RARI is an Ethereum token that powers Rarible, a community-owned marketplace for creating, selling, or collecting NFTs. Its primary purpose is to govern the Rarible protocol and RARI Chain, and to control the RARI Foundation treasury.
RARI operates on the Ethereum blockchain and uses the Arbitrum Layer 3 (L3) technology for its RARI Chain. It follows a Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, inherited from Ethereum's security model. RARI Chain utilises EVM-compatible smart contracts to enforce node-level royalties for NFT transactions, which are reverted if royalty payments in ETH or ERC-20 tokens fail.
RARI has several real-world applications including:
Notable projects utilising RARI include BotFrens, Mattel, Mocaverse, Footprint Analytics, and Ledger, spanning sectors like digital art, DeFi, and NFT marketplaces.
Rarible, the platform behind RARI, was co-founded by Alex Salnikov and Alexei Falin and launched in early 2020. It received initial funding from CoinFund, with a marketplace launch on Ethereum Mainnet in 2019. The RARI token was introduced in July 2020 as the first governance token in the NFT space. The platform has seen significant growth and evolution, including the introduction of Marketplace Liquidity Mining and the expansion into a DAO with various working groups.