Paras

Paras is an NFT Marketplace project focusing on Digital Cards Collectibles, bringing these conventional items from the traditional world into the crypto space. The project believes that every single physical art form needs to be stored and digitized to keep as an original version.

The project runs on top of NEAR Protocol, a layer one blockchain scaling solution with high transaction speeds, low cost, and climate-neutral, therefore taking this leverage to offer a cheap, fast NFT Marketplace for NEAR Ecosystem users.

Paras is also ready for the cross-chain trend in the future since with the help from Rainbow Bridge, Ethereum Users would easy to transfer their assets to NEAR Protocol and use it to buy/sell NFTs on Paras, move back the proceeds to the Ethereum chain seamlessly.

Unlike other competitors, Paras NFT Marketplace only chooses the Digital Card Collectibles Segment to focus on. Even though this strategy causes them to lose a significant share from different NFT Segments, including image, video, song collectible, ticket… but it facilitates projects providing High-quality Digital Art Collectibles, becoming the greatest NFT Marketplace in their segmentation.

Paras co-founders Rahmat “Riqi” Albariqi and Afiq Shofy started out to create a decentralized social media site. After some months of experiments, they discovered NFTs, or non-fungible tokens—a cryptographic asset where each unit represents something unique and indivisible. Intrigued by the potential for provable digital ownership and sales, they decided to build a platform where digital artists could create and thrive.

To keep up with the pace of innovation in the NFT space, one of the hottest topics in crypto today, Riqi and Afiq knew they had to develop and launch fast. Getting from the first testnet experiments to full MainNet launch took just three months, a testament to NEAR’s seamless developer experience. The pure build time of the application was four weeks, once they understood the basics of how to build on NEAR.

Launched in December 2020, Paras is a digital art card marketplace built on NEAR that offers artists more control of their creations and digital scarcity for collectors—using NEAR as the medium of exchange between creators and collectors. The name Paras (pronounced Pa-RAS) translates to “face” or “persona,” and “equal,” in Bahasa Indonesian. The vision for Paras is to create a space for artists to cultivate and act on compounded momentum.

Paras’ artists have collectively made more than $25,000 (USD equivalent) already, in just two months since launching the platform. Paras has facilitated a trading volume of $35,000+ from 700+ transactions, with 80+ active collectors and 70+ artists onboarded. Because the minting fees are so low on NEAR, the barrier to entry for digital artists is very low, and an artist can mint a card without thinking about the minting cost. This means they can sell their cards for as low as $1 or $5, lowering the barrier to entry for participation in the marketplace. This opens the NFT world to new artists and collectors alike.

“We are big on collector’s cards and their surrounding worlds—like YuGiOh and Pokémon. We aim to create a framework where artists can do the same in NFT format. On Paras, artists can expand their portfolios and reach new audiences.” –Riqi, Paras co-founder

On Paras, artists mint and sell limited-edition NFT trading card collections – so each NFT is part of an ever-expanding world created by each artist. NFT creators can grow their audience base directly without middlemen, test the market, and expand their collections collaboratively with the Paras community. They are looking for long-term collaborations and sustainable approaches to expanding their digital art businesses. This framework allows artists to hyperfocus on building the colorful stories behind each card’s representation. For example, artist Fetus Squid launched a batch of digital art trading cards to fund the creation of his novel.

Paras does weekly artist invitations, so there are a limited number of artworks issued on the platform at any given time. After an artist is whitelisted, they can start minting right away. 400+ registered wallets are ready to grab the artist’s card collectibles, so they can begin building a collector fanbase by selling at low prices or in multiples and still make a profit—thanks to the very low cost of minting and storage on NEAR. The long-term hope for cultivating artist careers on Paras is that building collections will evolve into creating their own IP universes in the realm of Pokémon or YuGiOh.

For collectors, the 3D, interactive visual representation of the art cards sets Paras apart from other NFT marketplaces. Paras’ eye-catching cards pop on the page and have an undeniably rich style even within the fixed size of the trading card art format. The native format of a Paras digital art card mimics real-world trading cards with a portrait ratio of 64:89—and Paras recently added .gif support alongside .png, .jpg, .jpeg.

If you want to create cards and sell NFTs in Paras NFT Marketplace, you will have to be a whitelist artist. Every week, Paras Team will only approve 30 new Artists selected carefully by the team to ensure the quality of the final product.

It is not the same with other NFT Marketplaces; for example, Mintbase — The main competitor of Paras allows everyone to create a store and sell NFTs with just a small fee (around 8N), having unlimited NFT Minting numbers and available to all users.

Most markets, especially Ethereum-based ones, allow users to post anything to the media, which seems to create a low-effect work with the society and allows these projects to attract every kind of user with varieties of styles. Meanwhile, the community that seeks high-value art pieces is the main target of Paras. That is why Paras decided to focus essentially on providing the highest-quality NFT in the markets.

Paras will reward a token for all buyers and sellers who perform transactions in the marketplace. The rewards will be based on the transaction size and the PARAS/NEAR pair price on the swap.

For example:

• Purchases an NFT from B for 10 NEAR
• The transaction fee is 0.5 NEAR and 80% of that is 0.4 NEAR
• The current price 1 PARAS: 1 NEAR
• The total reward will be 0.4 PARAS, the buyer and seller will receive 0.2 PARAS each

Once the marketplace mining runs out, the 80% transaction fee will be sent to DAO as a community fund for future grants or projects.