Ivy League Brains Monetize JPEGs: Stanford, Harvard Profs Launch Bored Ape Rental Platform

Academic heavyweights from top-tier US universities are betting the farm on NFT utility—or at least, utility adjacent. Their new project lets holders rent out Bored Ape NFTs like beachfront condos.

How it works: Pay-to-play access without the six-figure buy-in. Renters get temporary bragging rights; owners squeeze yield from depreciating cartoon assets. Everybody wins—until the music stops.

The twist? They’re using blockchain smart contracts to automate leasing terms. Because nothing says ’financial revolution’ like digitizing timeshares for JPEGs.

Cynic’s corner: If you can’t sell your ape, at least you can Airbnb it—Wall Street’s securitization playbook finds its Web3 counterpart.

Liquefaction Primitive Enables Temporary Rental of Bored Ape NFTs

Further, the temporary NFT ownership is introduced through a novel system called Liquefaction, deployed on Oasis Sapphire.

The project is developed by James Austgen, Ph.D. student at Cornell Tech, under the guidance of Professor Ari Juels, a leading figure in blockchain security and co-director of IC3.

Speaking to Cryptonews.com, Austgen said that Liquefaction is a wallet system that restricts what users can sign with their wallet. It uses a specialized hardware called Oasis Sapphire’s Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), he added.

“These restrictions enable you to rent, sell, or delegate specific capabilities granted by your wallet and make commitments about its future state.”

The live proof-of-concept enforces an agreement that the NFT gets sent back to the owner after the rental period is over and does not let the renter transfer it elsewhere.

“We make use of this method in our demo, since we think it’s cool to see a high-value NFT transferred directly to an account you have some control over, and you get a copyright license to the NFT while you’re holding it,” he added.

Renting NFTs vs Traditional NFT Ownership: Liquefaction is Off-Chain

Unlike traditional wallet addresses, where sharing of seed phrase or private key leads to stealing of funds, Liquefaction lets you share specific capabilities of your account without sharing all of it, explains Austgen.

“You can hold assets (potentially permanently) in an account whose history belonged to someone else.”

He stressed that Liquefaction agreements are off-chain. This lets users swap control of assets without making a transaction on the blockchain where the assets are.

Rent a BAYC NFT by Entering Into an Agreement

When asked how “Take My Ape” maintains security and trustlessness, the team said that users enter into an agreement before renting a BAYC NFT.

“You lock yourself out of being able to transfer the NFT out of your account (thereby preventing someone from stealing it), and you also agree to allow the next person to sign a transaction through your account to transfer it out once your rental time is up.”

One of the challenges is that since Liquefaction is entirely off-chain, the team had to enable ways for participants to prove to the “Take My Ape” policy what happened on Ethereum and who currently holds the NFT there.

“There are many peculiarities when it comes to redesigning wallets under a different adversarial model,” said Austgen. “The way we implemented “Take My Ape”, you literally are signing a transaction from someone else’s account to send the NFT to your Liquefaction account, so we had to require that you have enough ether in your wallet to fund the transaction to get it to the next person.”

The project will be developed in five phases, ending with a public release on March 31, 2025, the official release read.