Sharky 🩈 — #1 NFT-lending protocol ($SHARK application for LFG)

LFG Introductions
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Disclaimer

We love cats and space travel. Cats are ameowzing :cat:

How did you get to today, and what do you want to do next?

Sharky — as the name hints — started as an idea to bring more freedom to the loan market based on the rising field of digital assets and the power of community in peer-to-peer economies.

Riding on the core ethos of crypto as the democratization of capital, we built a product that people love to use. Allowing people to collateralize their NFTs to obtain quick loans in a frictionless way has catapulted Sharky to the #1 NFT lending protocol on Solana, and made our brand one of the most recognizable ones today.

Here is a quick overview of our achievements thus far:

  • Facilitated 95% of all NFT loans on Solana in the past 2 years by volume in SOL.
  • We were the first escrow-less protocol in the world and helped the ecosystem shape the “freezing” feature as it stands today.
  • Maintained 70-90% of market share for over 1.5 years.
  • Distributed ~18,000 SOL (!) to our NFT community and helped lenders earn ~450,000 SOL in interest payments since our inception.
  • We generated $1.2M in revenue in 2023 alone and are on track to 3x it this year.
  • We are one of the top-performing NFT collections in the space - sharx, with 750k SOL trading volume. Recently we’ve reached ATH in USDC value for our NFTs.
  • Sharky already has one of the most successful tokenomics and Revenue Reward systems in the space. It has been sustainably working for over a year, retaining our users and bringing in new ones.
  • We have successfully acquired two teams, from both natively Solana and Ethereum.
  • We have played a key role in ensuring a stable ecosystem and educated user base through assisting with the unwind of widely used infrastructure teams and even wrote the guide for the ecosystems migration to pNFTs (more on this below)
  • We grew faster than almost any protocol on Solana from Q3 of 2022 til Q3 of 2023

So what’s ahead?

We have the ambition to become the liquidity layer across protocols and chains. Think PayPal or Affirm of Web3 by facilitating lending and mortgages for any p2p transaction.

Be that degen NFTs, collectible watches, buying things on future eBay of web3, or taking a loan against your car or a house. But instead of being a bank, we are committed to embracing the true nature of crypto - building peer-to-peer economies at scale.

Describe your project in 5 sentences.

Sharky is the #1 NFT lending and financing protocol on Solana. It is also the first escrow-less lending protocol in the world. We pioneered the order-book model that allows lenders to compete for borrowers. Currently, we hold the world record on the total number of loans given against NFTs as collateral.

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(Comparison of Sharky’s total loans given with other largest NFT-lending protocols on ETH. Compared to ETH since it is currently a bigger market that existed for longer.)

Our Team

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Anton (Restuta)
CEO and Co-Founder, Product/Engineering, UX
(likes cats and bunnies)

LinkedIn | GitHub | Twitter

Co-founded 2 successful startups before (Apination and Toast). Over 16 years of experience in building products and teams. Worked as Principal Engineer and Head of Engineering in various early-stage startups (BuildingConnected, DivvyHomes, JuniLearning). Built and managed teams of 10-30 engineers. He has extensive experience in real estate, engineering productivity, and education. Loves building products and teams. He turned down CTO roles in trad-tech to pursue building infra for NFTs and the metaverse. He likes to brag about investing in Ethereum early (and subsequently selling too early). Anton was immersed in crypto through multiple bull and bear markets and is excited to bring new product standards to Web3.

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Biba
CMO, Growth, Marketing
(used to do boxing, also a licensed therapist)
LinkedIn | Twitter
Startup founder, 3 sold companies, cofounder at Infinity, previously Head of Growth at Kriptomat, Head of Growth at GameCredits, cofounder at KickAssGrowth, founder at BookABoat. 12+ years of Growth and Product Marketing experience, mentor at many startup accelerators and incubators, early crypto adopter, and advisor to multiple crypto projects including NFTs, gaming, and DeFi. Helped 2 ICOs raise over $50M each during the ICO era, and some smaller ICOs to raise $10M-$30M.

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Jake
COO, Partnerships & Business Development
(was run over by a truck and walked himself to the ambulance)
LinkedIn | Twitter
With over a decade in the Digital asset space, Jake has consulted non-profits, VCs, and companies at various stages regarding the use of blockchain technology. His exceptional expertise across chains has allowed him to speak alongside those like James Altucher, Congressman Warren Davidson, and Jimmy Song. As COO, Jake provides this insight to continuously improve the organization.

More here: https://team.sharky.loans

Jupiter Ecosystem and Sharky

We have always been a user and supporter of Jupiter, Meteora, and related products. Many of our users over the last few months have utilized Sharky loans to increase their liquidity & use it across several of Jupiter’s products.

