Zora is about to launch their new protocol, which aims to improve on the ERC721 token standard. One of its new features is the coupling of a market contract to an NFT. This means that every zNFT (Zora NFT) has a canonical marketplace for trading. This solves the problem of fragmented liquidity for the trading of NFTs.

By "fragmented liquidity", I'm referring to the problem where there isn't a single, logical place to go to buy an NFT (e.g. digital art), and so trading happens in a number of different storefronts. This leads to a number of inefficiencies! If everyone were just trading in the same marketplace, then you could deploy a single contract for each NFT type, and have everyone trade on very efficient layer-2s, and have it all conform to the same metadata standards.

We (the team at Mirror) proposed to Zora that we build a crowdfunding contract for NFTs, and integration with their protocol. I wrote up a prototype smart contract for this purpose, which you can view here.

The flow is summarized in the following diagram, and I also walked through the contract on today's livestream on YouTube (link).