How to Short NFTs without Having to Buy Them

If all you have right now is some ETH, you can short blue chip NFT projects like CryptoPunks and Bored Apes using nftperp, a new type of perpetual futures exchange for NFTs. How it works: investors open and maintain long or short positions on the floor price of an NFT collection without buying the NFTs.

This is a big deal because previously you'd need to actually own a blue chip NFT to profit from its price movements. Previous NFT financialization products, like Bend, require investors to own the NFT before they can short it. Even with the NFT market in a brutal winter, the Bored Ape floor price is over $100k. Most retail investors can't afford to get exposure to the blue chip NFTs.

nftperp expects most investors to use the protocol to "bet" on the price movements of blue chip NFT collections, but blue chip NFT holders can also use nftperp to hedge against price drops in their own collection. If you own a Punk and you short Punks, you can limit your exposure to the Punks' price movements.

This is a cool idea. I'd like to be able to short the floor price of Apes and Punks without having to buy one then loan it out. Unfortunately, this type of product seems vulnerable to oracle attacks. Crypto protocols use oracles to access off-chain data. In an oracle attack, the attacker manipulates the oracle’s data to execute code on the blockchain.

If nftperp’s NFT price floor oracle is hacked, the attacker could manipulate the "floor prices" on the platform to liquidate everyone's positions and take their ETH. nftperp believes its True Floor Price oracle is tamper-proof, but that remains to be seen.