In the future, we plan to integrate JUP swaps natively into Sharky’s core product along with our future token portal.

We also plan to actively participate in all $JUP governing activities and hold a significant allocation of $JUP as part of our treasury.

Partners

Sharky partners and friends are all over the Solana ecosystem. Next to Jupiter, we are partners with MagicEden, Tensor, Phantom, Solflare, Backpack, Hellomoon, Helius, Metaplex, Solscan, Solana.fm and 450+ NFT collections listed on Sharky. A lot of Solana products are built on top of Sharky, like Wolf Capital, Lender Labs, Texture, etc.

Our early investors are Big Brain Holdings, Token Ventures, Monke Ventures and other VCs and angels who supported us on the way to the top.

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Ecosystem Contributions

We are proud of our initiative regarding pNFTs release when we helped get together all Solana devs and NFT collections to organize the release of pNFTs as smoothly as possible together with the Metaplex team.

You can find more about it in this tweet:
https://twitter.com/SharkyFi/status/1618040105519968257

We also helped Cardinal’s team to transition off the ecosystem. We are part of many DAOs and communities helping shape Solana NFT and NFTfi space at large.

TGE Details

Ticker: $HARK
Total Supply: 100,000,000
TGE Date: 3rd or 4th week of March 2024 (depending on CEXes approvals)

Vision Category

If your project were to succeed, how would it fundamentally change the web3 space?

We will have a future where lending and borrowing happens mostly p2p. Where you don’t need to go to a bank to take a loan and incentive systems are built not to extract capital from you as a borrower, but rather to give you the best terms the current market of decentralized lenders can offer. A world where access to capital is readily available and people can tap into the value of the assets they own without delay.

What would you say is your biggest challenges or obstacles as a project?

Growth of the space overall. Our team is exceptional at growing within our area, but we need the crypto space to grow as well. It’s a common challenge for all of us, but Sharky is truly limited only by that.

What advice would you give to another team launching a token in web3?

Don’t do it
 unless you feel like you are doing it for the right reasons – to build community and incentive systems to attract new users and retain existing ones. Until you have a clear plan and ethical framework in mind – don’t just follow the trends. And if you do decide to launch a token – make sure you and your team answer “yes” to – “Would you buy and hold this token?” because of its utility and not just speculative nature.

Well, unless you are launching a meme-coin, then you just call it $MEOW and space cadets will take it to the moon! :cat::rocket::full_moon:

What is something most tokens get wrong, and what steps are you taking to ensure that you won’t experience these pitfalls?

Most teams work very hard to pump the token and focus 90% of their efforts on the initial launch. It’s funny, but team energy and efforts often follow the typical post-release price curve:

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This happens for a variety of reasons including just natural fading of interest and passion. We are building long-term incentives internally to keep going, before, during, and after TGE. Our token is our main asset and this has to be a cultural thing first and a token with good utility next.

We can talk all day about utilities and typical flaws in tokenomics, but there are numerous examples of meme-tokens that reached massive success while having no utility and no meaningful tokenomics. We believe it’s because:

Culture eats strategy for breakfast.

So we are here to ensure that $HARK and $JUP start with great culture and community followed by world-class utility.

Appendix

Thank you for considering Sharky for LGF, and well
 LFG :fire:

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Beautiful post.

Also I had no idea sharky was responsible for 95% of loan volume on SOL NFTs, that’s crazy.

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:heart_hands: thank you, yeah it was like 99% at some point and now it’s trending towards 80%, but the total volume in 22-23 was pretty crazy

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Hi Sharky team, excited to have you guys here, been using your dapp for a while now. Probably one of the most useful dapp on Solana ecosystem. But I do have a question on your proposal.

Okay maybe I’m little bit ignorant in this space but how exactly are you planning to do this? Are you going to physically take away someone’s car if they don’t repay the loan?

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I would like to see more details on the tokenomics, as this will often make or break a project. The total supply figure is not useful information by itself; ultimately what matters is the % that will be sold as part of the launch, the % that is allocated to the team and investors, the price that investors are getting on their tokens, vesting schedules, etc.

Regarding the total loans infographics, I think it would be more useful to see total volume. Total loans can be gamed by splitting a loan into smaller parts, but this isn’t possible for volume. To be clear, I’m not claiming Sharky is gaming anything (it doesn’t have to be Sharky who does the splitting); I’m just saying we should use metrics that are unmanipulable as possible for our evaluations to be as objective as possible. Volume is simply more meaningful in this context.

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Thank you for your response. Regarding your comment on total vs volume – sure, all metrics can be gamed. Volume is one of the easiest. (0% fees, 1M dollar loans from private network and etc)

You can verify our loans on-chain and we can help with this if you have doubts. We don’t have any ability to split loans and never gamed numbers in any way.

