports Fantastec and more Flow collections.  

Austin Kline (Co-Founder and CTO; Twitter)

Austin is a full-stack developer who has been in crypto and NFTs since 2017. He was a member of the fan panel that participated in many of the formative decisions and designs for NBA Top Shot and has a significant Top Shot account. Prior to co-founding flowty, Austin worked at Microsoft, Amazon and OpenSea. 

Guillaume Huot (Co-Founder and Advisor; Twitter)

Guillaume is a web-designer and blockchain expert who has been in crypto since 2015. He is the owner of a top 25 Top Shot account and famously has collected 1,000 Series 1 Cody Zeller NBA Top Shot moments. Guillaume is also one of the largest collectors of non-Top Shot Flow NFTs, with a strong portfolio of Ben Mauro Evolution, Versus art, and much more. In addition to collecting NFTs, Guillaume is a generative NFT artist with two Art Blocks collections; Unigrids and Beatboxes. 

We are proud and excited to be building on Flow – so much so that our company name starts with “Flow.” We also published a Medium post describing why we built on Flow in September 2021 (note: the post predates our CTO Austin joining the team). The key reasons we outlined were as follows:

  • Flow was purpose-built to handle enormous transaction volume and to be accessible to mainstream users, with a much easier learning curve than other chains and user-friendly payment onramps
  • The Flow and Dapper Labs teams are best-in-class
  • Flow is the blockchain of the future
  • There are world-class brands with incredibly powerful IP building on Flow
  • Financial backing from some of the smartest and most well-connected investors

We think the following quote is highly applicable to Flow:

“I skate where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” - Wayne Gretzky

Where to find us

Flowty Website

Twitter

Discord

Medium