LimeWire Finds New Life as an NFT Marketplace, Set to Launch in May

The peer-to-peer file-sharing website LimeWire is expected to make a comeback in May following its shutdown in 2010 when it lost a legal dispute against the Recording Industry Association of America for music piracy. LimeWire — along with BitTorrent and Napster —was the predecessor of today’s subscription-based streaming services including Spotify and Netflix, which was believed to have caused copyright infringement on a “massive scale.”

Recently, the website announced that it will be relaunched as an NFT marketplace after its intellectual property and other assets were acquired by Austrian brothers Julian and Paul Zehetmayr who have been aiming to revive the platform. The latest iteration of LimeWire will set its sights on music, allowing users to purchase and trade rare tokens such as limited editions, unreleased demos, and digital merchandise.

Prices on the platform will be listed in US dollars instead of cryptocurrencies, which will also enable users to purchase NFTs using credit cards. The website’s payment functionality has likewise been developed with the help of Wyre, a start-up that provides payment application programming interfaces (APIs).

The new LimeWire hopes to offer a more accessible approach to NFTs. In an effort to attract more users, the company also has an advisory board that includes Tareef Michael, the manager of the famous rap group Wu-Tang Clan. “The issue with the NFT market is that most platforms are decentralized,” explained Julian Zehetmayr. “If you look at bitcoin, all the exchanges are making it really easy to buy, trade, and sell bitcoin. There’s no one really doing the same in the NFT space.”

“We’ve obviously got this great mainstream brand that everybody’s nostalgic about,” furthered Julian. “We thought we needed to build a real mainstream user experience as well.” The Zehetmayr brothers are looking to raise additional capital for the platform by launching a LimeWire token to be sold to a limited number of investors before it goes public.

Holders of the platform’s token will allow them to vote on certain changes to LimeWire’s policies as well as getting to choose which artists will be featured in its music charts. A venture capital financing round is also being eyed later in the year. The NFT space has been receiving a lot of both praise and criticism after it took off in 2021.

In this light, Julian notes that “lots of parallels” can be seen between the current NFT market and LimeWire’s past which share a common attribute of being “kind of a Wild West.” “We’re trying to be a more mature platform and professionalize everything, just like Coinbase or other exchanges would do for crypto assets,” he added. In 2018, LimeWire’s previous rival BitTorrent was also bought by Tron, a start-up owned by crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun.

Source: CNBC