Regarding volume, we posted this number above - around 90-95% of all loans by volume on Solana were facilitated by Sharky. At different times of the market last year, we were doing 60% daily volume (denominated to USDC) compared to all ETH protocols combined. Now markets are very different (especially with 0% interest loans farmed on Blend). You can see ETH aggregated dash here:
https://dune.com/impossiblefinance/nft-lending-aggregated-dash

But since Blend’s farming, those numbers are extra inflated and it’s much harder to compare.

While Sharky gave 11000 SOL in loans in the last 24h, so (1.2M in current prices)

We picked “total number of loans” because it much better reflects consumer demand. We don’t believe larger loans are better than smaller ones. There are people for whom borrowing $50 is as meaningful as borrowing $5000 for somebody else. Sharky has more daily active wallets than any ETH protocol and it’s reflected in those stats as well. We just wanted to highlight the size of consumer demand vs somewhat “whale-skewed” demand on other protocols.

Regarding the tokenomics - you are completely right, there is a lot of missing information here, we just followed the format suggested by $JUP team and this post went through their review before posting. I think this is probably not a grat “forum” for nuanced tokenomics discussion. We are also not yet ready to provide that information publicly, it could hurt certain social activities and launch mechanics, but I am happy to clarify this in DM and help you understand our approach to the launch much better.

Just drop a dm for me on twitter https://twitter.com/Restuta

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Hey, thank you for the kind words :heart: !

Okay maybe I’m little bit ignorant in this space but how exactly are you planning to do this? Are you going to physically take away someone’s car if they don’t repay the loan?

You are not ignorant and it’s a really good question. The analogy I like to give is that if you shop at IKEA or eBay, you can typically finance the product you are trying to buy. E.g. get a couch now, but pay over 6 months in installments. Typically those kinds of “payment plans” are handled by a 3rd party. In the case of IKEA it was Affirm and in the case of eBay it’s PayPal (which is owned by eBay, but web2 tends to like monopolies). So we want to be PayPal or Affier of web3. It’s ambitious, but YOLO :person_shrugging: :slight_smile:

In other words, we are not going to tokenize cars or watches, somebody else will do so (e.g. our partner https://watches.io/) and we will be the “liquidity layer” allowing consumers to take a loan against those tokenized assets or buy them with a custom payment plan (aka mortgage).

And just to shine some light - if somebody is tokenizing watches or cars, they would typically partner up with a 3rd party custodian or even a network of such, and those would guarantee the handling of assets in escrow. As you can imagine reliance on those custodians is not a very decentralized process, and. that is one of the biggest issues with consumer asset tokenization currently.

Hope this helps.

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Thanks! Makes sense. Will the tokenomics information be made public before it’s time for the community to vote on the next project to be launched through LFG?

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After reading this, I’m confident Sharky launching with LFG is the right move. Very impressive the marketshare in total loans you have compared to other big name players like Blur.

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Would like to see an expansion of tokenomics, vesting dates and long term plan for utility. Many projects can thrive with two tokens if they serve distinct purpose within the expanding ecosystem.

Love the bold vision of providing liquidity for tokenization of web 2 assets and excited to see what is in store.

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Great write up and love the product. I’ve been a sharky user for a while

I’d like to know what are the initial plans after TGE?
For example I understand expanding into real world assets is a priority, but I see other areas as being a quicker win and potentially bigger gain?
examples

  1. revamping of the website to modernise
  2. allowing for more flexibility in bulk loans, borrows, partial repays, etc
  3. Duplicating sharky for other chains. Potentially even introducing cross chain collateral, etc

These could expand sharky market share before moving into uncharted waters (intentional shark reference haha)

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I am already impressed with the platform I have been using it. You have my JUP vote already hope the community sees the same value as I do as enabling NFT to be liquid and without losing the art. Amazing. Best of luck.

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Great work with this post, @Restuta!

Hyped to see this go!

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Wow, incredible breakdown.

Thanks so much for the details on the launch, the team, and even the doxxing!

Sharky is by far the best lending protocol and see the future being very bright on the platform.

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Same, absolutely wild. Fantasitc post too.

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I’ve used your platform plenty of times when I was short for some bills solely because the rates were better than just insta-selling especially between '22-23. Awesome product and I can’t wait to see how far this will go! Hopefully you guys give “loan sharks” an entirely new meaning!

Shoutout to the homie Neppah for explaining the vision back in '22!

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Optimistic outlook for sharky p2p lending network expanding Got my vote

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Superb presentation, and lovely vision!

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This is awesome, just strange i haven’t heard of it until today.

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Low supply, but would like to see how this plays out.
I think the picks for initial use of LFG launchpad are top tier.
Wish you success in your launch!

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