Introducing Rightshare — Easy Leasing and Trustless Collaboration for NFTs

Note: This article was originally published in Lendroid’s blog site on Apr 17, 2020.

Rightsharing opens up a range of possibilities for NFTs. For the first time, you can share access to your NFT without giving up ownership.

Say you have an NFT. You can either hold it, transfer it or sell it. If you want to share access to it, you will need to transfer the NFT, which means you don’t own it anymore.

Say you want to ‘experience’ an NFT. The only way to do it is to buy one, or if someone trusts you enough to transfer it to you.

With Rightshare, you can now share access of an NFT — conditional, and with an expiry period — without giving up ownership.

Tokenizing Ownership and Access

The idea is to preserve or ‘freeze’ ownership for a duration and allow access in the ‘interim’. The most elegant way to make this happen is by tokenizing ownership and access separately.

It’s a simple smart contract function, and feels like you’re messing about in a familiar browser-based place like OpenSea.

Let’s imagine you have a cryptovoxels parcel you want to lease to someone for a month. Here’s how it works –

Step 1 — You go to https://rightshare.lendroid.com (live on the mainnet within a week)

Step 2 — At the click of a button, you deposit your parcel in a smart contract. When you do, you freeze your access rights to the parcel and create two new ‘Rights Tokens’

• Frozen Rights or fRights — You set an expiry date and ‘freeze’ ownership to the land parcel until then. On expiry, the holder of fRights can unfreeze the NFT that represents the land parcel. Remember ‘freezing’ ownership? That’s what’s happening here.
• Interim Rights or iRights — Until the expiry, anyone who holds iRights can be given access to the land parcel. Access in the ‘interim’, basically.

Now the fRights and the iRights are not some strange new tokens. They too are NFTs. Transferable, and can be bought and sold.

Exclusive and Non-Exclusive Rightsharing

The example above is exclusive Rightsharing. Much like renting out a house. Either the owner has access, or the tenant does. The ‘ownership’ is locked away in a contract until the terms expire.

But what about collaborations? What if you wanted to have guests over with the same privileges that you do? What if you want an interior decorator to do up your house? They would need unrestricted access and you would too. Do you sign the house over to them? Wouldn’t it be easier to simply generate more iRights — keep one with you and share the other(s).

Here’s what non-exclusive access looks like –

And voila, trust-independent collaboration is achieved.

You can try it today

Rightsharing is live on Rinkeby right now. You can check it out, play with it and see what’s what. Or you could dig into our mainnet version, out in a week. You can read about it at Rightshare.Lendroid.com and talk to us about it on our discord channel.

The smart contracts are have been fully audited by Quantstamp and we’re rather pleased with the report. We’ll share it soon. For those kindred tech spirits among you, our repositories are freshly stocked and available at our github repository.

Some cool possibilities

It’s the most rewarding feeling — buidling something that is useful now. We floated the idea of Rightsharing a couple of weeks ago, and the response was pure, un-cynical warmth. It almost felt like early crypto days, a vibe that seems to be exclusive in the NFT space today.

There is a nice interesting road ahead for Rightshare and we some shiny milestones on the way –

• Leasing — You saw the examples. Considering how fast Metaverse is growing and how quickly land parcels are being gobbled up, leasing will open up these worlds of wonder to so many more people.
• Serious Collaboration — No longer bound by familiarity or trust, you can collaborate with artists or architects across the skill spectrum. Imagine a large art gallery, thrown open to a new breed of artists, none of whom needs to own the space.
• Digital Rights — This is close to our heart. Say you created a work of art, or own Banksta. You own the token to have and hold, for some future value. And meanwhile, haver very little control over who uses it and how. Shouldn’t you be able to control access, and if you want, monetise it? In the metaverse, only those who hold iRights to your art — either sold or given by you, should be able to display the art.
• Advertising — A logical extension of leasing, an idea we picked up from Andrew Steinwold’s interview with Trislit.

Talk to us

We’d love to know what you think of the idea, and also to chat and share cool NFT stories. The best place to reach us is our Discord channel. Also tweet at us, @lendroidproject.

Note: This article was originally published in Lendroid’s blog site on Apr 17, 2020.