It was announced today that the team of crypto enthusiasts that burned and tokenized an original Banksy piece, has raised $3 million to launch Burnt Finance, a fully decentralized auction protocol built on Solana.
Backed by exchange platform Injective Protocol; investors include Multicoin, DeFiance, Alameda, Mechanism, Vessel Capital, Hashkey, Spartan, Do Kwon (CEO, Terra), Sandeep (COO, Polygon), and others.
Earlier this year an anonymous group known only as “Burnt Banksy” was put into the international spotlight when they burnt and created a non-fungible token (NFT) of the original Banksy piece. Then the group held an auction on the OpenSea platform where the art piece was sold for nearly $400,000.
While holding the auction, the team faced a number of challenges. The rising congestion of the Ethereum network led to exorbitant gas fees and made creating NFTs and even placing a bid extremely expensive.
Some actors tried to leverage the congestion and manipulate the transaction fees to sway the results and the length of the auction.
All major auction platforms suffer from these problems or end up being centralized in their nature. As a result, The Burnt Finance team decided to build the first convenient and fast decentralized solution for conducting trustless auctions for a diverse array of assets such as NFTs and synthetics.
“NFT auctions continue to gather pace, beating records and generating buzz around each bidding. We’ve seen from our own experience how existing platforms are hampering the further development of such a promising market,” said Burnt Banksy. “We believe in the potential of the crypto auctions, and with Burnt Finance strive to address the needs of the market, launching the first fully decentralized auction protocol built on Solana.”
Burnt Protocol is built on Solana, a blockchain known for its high speed, performance, and low transaction costs. The platform leverages Solana Wormhole, the first bidirectional bridge launched in 2020 that connects ETH and ERC20 tokens to SPL tokens; and allows Burnt Protocol users to move tokenized assets seamlessly across blockchains.
The Solana Foundation also supports the project and funded the team with a grant. The platform is in the beta phase now and is expected to launch in Q3 2021.