How does it work?

Before getting into “how to,” let’s have a quick overview of the IQ concept of renting.

One of the main issues IQ Protocol addresses is: an asset owner has to be guaranteed that they will have their asset back in specific cases (for instance, when the renting is finished). To address this issue, IQ Protocol introduces Warpers, which are special NFTs that behave like the original but are also rentable in a way users expect. Once a Warper is created, the overall renting process may be thought of as this simplified diagram shows:

First, an original asset owner makes a listing, which means “ok, my asset is now inside a Vault contract; anybody interested may rent it on certain terms.” When another user rents the asset, they are provided with its rentable version, called a Warped Asset. This token is minted on Warper for the renter by IQ Protocol. The renter owns the Warped Asset until the rental period expires.

Terms disambiguation

To avoid ambiguities and to stress that the protocol is not limited to ERC721, we avoid using the term "NFT." Instead, we distinguish collections and instances (assets), calling them:

Original Collection – a smart-contract that is also a collection of digital assets (such as ERC721 = NFT, ERC1155, and so on) that are supposed to become rentable;
Original Asset – a token (an instant) of an Original Collection that’s produced by minting (this is something that users in fact own; in the case of ERC721, each one has an id);
Warper – a special IQ smart-contract that is deployed per Original Collection and makes Original Assets in that collection listable in an IQVerse (and, once listed, rentable);
Warped Asset – is an asset that a renter gets and that inherits various properties of the Original Asset being rented (including the id in the case of ERC721).

This can be summarized in the following diagram:

Economy

A lister is the one who makes an asset available for renting, but there are two more stakeholders that make it possible: the service (which deployed the Original Collection and the Warper for it) and IQ Protocol itself. The rental fee is composed of:

Lister Fee – set by the lister when listing;
IQVerse Fee – set by the IQVerse owner and based on Lister Fee (e.g., 5% from Lister Fee);
IQ Protocol Fee – similar to IQVerse Fee, but is set by the IQ Protocol.

Once the Original Asset owner sets their fee, other fees are calculated, and the total fee is shown to those who want to rent. When one rents the asset, the fee they pay is passed to the stakeholders.