Double Protocol Lays Out Comprehensive Usage Scenarios of Utility NFTs in Latest Roadmap

Double Protocol, the fully decentralized Rental Protocol for utility NFTs renowned for pioneering the NFT rental standard 'ERC-4907', has revealed its roadmap for 2022-2023, which lists a number of goals that Double Protocol is working towards in order to achieve its mission of unlocking the liquidity of utility NFTs. Some of the features planned for utility NFTs according to the roadmap include leasing, subscription, rent-to-own (buy-now-pay-later), IP licensing, and usage rights transactions. Double Protocol is the project developed by Emoji DAO.

ERC-4907, which received 'final' status last month to become the 30th ERC standard on Ethereum, is a revolutionary token standard that streamlines NFT rentals by introducing dual roles of 'owner' and 'user' at the token standard layer. This makes the NFTs rentable by default and allows NFT projects to adopt the standard by adding just a few lines of codes to check whether an address is the current valid user or the owner.

This allows NFT projects to spend more time working on the product instead of focusing on the NFT rental functionality at the application layer. Further, the application of this standard greatly reduces the development and integration costs of utility NFT leases such as in games, metaverses, and membership cards, enabling more liquidity of NFT assets.

Double Protocol has already deployed its rental protocol on both the Ethereum mainnet and BNB chain and plans to expand to other major EVM chains like Polygon by the end of 2022 and eventually to non-EVM chains like Solana by 2023.

The first goal on the roadmap in 2022 is the launch of the 'subscription' feature. The 'subscription' feature will begin with the launch of ENS subdomain issuance going live at the beginning of August. As a part of the development of its subscription feature, Double Protocol has also proposed ERC-5007, a time-based NFT token standard designed for subscription NFTs.

Other goals planned for 2022 include launching support for the rental of ERC-1155 NFTs and the rent-to-own feature. In order to support the rental of ERC-1155 NFTs, Double protocol has introduced ERC-5006 (an ERC-1155 compatible version of ERC-4907) which is now in the status of 'review'. As for its 'rent-to-own' feature, it can be simply described as a form of 'buy-now-pay-later' feature.

The rent-to-own feature will allow an individual to eventually buy a utility NFT by paying part of the price of the NFT in the beginning and gaining access to the usage rights of the NFT in the form of 'renting'. Once the individual pays the whole price of the NFT over a duration of time, they switch from 'renting' to 'owning' the NFT. This feature will be extremely useful for allowing users to purchase valuable NFTs that would be unaffordable otherwise.

Coming to the 2023 section of the roadmap, there are two goals that immediately catch our eye, i.e., the launch of two additional features for utility NFTs- the 'Free Trial' and 'licensing' features.

The 'free trial' feature allows projects such as games and metaverses to grant new users access to usage rights of utility NFTs temporarily. This allows the projects to onboard new users by providing them true access to the full premium experience of the product. The 'licensing' feature, on the other hand, will enable partnered projects to share the usage and other IP rights of the NFTs with the licensee under customizable timeframes and compensations.

While all the features spoken of so far may seem like very different business applications of ERC-4907, the underlying business logic for all of them has the same foundation: the trading of usage rights for a given period of time. In addition to these features, Double Protocol is also planning the launch of two 'tools'- the 'collection management' tool and the 'guild management' tool in 2022 and 2023 respectively. All of these goals on Double's roadmap signal a truly exciting and utility-packed future for the protocol.