NFT Renting: What’s It And Why’s It A Big Thing In 2025?

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Updated: 30 January 2025

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The non-fungible token market, once a booming sector of the cryptocurrency space, has matured after undergoing ups and downs in the past several years. Unfortunately, owning an NFT collection has become very expensive recently, as many blue-chip NFT collections exchange hands for hundreds of dollars. In this article, we shall explore NFT renting and how it can solve the recent NFT ownership problem.

NFT Renting Explained

In 2025, non-fungible token renting has become popular in the global NFT market, gaining massive traction among low-class and middle-class NFT traders. NFT renting allows collectors to rent out rare non-fungible tokens, in-game items, characters, or virtual real estate via NFTs. This gives traders temporary access to exclusive benefits and perks, enhancing their trading experience without requiring full ownership.

It’s worth noting that it has become expensive for those seeking to benefit from holding premium NFTs in recent years. For the past three months, lowest-priced NFT collections from popular projects, like CryptoPunks, Pudgy Penguins, and Bored Ape Yacht Club, have not traded for less than $30,000. This is why NFT renting is now the next big ‘thing’ than holding premium NFTs themselves.

In the past three months, most digital asset incubation studios, such as Chiru Labs, the team behind Azuki NFT collections, Remilia Corporation, the team behind Milady Maker NFT series, and Igloo, the digital asset firm behind the Pudgy Penguins and Lil Pudgy, have airdropped tokens to their users. Since many NFT collectors could not afford these premium NFT collections, they were left out of the recent airdrops.

$ANIME is launching on January 23. pic.twitter.com/u8fj82eEqf

— ANIME (@animecoin) January 17, 2025

How Does NFT Renting Operate?

An NFT owner deposits their NFT in a protocol and sets a rental price for which anybody can rent it for a specific duration. Upon rental, the protocol issues a shadow-compatible delegation with some expiration period. For the duration of the rental, the renter effectively owns the asset. This can be used as a primitive to sell airdrop rights, game access, staking positions, or anything else built on top of shadows with no loss or liquidation risk to your NFT.

A use case I'd like to see built on top of shadows: short term NFT rentals.

It'd work like this 👇

An NFT owner deposits their NFT to a protocol and sets a rental price where anybody can rent it for X duration. Upon rental, the protocol issues a shadow-compatible delegation…

— Quit (@0xQuit) January 29, 2025

Under this trick, the non-fungible token owner retains the NFT and just sells the airdrop rights. In this scenario, it’s assumed that the NFT market would be overvaluing the airdrop in question, making this strategy equivalent to a futures trade. Even though NFT renting and lending are related, they are different. NFT lending is a form of asset lending that uses NFT as collateral, similar to how traditional lending works with real-world assets like cars, homes, or others.