After over a decade, LimeWire is coming back, but it isn’t going to be the same LimeWire from the old music-stealing days. Gone are the days of LimeWire being a hub to download the music you want to listen to without the price tag. Entering the chat is the new LimeWire: an emerging NFT marketplace.
For those unfamiliar with the once-famed platform that is LimeWire, listeners spent hours searching for music and other content on the peer-to-peer file sharing platform. It was where many lived their best unofficial-DJ lives, creating playlists and burning CDs — serving as the go-to music service before we had to pay month-to-month on competing streaming services.
People are legitimately surprised to hear that the old-school service is coming back since shutting down in 2010. But what’s even more unexpected is how it’s coming back. However, given LimeWire once being a digital leader, when you think about, it makes sense for the company to return wanting a piece of the digital future. “The issue with the NFT market is that most platforms are decentralized,” Julian Zehetmayr told CNBC. “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.”
The NFT space, much like cryptocurrency, is quickly growing, and people want to make sure their investments are safe. Hence why LimeWire’s announcement is causing plenty of buzz.
Julian and his brother Paul Zehetmayr want LimeWire to focus on music and allow users to sell and trade rare items. LimeWire will list prices in USD instead of crypto but enable people to purchase tokens using credit cards.
“We’ve obviously got this great mainstream brand that everybody’s nostalgic about,” Julian told CNBC. “We thought we needed to build a real mainstream user experience as well.”
LimeWire’s Instagram page is live and has one post so far. You can now sign up to join the platform when it launches if NFTs are your thing.