Nischal Shetty, founder of WazirX, says many Indians curious about NFTs

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WazirX, a cryptocurrency exchange, has launched a marketplace where you will be able to view NFT listings arts by various artists. Based on the blockchain that you choose, you will have to pay in the crypto that the blockchain supports.

In an interview with Money9, Nischal Shetty, founder of WazirX, tells everything you need to know about buying and selling of NFTs in India.

Q: What is NFT and what kind of digital assets can be bought and sold on the platform?

Nischal: NFTs are non-fungible tokens, which means there are more as digital art, some digital artwork or, an audio file or a video. It is all about digital ownership. Until now, we could not own digitally. But with NFT, you can actually own digital art. This is happening globally. And we thought, why not bring this to India?

Many Indian artists have reached out to us saying they want to sell their digital art pieces to their audiences in the country. We have a large userbase who are interested in cryptocurrencies and they wanted a platform to buy them. So we decided to build a marketplace where if you are a creator and you could set the price at which you want to sell, anyone in India can then go and buy it. So that is how this idea emerged and we are about to launch it very soon.

Q: What is the procedure? What does all one need to do to buy an NFT or list their artwork on your platform?

Nischal: The important thing is the market that we are creating is a decentralised marketplace. What I mean by that is when you are buying the NFT, you are buying it directly from the artist and we do not even hold the NFT. So the artists will be owning the NFT and even holding it in their own personal wallets. When you put a bid and if the bid is accepted, the NFT is directly transferred from the artist’s wallet to your personal wallet. So the first requirement is both you as a buyer and the artist should have a blockchain wallet. Once you have that, you can go to our marketplace and look for whatever NFTs are listed.

If you like a particular NFT, there are two options. One is you can directly buy it at the listed price. The second is you can enter a bidding process where you can put a certain bid and let’s say if someone else too wants it, then that whole process starts and the artists can then decide based on the highest bid received. You can only buy it via cryptocurrency. So the transfer is from crypto to an NFT.

Q: Which digital assets can be bought and sold on the platform?

Nischal: The beauty of NFT is it depends on what you want to tag to an NFT tool. So if you want to tag an image file, you can associate an image file to an NFT token. If you want to associate a video file, you can do that. And the best thing is whoever buys it, can verify the ownership that they own this video file on the blockchain and in the future, they can sell it to someone else. There is recently an international artist who sold some of his childhood photographs, which are very personal to him and he converted that into an NFT and he sold it to his fans.

So, you know, the ideas that are emerging out here is humongous, like it’s mind-blowing because you can put your creativity to work. In a traditional world, if you want to sell it you’ll have to find a company and then maybe get into a deal with them and do all that process. Out here as an artist you just go and put whatever you believe it has value, you just put them online. And anyone, anywhere in the world will be able to buy it.

Q: How much do you charge a buyer and a seller?

Nischal: The first most important thing is the cost or the price of an NFT. We had seen big numbers of with millions of dollars being sold, but the price is decided by the artist. So an artist can decide. And usually what happens, what we’ve seen is the more popular the artist, the more expensive it is. But there are a lot of emerging artists who want to sell that NFTs for a smaller price. And as these artists get popular, if you were the one to first buy them, you would have those NFTs that would appreciate in value over time. We charge the artist 5% fee on the sale of the NFT. And that would not be any charges for buyers. This is practically the only fee that we would levy on the sell

Q: Does one have to pay in rupee for NFT?

Nischal: We are yet to decide on the blockchain on which we would do it. We are close to finalising it and we will make an announcement very soon. Based on the blockchain that we choose, you will have to pay in the crypto that blockchain supports and that will be the only way the cryptocurrency and the reason why we are doing this because this is a decentralised marketplace.

So bringing in rupee is difficult and impossible in a decentralised market marketplace because the transaction is between just two parties on the blockchain. So, so it will be the cryptocurrency of the blockchain that we choose.

Q: Is there any legal framework for NFTs? In case of a dispute, how will they be settled as there is no regulatory authority when it comes to cryptocurrencies?

Nischal: The first thing is let’s say usually disputes happen when you try to buy and you pay it to someone and that person does not deliver the goods. The beautiful thing about blockchain is this is all put into a code already. So no one has control over it. Once an artist puts the NFT for sale and let’s say, you want to buy it and you transfer the crypto, the blockchain code itself automatically transfers it. So, non-delivery is not an option out here. It will automatically be delivered to you. The other option to understand is that the artists in question you are buying from are the ones you want to buy it from. As a platform, we will try to make sure that we bring in artists who are reputable to the platform and get them listed.

Q: How big is the NFT market worldwide and how do you see things panning out in India?

Nischal: The NFT market is very new. Most of us are discussing it this year, but it actually started in 2017 with CryptoKitties. It was like the first time that NFTs as a concept emerged. In 2020 what you’re seeing is all the artists around the world getting in. About $2 to $3 million worth of NFTs is being sold every day. This number is increasing rapidly. It does fluctuate, but the average is $3 million a day is being sold globally. In India, we don’t have a number because we don’t have a platform. So once we launch, we will be the first one.