Revolutionary NFT Protocol Pushes Boundaries of Digital Asset Functionality [INTERVIEW]

Rob is the founder and truly the visionary behind the revolutionary concept that is Charged Particles. He has over 20 years of experience as a full-stack developer, 5 years in FinTech. His primary focus has centered around Ethereum and smart contract development for DApp creation, utilizing various token standards such as ERC20, ERC721, and ERC1155, among others. Previously, he was a senior developer bringing PoolTogether (v3 – the current version) to life!

I'm Ben Lakoff, a Co-Founder and Business Lead at Charged Particles. I am an entrepreneur at heart with a background in Finance (M&A, PE, Venture Capital) before going full-time into the blockchain space in 2017. I met Rob at the Gitcoin Kernel Web3 hackathon last summer, and immediately got captivated by the incredible vision behind Charged Particles.

With Charged Particles, you can create a truly unique NFT, and it's important to note that NFTs created via Charged Particles are still standard non-fungible NFTs (ERC-721s) that can be sold on popular marketplaces like Rarible or Opensea, but you're enabling them to easily hold other tokens and have programmable value & utility.

We're completely remote, and spanning quite a few time zones with team members in the USA, Canada, Romania, India and Morocco.

We are very fortunate to have put together a really rockstar team for Charged Particles. I joined Rob in July-2020, and we hired Vlad (blockchain dev), Eric (full stack dev) in October. 

We started adding additional team members more quickly after completing our pre-seed fundraising in 4Q20. Mango – Community & Events Manager, Sam – Full Stack Dev, Emotion – Full Stack Dev, Sumit – Front End Dev, Jon – Growth,  Pri – Social Media Manager and Steve – Marketing have joined since then, all full time. We're always looking for experienced web3 developers if anyone is interested!

Our community (shout-out Photons) is really strong and excited – too many amazing members to list them all here as "team" but they should be included too – you know who you are!

Also important to note that we're also super proud to have amazing mentors, advisors and investors involved. Advisors include Leighton Cusack (Founder, CEO of PoolTogether) and DeFi Papa (CDO of Zapper). We'll actually be announcing another advisor later in the month as well!

Someone who wants to push the boundaries of what's possible with NFTs – ANY NFT. 

We have a marketplace and a minting platform — both of which are pretty cool and charge literally 0 fees. So far we've had about $2M in NFT sales there with some very unique offerings (enabled by our tech). Important to also note that our protocol is also completely server-less so we're never collecting any data on you as you interact with our DApp.

At the protocol level, this is where things get exciting. Eventually, our protocol will integrate into the ecosystem of these other NFT platforms, and the ability to "Charge" or "Energize" your NFT is the feature we really care about. ANY NFT can have a "charge" and hold other assets. When thinking about NFTs beyond art, there's a lot of possibilities. 

That they're just art. CryptoArt as an NFT is just the very tip of the iceberg of the potential of NFTs. People are starting to figure this out, but it's still a very common misconception.

The NFT Ecosystem is just getting started and I think a key milestone will be changing the framing around "NFT" itself. It's such a broad category and that needs to evolve.

Certainly, here's the full breakdown on IONX here.

The Protocol notes: $IONX is the native governance token for the Charged Particles Protocol. Any changes to the Protocol will be proposed and voted on by $IONX token holders.

These proposals can include things like adjusting platform fee values to add the protocol deposit fee, implementing scaling solutions, adjusting 3rd party integration fees, registering, adjusting or disabling DeFi protocols as yield sources, and controlling the future distribution of $IONX to protocol contributors.

Certainly, our roadmap can be found on our site here.

Some big ones coming up in the next month include:

• Layer 2 (Polygon)
• Whitelisting of other NFT platforms – meaning NFT from Rarible, you can 'charge' up on CP

Longer-term, we're implementing CP Protocol into numerous NFT platforms and working VERY closely with a variety of upcoming DApps built on our Protocol.