Introduction to Vera

Everything you need to know about what we're building.

What is Vera?

Vera is the most powerful open financial platform for non-fungible token (NFT) assets. Vera offers decentralized financing, renting, lending, and other essential financial services for any NFT marketplace, game, or application.

Founded in 2021 by Vera Labs and backed by notable investors in the decentralized fintech space such as Animoca Brands (leader in blockchain gaming and NFTs; key investor in Axie Infinity, Open Sea, Dapper Labs, CryptoKitties, and much more) and the Web3 Foundation, Vera’s mission is simple: To build open, secure, and powerful NFT financial products that are equally available to everyone everywhere.

Please join the Vera community Discord server; the Vera team and members look forward to helping you understand and use Vera.

Why Vera?

Vera's protocol is audited, secured, and is completely open source, which allows anyone to interact with an user interface client, API, or directly with the smart contracts on any of our supported blockchain networks such as Ethereum. Being open source means that you are able to build any third-party service or application to interact with the protocol and enrich your product.

What major problems is Vera solving?

Today, if you want to buy an NFT on a marketplace or game, you must pay the full price in crypto and there are no financing options. Also, credit cards do not support direct NFT purchases due to the risk of theft from chargebacks and refunds. Once you own an NFT, you are limited to selling the NFT to generate income—that is if you are even able to find a buyer in the increasingly crowded NFT marketplaces. These limitations and problems cause poor user experiences and slows down the innovation and mass adoption of NFTs. Vera solves these challenges and supports NFTs minted on any blockchain, building the foundation for an ecosystem that serves as the gateway that connects real-world assets to the digital world.

Who are Vera's competitors and how is Vera different?

We do not know of any known competitor in the NFT space that's currently building our suite of essential financial tools. If one exists, our main competitive advantages are:

1. First-mover advantage.

2. Product and engineering team with high domain expertise working with major enterprise clients in blockchain and NFT space such as Dapper Labs, Bitrail, Kodak Image Licensing Platform, and Northern Trust, the #4 bank in the world with $14+ trillion in assets under management.

3. High product market fit with major games, metaverses, and NFT projects.

4. Compatibility with NFTs minted on any blockchain.

5. Backed by the #1 NFT company, Animoca Brands.

6. Support from Polkastarter and communities for several major blockchain ecosystems.

How do I interact with Vera?

You can interact with Vera when the project launches its mainnet, which is planned to occur in Q4 2021 according to the Project Roadmap.

Once the mainnet is live, in order to use to interact with Vera, you simply deposit your preferred NFT and/or cryptocurrency assets. Initially, NFTs minted on Ethereum are supported, but Vera will have multi-blockchain support in 2022, especially for popular ecosystems such as Solana, Polygon, Polkadot, and BSC.

After depositing, you will earn passive income based on the market borrowing demand. Additionally, depositing assets allows you to borrow by using your deposited assets as a collateral. Any interest you earn by depositing funds helps offset the interest rate you accumulate by borrowing.

What is the cost of interacting with Vera?

Interacting with the protocol requires transactions and so the transaction fees will depend on the blockchain network's status and transaction complexity.

Where are my deposited assets stored?

Your assets are allocated in a smart contract. The code of the smart contract is public, open source, formally verified and audited by third party auditors. You can withdraw your assets from the pool on-demand.

Is there any risk?

No platform can be considered entirely risk free. The risks related to the Vera platform are the smart contract risk (risk of a bug within the protocol code) and liquidation risk (risk on the collateral liquidation process). Every possible step has been taken to minimize the risk as much as possible The protocol code is public and open source and will be audited. Additionally, we will soon be launching a bug bounty campaign.

Definitions

If you are unsure about any specific terms feel free to check the Definitions.

Telegram and Social Media

Our company, project staff, or community moderators will never direct message or solicit you on Telegram or any social media platform. If you are receiving direct messages from someone pretending to be our staff or moderator, they are likely trying to scam you.

There are several scam or fake Vera groups and channels on Telegram. Several of such groups copy and paste the same content and announcements we use in our official channels. If you join a group where you are unable to chat with the community it is likely a fraudulent Vera channel. The only official Vera Telegram and social media channels are the ones found on our official project website and blog. Please be careful and stay safe!

Emails

Official emails will always be sent by the domain @veralabs.com, the development company backing the development of Vera. If you receive an email from this domain, be sure to check the sender details to prevent yourself from being a victim of email spoofing and phishing attacks.

Mobile App

Vera does not have any downloadable mobile application available. If you find one, it is a scam. Vera will never ask you for your seed passphrase. Please be careful and stay safe.

Online Advertisements

Vera will never advertise on any social media or search engine. If you see any advertisements, those are scams and phishing sites. Please be careful and stay safe.

Additional information and resources about Vera

Feel free to access the Documentation for a technical description of the Vera platform.

If you still have any questions or issues, feel free to reach the Vera team over the live chat in our Discord or Telegram community.