2021 has undoubtedly been the year of non-fungible tokens (NFT). After turning investors’ heads on Ethereum (ETH), the NFT ecosystem has been growing on other blockchains, such as Polygon (MATIC) or the Binance Smart Chain (BSC).
Aavegotchis: ghosts to collect
On July 14, 2020, the Aave project surprised the entire crypto sphere by unveiling its homegrown NFT project: the Aavegotchis.
These are scalable NFTs hosted on the Polygon blockchain. Like most NFTs, the physical attributes of these little ghosts are randomly generated. They also have a rarity score, which can be improved by earning experience points as well as by equipping their Aavegotchi with items.
6 months after the launch of these NFT, the project unveiled a marketplace for buying and selling NFT called Aavegotchi Baazaar. Since then, it has become the leading NFT platform on Polygon, with over $10.9 million in sales as of September 2021.
Aavegotchis set sail on Ethereum
On October 4, Aavegotchis teams announced the launch of a bridge between Polygon and Ethereum, in partnership with NFT marketplace Rarible.
Aavegotchi launching Polygon and Ethereum bridge partnership Rarible
Announcing the launch of the bridge between Polygon and Ethereum
In practice, this bridge allows users to send their valuable Aavegotchis to Ethereum, specifically on Rarible.
“One of our main goals at Rarible is to make sure our vibrant community has access to all the amazing things happening in the space. Given the growing popularity of the ‘play-to-earn’ model and the hype around Aavegotchi ghosts, it made perfect sense to partner with Aavegotchi and offer their cutting-edge NFTs to the Ethereum ecosystem en masse for the very first time.”
Alex Salnikov, co-founder of Rarible
To celebrate the partnership and the arrival of Aavegotchis on its platform, Rarible is offering a 3x increase in RARI rewards for any user who buys or sells Aavegotchis in the next 2 weeks.
Thanks to this new partnership, Rarible hopes to attract new users to its platform, to finally catch up with the leader OpenSea. Indeed, until now, OpenSea is the platform that has most benefited from the craze around NFTs. By attracting new trendy NFTs, the newcomer could well succeed in reducing the gap.
The arrival of Aavegotchis could unfortunately turn out to be bad news for Ethereum. Indeed, for several weeks the chain has been suffering from a major congestion, whose main culprits are none other than the NFTs. Let’s hope that the hype around the arrival of Aavegotchis does not lead to a new increase in transaction fees.
