Double Protocol — Introducing the NFT Rental Infrastructure
What is Double Protocol?
Double Protocol is an NFT rental platform that enables the lending and renting of in-game and in-metaverse NFTs.
You might ask how to transfer the user right without transferring the ownership? How to separate an NFT into several pieces with specific validity periods? These are all crucial for the NFT rental space.
Double introduces a duration NFT called doNFT to the space to achieve these above. For the first time, validity duration is indicated by an NFT.
DoNFT represents NFTs with valid duration. This helps to ensure that the NFT will expire when the rental period ends. Through Double, the market contract mint the doNFT for the renter after they pay the rent. Thus, they are entitled to any further action of the underlying assets.
Take the land rental in Decentraland as an example. You rented an estate for three months, which means the doNFT will expire at a fixed interval. You can build on top of the land during this period or transfer the doNFT to others.
As we all know, NFTs are usually illiquid. With doNFT, NFT owners can now:
- Lend and rent the doNFT on Double’s marketplace,
- Split the doNFT into multiple, smaller duration,
- Merge the doNFT into a more extensive duration.
How Double Works?
Double NFT rental Protocol runs on two primary smart contracts: a “Market” contract and a “doNFT Factory” contract. The factory smart contract adds new NFT contracts to the platform, and the market contract facilitates all NFT renting. Any ERC721-based NFT can be rented in the Double NFT Rental Protocol.
doNFT Factory
When the renter pays his rent, he will receive a doNFT. The doNFT is minted by the doNFT contract, which the doNFT factory creates.
DoNFT is an extension of ERC721, which has a list of duration that contains start time and end time. A duration indicates that the owner of doNFT has the right to use this NFT during this period.
DoNFT can be split into new doNFTs or combined with new doNFT by durations. Any ERC721-based token can be mapped to doNFT by the “doNFT Factory” smart contract.
How does Double compare to other NFT rental protocols?
Ownership Transferring VS User Right Transferring
Many NFT rental protocols will transfer the ownership from the lender to the renter after the deal is done with the condition that the renter pays a lot as collateral even though the renter may not return the rented NFT if the price increases more than they paid.
The Double NFT Rental Protocol takes a different approach, using a doNFT to transfer only the user right. The ownership never needs to be transferred to the renter.
At a very high level, a doNFT replaces the ownership transferring in a collateral model with a doNFT transferring. And the doNFT will have the validity duration on it as the metadata. As you pay the rent of an NFT, you will receive a doNFT with the mapping to the original NFT and the expiration date. When the rental period ends, the doNFT will expire automatically.
With this approach, the lender will no longer be afraid of losing their original NFT, and the renter will never need to pay collateral.
Registry VS doNFT
The second departure from other protocols is the doNFT Factory design of the Double Protocol.
To integrate the rental protocol with partners and other applications, the typical approach usually records the NFT usage rights in the registry, while doNFT has the following advantages over the registry.
- Easy for the partners to read the user information. The doNFT is fully compliant with the ERC-721 standard, and a third party has established a mature on-chain reading process.
- Easy to extend the functionality of the dapp. Take advantage of NFT, and it’s effortless to transfer doNFT through their wallets to enable sublet and reservation functions, etc.
- Easy for others to build on top of the project. Leasing as one of the fundamental infrastructures in NFT finance, there will be many derivatives in the future.
How to use Double NFT Rental Protocol?
Getting started with Double is relatively straightforward. Once you have a wallet and Ether to pay for gas, you can begin.
1. Head to double.one.
2. Click “Enter App” in the middle of the page.
3. Go to “Connect Wallet,” log into your wallet and allow it to connect to Double.
4. The screen will show you all of the lands listed in the market.
5. Select which you’d like to rent, click “Rent,” fill in the rental period you need, and pay the rent.
6. A preview window of the transaction will appear, and you will need to confirm the transaction on your ERC-20 wallet.
7. Wait for the transaction to be added to the Ethereum blockchain. You can check its progress by copying and pasting the transaction ID into https://etherscan.io/. The transaction ID will be available in your wallet by finding the transaction in your sent transaction history.
The Potential Extension of doNFT in the Future
Multi-chain Deployment
The Double NFT renting Protocol is currently built on top of the Ethereum blockchain. But it will expand to other public chains according to where the users are. The first project we support in our official launch is Decentraland. You can now rent (out) a piece of land in Decentraland, and we will support other projects later on.
Multi-finance Derivatives
With Double’s doNFT model, we can now separate the ownership from the user’s rights. What’s more, the user right could be transferred as easily and quickly as transferring an NFT.
In addition to rental, there are various derivatives of leasing — for example, finance leases, hire-purchase leases, leveraged leases, leaseback leases, and subleases.
And doNFT makes them possible.
Multiple Scenarios Adoption
With the design of the Double Protocol’s doNFT model, validity duration is indicated by NFT for the first time.
And this will serve many businesses whose essence is the transfer of the right to use during a specific time.
Apart from the most familiar housing and land rental, Double’s doNFT can be used in sharing economy (Airbnb, Uber), subscription services (Spotify, Netflix), licensing services (Disney), and many other scenarios.
Connect with us and join our amazing community:
Website: https://double.one/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DoubleProtocol
Discord: https://discord.gg/8MNtaMEENf
GitHub: https://github.com/emojidao/double-contract
