A new partner has joined the RSK ecosystem - Carnaval. The highly-curated Iberoamerican NFT marketplace is an industry-first for minting unique artworks on Bitcoin with some of them being tied to physical art. Carnaval launched on RSK combines the security of Bitcoin’s blockchain, viewed as the most secure in the world. 

The minting of NFTs through Carnaval occurred with the help of Rootstock (RSK) and RSK Infrastructure Framework (RIF), a third layer protocol on Bitcoin. The Rootstock network is an open-source platform hosting smart contracts and decentralized applications and benefits from Bitcoin’s network security through merged mining. RIF offers decentralized protocols and services built using RSK smart contracts. Carnaval has integrated RIF’s marketplace engine, an open-source and fully audited suite of SDK libraries that significantly reduces time to market for decentralized marketplaces on Bitcoin. 

Carnaval is one of the enablers of the ongoing paradigm shift triggered by the introduction of non-fungible tokens. Users gain a new understanding of “ownership” while the Carnaval platform takes us to the next level as some of the NFTs will be related to physical pieces. A marketplace of tradeable digital assets - tokenized as NFTs - on top of Bitcoin combines security and trustworthiness.

The platform launched a unique collection called Carnaval Genesis Drop on April 6th at 10 am EST along with the BITCOIN GENESIS DROP - the 210 first NFTs of Iberoamerican art collection on top of the Bitcoin network. This collection will be released as 10,000 generative NFT PFPs that reflect the world-famous work of Magritte's Son of the Man. 

Moreover, Carnaval has secured sponsors - art museums and galleries - to help validate this art and allow its creators to tap into a new audience. By bringing traditional and established art world players into the fold, the artist’s artwork is put front and center.

The team behind Carnaval is a diverse group of founders with distinctively different backgrounds:

  • Adrian Garelik: Decades of experience in video streaming and online gaming, RSK co-founder, and founder/CEO of Flixxo.
  • Connie Ansaldi: 25 years of experience in media, startups, international speaker, personal branding expert, CEO Nuclear Branding, a key figure in the Latam art world.
  • Gus Balbontin: Former Lonely Planet CTO & Executive Director, Director at Neu21, Startup Victoria board member, a key figure in the Australian entrepreneurial ecosystem. 

"Carnaval is one of the most exciting projects in the crypto world today. It combines NFTs, Bitcoin, and the most talented artists of Ibero America under one roof. Carnaval is NFTs 2.0. This is why all those who buy any of the exclusive 210 art pieces from the Bitcoin Genesis Drop at Bitcoin 2022 at the same time will possess a piece of history." says Diego Gutierrez Zaldivar, IOVLabs CEO and Co-Founder of RSK.

Carnaval co-founder Connie Ansaldi adds:

“I’m incredibly excited to be part of this game-changing experience: creating new financial tools built on top of NFTs. This is the shaping of Ownership 3.0. The shaping of a legacy of transcendence. And the most beautiful thing is that we are empowering talented artists as well as reaching new audiences for this art. This opens a rabbit hole as infinite as the imagination can go. And maybe…beyond that, If you wanna make history, you have to be part of the story.”

Carnaval will serve as an invite-only platform. However, it will be accessible by anyone in the first week of launching to establish a broad community of supporters. All users who join the platform in the first week can invite a maximum of five new members per person. Additionally, all NFTs on the platform can be purchased with BTC and RBTC. 

About RSK

RSK is the most secure smart contract platform in the world, secured by Bitcoin's unparalleled hash power via merge-mining that adds value and functionality to the bitcoin ecosystem by enabling smart contracts, near-instant payments, and higher scalability.

The network scales to up to 100 transactions per second without sacrificing decentralization and reduces storage and bandwidth using probabilistic verification, fraud detection, and more. RSK Infrastructure Framework (RIF) is a suite of open and decentralized infrastructure protocols that enable faster, easier and scalable development of distributed applications (dApps) within a unified environment to enable mass adoption of Bitcoin and RSK.

For more information, visit rsk.com

Contact for the media:

Magdalena Wilma

magdalena.wilma@iovlabs.org