Introducing Seasons (szns)

SZNS
4 min readMar 17, 2021

Seasons, styled SZNS or szns, is a decentralized protocol for collective NFT fractionalization, and governance.

Our first product launching Q2 of 2021 is a platform for user-curated NFT collections offering liquid, fractionalized ownership.

szns UI (subject to change)

User-Curated NFT Albums

Over the last few months we have seen important attempts to financialize NFTs via the creation of NFT indexes led by NFTX and NFT20. The two projects introduced a simple yet ingenious mechanism by which users could create pools of NFTs that would trade on an AMM curve, giving value to an ERC20 that was representative of NFTs deposited in each pool and introducing opportunity for price discovery.

However there still remain gaps as most NFTs are individually unique and the value of each NFT even from the same creator will differ wildly and widely (i.e. not all Axies are created equal, not all of @beeple’s works are created equal). In essence, old models sacrificed the NFT’s uniqueness for the sake of liquidity.

SZNS introduces a permissionless way for anyone to create an Album of a curated collection of NFTs.

As the NFT space matures, we begin to see not only a growth in NFT creators, but curators who have an eye for collecting high-value NFT collections. A curator can come to SZNS and tokenize their collection to be invested in by other NFT collectors all over the world. Rather than purchasing individual NFTs or investing in a single, fractionalized NFT, collectors can now gain exposure to a specific creator or curator’s collection. SZNS is a first of its kind project enabling creators, curators, and collectors alike.

How szns Works

Any user with an NFT collection they’d like to create an index for can simply deposit those NFTs into the SZNS smart contract to create an Album (a collection of NFTs on the SZNS platform) to govern as a DAO. The user sets the terms for the Album sale, such as:

  • The NFTs included
  • Album token ticker
  • Total Album token supply
  • % of Album token being sold
  • Sale price per token
  • Duration of sale

Suppose Alice has a nice collection of NFTs (perhaps with a few Mystic Axies) which she believes will appreciate over time and would like others to gain exposure to her collection. She would create an Album (perhaps named AliceDAO) with a selection of those NFTs, perhaps using a ticker like $alice.

She decides she’d like a total supply of 100,000 $alice and offers 50% (50,000 $alice tokens) for sale to other investors, at a price of 0.01ETH per token. She sets the sale duration for 2 weeks and creates the UCF.

The Album AliceDAO is then created with the selection of NFTs locked in the SZNS smart contract. Other users of SZNS can then purchase $alice in Alice’s terms during those two weeks.

Once the sale is over the ownership of Alice’s basket of NFTs is now shared across various collectors! Alice has successfully democratized access and ownership to her highly desired NFTs. From a collector’s perspective, it’s an opportunity to buy into NFT collectors themselves, much like how one would trust the decisions of a good fund manager. From a creator’s perspective, it’s an opportunity for any NFT collector to make a name for themselves as a curator of high-quality NFTs.

We as a platform want to make collective decision making an easy process for collective owners of Albums. We will share more details around how we enable decentralized governance in our docs page: https://docs.szns.io

The Mission

The core of our team’s mission is to explore and enable the meaningful collective ownership of NFTs. Fractionalizing is an important component of that mission, but introducing meaningful infrastructure and tooling for collective ownership as a DAO is another.

The Team

Anon teams are special. But so are those willing to put their real identities and reputations at stake. Our company — NFTree Labs — is composed of crypto-native, yet traditional software professionals who are going all-in on NFTs. Our core team is composed of:

We first embarked on our NFT journey with AxieTree, a platform that allowed anyone to come borrow Axies for free to start earning while sharing rewards with lenders. Axies from the Axie Infinity world were particularly interesting as NFTs, as each Axie represented ownership in a game economy that allowed players to earn SLP tokens, thus introducing the concept of “yield generating NFTs”.

We began with AxieTree because we wanted to slowly delve into the nascent NFT space and explore the growing building of tools to allow people to use their NFTs as financial assets. We realized quickly that we were both right and wrong — lending and borrowing NFTs may not yet be ready to be generalized, but the NFT space was maturing and moving much faster than we’d imagined! SZNS is our effort to capture and grow with the industry.

Want To Get Involved?

Nothing meaningful gets done without the community. Come join us on Discord and Twitter, and participate in making SZNS become the best NFT platform to collect together for years to come!

Discord: https://discord.gg/szns

Twitter: www.twitter.com/sznsNFT

Email: team@szns.io

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