Last updated on: 24 March 2022

<aside> 👉 Key Takeaways

• NFTs are going to tokenize the world - we’re very early. Gaming will be the first massive break-out vertical and is Immutable’s core focus right now.
• However, it is extremely difficult to build a high quality, utility-driven NFT project like a game - the purpose of Immutable X is to solve the challenges these projects face (e.g. scale, cost, UX), and allow them to create strong, long-term liquidity for their assets
• We monetize liquidity: every time a trade or transaction takes place, Immutable and the $IMX token receive a fee. This aligns the incentives of projects, Immutable and token holders perfectly - more protocol volume is fantastic for all participants
• Over time, we will be distributing the majority of the $IMX supply to the community by issuing grants or rewards to projects, marketplaces, tools and users who are contributing additional growth, liquidity and volume to the protocol. </aside>

NFTs are going to tokenize the world—we’re early into a $1T+ market

Video games alone is a $200 billion industry and is expected to grow roughly 10% a year between 2021 and 2025. It’s larger than the movie and music industries combined.

Each year, players spend more than $100 billion on in-game assets, such as unique character skins, items and exclusive unlockable content. This content is a fantastic opportunity for tokenization: every one of these assets would be more valuable to players if it were represented by an NFT.

Everything which is unique and tradable, including artworks, in-game assets and title to physical goods, can eventually be represented as public blockchain NFTs. Digital content, such as videos, songs or images can be tokenized into provably scarce digital collectables, enabling a new type of creator-audience relationship.

Unique physical commodities such as diamonds, rare metals, and property like real estate or sneakers can also be tokenized into NFTs. As NFTs, these assets would be tradable on a globally liquid market, and able to plug into all the tooling built for trading NFTs (e.g. rentals, derivatives, exchanges, wallets).

NFTs will penetrate the mainstream through gaming, and we look forward to helping bring the next 100 million people to mint & trade NFTs.

The current NFT market is broken; Immutable X’s global orderbook is the best solution

NFTs are mostly traded in marketplaces. Currently, NFT marketplaces are:

• Big, broad aggregators like OpenSea or LooksRare
• Next generation NFT marketplaces like Fractal or Gamestop are targeting a subset of NFT traders (e.g. gamers)
• Emerging ‘native’ marketplaces like NBA TopShot specifically for particular types of NFTs or in-game marketplaces

New NFT marketplaces are constantly launched. Every one of these has created separate orderbooks which creates “order fragmentation” — as listings only show up on their originating marketplace, each marketplace’s orders can only be filled by users of that marketplace. There might be dozens of people across the NFT ecosystem who’d pay your asking price — but if none of them use your marketplace, your NFT will never sell. This fragmentation results in a substantial drop in the overall liquidity of your NFTs.

https://twitter.com/DCLBlogger/status/1504607911884234752?s=20&t=imI-aSGj7IyGIB-AIaZf9g

Our solution is simple: build a global protocol-level orderbook for Immutable X.

A protocol-level orderbook means any orders which are created anywhere on the Immutable X protocol are immediately visible on any IMX-integrated marketplace. Our goal is to build an ecosystem where hundreds of niche and native marketplaces can co-exist with larger, aggregating marketplaces. A great example of this is GUDecks, a Gods Unchained deck builder which allows you to instantly copy and buy popular decks — an awesome contextual experience which is only possible with external order flow.

Without Immutable X, NFT marketplaces suffer from “Order Fragmentation”

Powered by Immutable X, NFT marketplaces benefit from exponentially greater liquidity

The Immutable X orderbook launched with the protocol in mid-2021, though this is the first time we’ve written about it in blog form. To date, more than 20 million orders have been created in the Immutable X orderbook, and there are currently more than 5 million active NFT listings. The orderbook already services more than 150,000 API requests every minute, and we are in the process of adding some of the largest NFT marketplaces in the world (launched and unlaunched) to this liquidity pool. For example, NFTs listed on Immutable X Marketplace appears on Mintable and Tokentrove and vice versa.

For emerging marketplaces, and for native experiences, the protocol orderbook is clearly beneficial — the hardest problem to solve is bootstrapping liquidity, and being able to show your users orders which originated elsewhere is crucial. Existing marketplaces may be initially resistant to the idea of sharing orders with other marketplaces. However, when you allow other marketplaces to fill your orders, you gain access to the combined user base of all of those marketplaces. Vastly more potential buyers will mean vastly more trades, with the incremental volume likely far exceeding the fees you’re sacrificing by not requiring orders to be filled on your marketplace.