| The market for nonfungible tokens remains frozen solid. Not only are daily NFT sales below their 2022 peak, they are also about two times lower than a year ago, when everyone thought the market couldn’t get any worse. In the middle of this wasteland, however, one company that’s issuing NFTs is making a killing. Courtyard.io is currently leading in NFT volumes, consistently doing $700,000 to $900,000 per day, according to tracker NFT Price Floor. Courtyard’s revenues have been ballooning, from $9 million in December to $48 million in March, according to CEO Nicolas le Jeune, a 32-year-old originally from Belgium. The startup is now in the middle of raising another funding round. “Courtyard is a really interesting case, because it represents a new use case for NFTs picking up steam to the point that is outperforming usual incumbents — Bored Ape, Pudgy Penguins and CryptoPunks — in terms of trading volume,” said Nicolas Lallement, co-founder of NFT Price Floor. Courtyard was started by former employees of Google and Apple and funded by the likes of Y Combinator. It’s actually not solely focused on selling NFTs. Instead, it’s putting out NFTs tied to physical collectibles: Pokemon or sports trading cards. Collectors can use its virtual vending machine to buy a mystery card and then immediately sell it back to the site, if they want, for 90% of the cost. It’s this vending machine that’s fueling sales, said le Jeune. The project discovered a new mechanism that doesn’t rely on crypto, according to le Jeune. “We are essentially offering liquidity in a market that was illiquid,” he said. The site’s cards — each connected to an NFT for authentication purposes — can be stored in an insured vault, or shipped to the buyer. Users earn a 1% revenue share every time a collectible they store in the vault is sold and resold. Courtyard’s model may be shining a light on the next wave of successful NFTs — if there is one. It may not be about blockchain, or crypto or NFTs themselves. Many of the site’s users don’t even know they are using a blockchain or NFTs. “We use NFTs as a tool, not a destination,” le Jeune said. Courtyard is thinking about other physical collectibles — such as comic books — to feed into the virtual vending machine and connect to NFTs, he said. “It’s refreshing to see a strong real-world-asset use case that isn’t tied to DeFi or real estate,” said Sara Gherghelas, senior blockchain researcher and analyst at DappRadar. “The platform is clearly geared toward a niche audience of collectors at the moment, but the real-world application gives it broader potential. It’s been a while since we’ve seen such a smooth blend between physical assets and Web3. Imagine redeeming tokenized physical items like jewels with the ease of a blockchain transaction — that kind of use case could really open up mainstream adoption.” | 
