An innovative NFT Marketplace and Community with Crypto Rewards.
In 2021, Pavlo Kharmanskyi began collecting and trading NFTs. With more than 12 years in the Fintech & IT industry and a background in software development, the emerging NFT and crypto markets were a natural draw.
NFTs in particular caught the attention of Kharmanskyi and a group of close friends and they began exploring the mechanics of NFT creation, selling, and collecting across and within platforms.
The Artozo team is a multinational group, but many of the core players are from Ukraine and have had the additional challenges of political and social unrest to contend with as they work toward realizing the project.
Several issues in the existing marketplace structure became apparent — whitelisting, gas costs and minting fees were limiting access and eating up profits for both collectors and artists. Scammers and hackers — longtime problems on the web — highlighted a need for verification and security. The learning curve on Web3 tech also contributed to the growing sense that there had to be a better way — a way to make collecting, trading and holding NFTs both fun and profitable.
Kharmanskyi and close friend Andrew Savchuk pooled their knowledge of tech and the Ukrainian art community, connecting their individual concerns to larger issues in the emerging market.
“We saw for sure that people are struggling with web3 additional applications having tons of problems with wallets including security issues” Kharmanskyi recalled when asked about the early inspiration for Artozo.
Pavlo and his friends gathered a community of 25k followers on Telegram where the idea of creating a platform that would address these and other known issues in the NFT market took shape. Most projects did and still do require sharing invites just to get whitelisted for the chance at an NFT but other than that chance, there were no other returns. Stas Kudelko and Alex Ivanov joined Pavlo and Savchuk at this stage and began sketching out the structure of a referral reward system with real benefits for the user and the friends they referred.
Although lots of NFT collectors share their source links for the NFTs they collect, there’s no inherent value or utility in such sharing. Utility is also the driving force behind the need to be able to manage or regulate the floor value of NFT art and collectibles to create stability in the market for Artists, Collectors, and Investors.
The Artozo Marketplace is set up to give every NFT on the site a base value level with a fixed floor price.
One of the challenges for users entering into the realm of NFTs has been understanding Web3 technologies and navigating the cryptocurrency markets. The decision to build Artozo on the Solana blockchain has made it possible to offer solutions that make transactions faster, more affordable and secure. Specifically, the dev team built Artozo with an In App Wallet that means that users will be able to sign up and start instantly collecting and trading NFTs on the marketplace without having to set up a separate crypto wallet. The In-App Wallet also protects users from pitfalls like the recent hot wallet hacks and the uncertainty about which provider will offer you the best service and protection.
“We want to bring NFTs to mass adoption and new people into the market,” says Kharmanskyi “…we want to make not NFT flippers but a new generation of NFT collectors.”
The results of the last year’s efforts by the team is a platform that gives you everything you would expect in an NFT marketplace, then layers on even more. Buying and selling NFTs is easy for Users with any level of experience whether they have dealt with Web 3 or crypto before or not.
Kharmanskyi and his team have also set out to make collecting fun and profitable by incorporating gamified elements into the process that reward the User for almost all their activities. The Invite Reward Model makes referring your friends actually meaningful by creating a network — a community within the community — that helps build the value of the NFTs collected and traded on the site.
Artozo is also the first platform to offer an NFT community Rating system where NFTs are presented to users anonymously for them to respond to and vote on. The votes accrue Activity Points (AP) which are then tradeable for bonuses on the site or exchangeable for the native cryptocurrency, ARTZ.
The ARTZ Token is also exchangeable for other cryptocurrencies and is listed on DEX, so your fun can become profit.
