Yiedl Announces Marketplace for NFT Rentals and Mortgages

Tokyo-based crypto startup Yiedl has announced that it will launch a non-custodial peer-to-peer, or P2P, mortgage and rental market for non-fungible tokens, or NFTs.

Speaking to Cointelegraph, Yiedl founder and chief executive Kohshi Shiba asserted that the platform will support a myriad of tokens as most real-world assets are tokenized.

“For assets that have persistent external utility, I believe NFT is an appropriate token form,” Shiba stated, listing subscription rights, decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO, memberships, and intellectual property rights, and in-game items as examples of assets that will see increasing tokenization.

Yiedl to facilitate NFT-collateralized mortgages

Yiedl will comprise a P2P marketplace in which users propose their preferred lending or rental terms.

When another user fills the order, Shiba stated that “the agreement is set on Yiedl protocol and [the] transaction occurs,” — with access to the leased NFT being provided following the receipt of initial rent.

If a loan repayment is not met on time, the NFT is automatically returned to its owner, with the entire process taking place without intermediaries.

“I believe Yiedl opens up a new horizon for the NFT ecosystem, and there will be massive new NFT owners in the future,” said Shiba. “Owning NFT will also become an investment since Yiedl enabled NFT owners to earn passive income with their assets.”

Yiedl develops modified ERC-721 token standard

To facilitate the platform, Yiedl created a modified version of the ERC-721 standard that has been made available as open-source for other developers to adopt, dubbed ERC-X.

Shiba stated that the new toke standard “added two user classes to the existing ERC-721 standard” in the form of “user and lien.”

“The idea behind it is that by supporting three user classes as default, application developers can assume that tokens can be rent[ed] out or collateralized,” said Shiba. “With ERC-721, it was impossible, and it caused difficulties when NFT owners rent/collateralize NFTs as the ownership is taken over by the contract address or tenant.”

NFT sector gains traction

Many companies are betting that NFTs will emerge as a leading use-case for crypto assets, with blockchain gaming and asset tokenization promising to expose distributed ledger technology, or DLT, to wider audiences.

However, it is still early days for the NFT sector in terms of infrastructure, with a surprise auction for a limited run of CryptoKitties leading to the Winklevoss-backed top NFT marketplace Nifty experiencing downtime last week.