Rick and Morty co-creator collaborates with Paradigm on NFT research project

Justin Roiland, co-creator of the Rick and Morty animated series, is collaborating with two researchers from crypto investment firm Paradigm on a new mechanism for non-fungible token (NFT) sales.

According to Paradigm's Dave White, the new concept would allow a project to more seamlessly sell large quantities of NFTs over a long period of time at stable prices, depending on demand in the market. 

"When NFTs are being sold too quickly relative to therate, we want to be able to adjust prices quickly," according to a white paper. "The higher the sales rate compared to therate, the faster we want to raise prices."

Through this mechanism, prices slowly will decline when demand decreases. 

"However, we want to decay prices slowly over time, because we managed to hit therate at previous prices and we don’t want to drop prices more than we have to," the white paper added. A Solidity implementation of CRISP can be found on GitHub.

NFTs — the form of which spans artworks, collectible trading cards, in-game items, and more  — have driven significant activity in the past year, with volumes on unicorn OpenSea reaching more than $3 billion this month.

The motivation for Paradigm's project was inspired by lackluster user experiences during NFT auctions. "Auctions cost gas, and we want users to be able to buy one of these NFTs at any time, without having to wait for an auction to terminate," the researchers wrote in a post that details the project.

For instance, if a project like Parallel wanted to sell 100 Parallel cards every 30 minutes for the next seven days, they could use this mechanism to allow the price to automatically adjust based on the demand so that the goal of 100 sales every day could roughly be achieved.