NFT Rental Protocol Rentable Announces Shutdown, Founder Shares Three "Lessons Learned"
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NFT Rental Protocol Rentable Announces Shutdown, Founder Shares Three "Lessons Learned"
A product or solution should ideally be validated before being fully rolled out to the market, rather than rushing into action—after all, haste makes waste.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insights
Written by: 0xrose, TechFlow
On September 13, the NFT rental protocol Rentable announced its shutdown. All services will cease starting October 14. Co-founder Emiliano Bonassi stated, “We haven’t found a product-market fit, and our runway has ended. After careful consideration and discussions, we’ve decided to wind down rather than pursue further fundraising.”
Not long ago, NFTFi was a booming sector—especially after the ERC-4907 NFT rental standard was approved in June—many were bullish on this space. But within just a few months, the tide turned. The founder reflected on the reasons behind this “failure,” summarizing three key lessons:
1. Narrow Market Focus
Defining your market involves identifying the specific problem you aim to solve and focusing on it. First, assess whether your solution can be applied to broader, similar problems and target a larger market—but choose carefully.
Drawing from my DeFi experience, I was biased toward solving generalized ERC20 problems, assuming that solving one would solve them all. Thus, I believed that solving a general NFT problem would universally apply across all NFTs.
However, this approach may work in DeFi because all tokens are ultimately fungible, but it fails in the context of rentals.
Each NFT is unique; while renting may resemble lending, "renting x NFT" means different things depending on what “x” represents. Note: this applies specifically to rentals—for trading, generalization works well.
We could have done better by conducting deeper research into various NFT types, selecting a specific niche market, and building a vertical, customized solution instead of an agnostic, generic one.
2. Resource Allocation
Time is everyone’s scarcest resource—whether for partners, investors, or users.
After the first call or a few feedback sessions, people are unlikely to engage unless committed—unless they’re doing it for free out of personal interest.
Since we didn’t need external capital to build our MVP, I completely underestimated this aspect.
We actually needed capital to align incentives. Every investor and partner brings unique value; knowing how to leverage that is crucial.
Therefore, planning what each stakeholder can contribute—capital, hiring support, reputation—is essential.
3. Better Validation
Validation is a broad topic, but it boils down to goal-setting, hypothesis framing, experimentation, and data collection.
We made a mistake: as soon as we had a solid technical solution for rentals, we immediately implemented it.
Additionally, we assumed users lacked any existing rental mechanisms, so if a solution existed (“out there”), new dynamics would naturally emerge.
We should have done more validation on paper, shortened iteration cycles, reallocated engineering effort, and focused more on understanding partners’/users’ motivations and goals around renting.
Summary
The author believes the founder’s reflections are sincere and pinpoint core issues.
First, is it a real demand? And is the demand/market large enough? NFT rentals may seem promising at first glance, but consider concrete scenarios: blue-chip NFTs often serve as social status symbols. Are top-tier holders—industry leaders or the ultra-wealthy—likely to rent them out? And how many people truly want to rent them? This resembles renting secondhand luxury clothing—seemingly a niche demand, much smaller compared to vertical markets like game NFT rentals.
Second, the team believed they could build and launch the product without external funding. Yet in crypto, fundraising isn’t just about money—it provides credibility, BD resources, access to key partners, recruitment advantages, and other external connections that can be strategically built through your cap table.
Finally, products or solutions should be validated before full-scale launch. Acting too quickly rarely pays off—you can’t rush success.
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