Pawn Your NFTs for Instant Cash? DeFi-Meets-NFT in Solana Pawnshop

When I was a kid, my buddies and I would sometimes wander around local pawnshops looking for cool shit that other people left behind in their need to access emergency cash. I once bought a metal detector that way.

That useless anecdote is relevant only to the degree that today’s dispatch is all about a Solana-based pawnshop protocol known as Pawnshop Gnomies, an NFT project that sold out all 5,555 Gnomies in eight minutes back in mid-November. Mint price: 0.33 Solana. Floor price today: 4.4 SOL.

In the ever-expanding world of decentralized finance, Gnomies aims to bring immediate liquidity to the very illiquid NFT space. And I call it illiquid because even though marketplaces such as Magic Eden, OpenSea and others exist, it’s not like NFT owners have immediate liquidity at the right price.

If I own a rare SOL Flowers (and I do), I can’t list it for its real value and expect it to sell immediately. I have to list it at the floor or slightly lower to gain quick access to cash for whatever purpose I have. So, I either sacrifice wealth or miss out on an opportunity.

In most cases, I’d chose to miss out on the opportunity because I’m not willing to throw away known value.