What is Immutable X?

Immutable X is a layer 2 protocol for trading Ethereum NFTs that gives users instant trade confirmation, huge scalability, and zero gas fees without compromising user ownership.
Immutable X’s goal is to make minting and trading NFTs easier than on other platforms, such as Opensea for example, on which fees can be extremly high.

What is a "Layer 2"?
Layer-2 refers to a network or technology that operates on top of an underlying blockchain protocol to improve its scalability and efficiency.
This category of scaling solutions entails shifting a portion of a blockchain protocol’s transactional burden to an adjacent system architecture, which then handles the brunt of the network’s processing and only subsequently reports back to the main blockchain to finalize its results. By abstracting the majority of data processing to auxiliary architecture, the base layer blockchain becomes less congested — and ultimately more scalable.

Quick presentation of Immutable X and its team
The Immutable X marketplace was created at the end of March, 2021.
It has an ERC-20 token named IMX, which will be used for governance, paying transaction fees (like Binance and its BNB), and staking.
The staking process will be automatic as soon as a user holds IMX and has voted for a proposal or held an NFT in the previous 30 days.
More information about the IMX token on Immutable X official website.

The team behind Immutable X is composed by three persons:
James Ferguson (Co-Founder) from the University of Sydney. After getting involved with Ethereum in 2015, his brother Robbie and him fell down the rabbit hole and since then have built the world’s first multiplayer blockchain game, the first blockchain TCG and the first zk-rollup for NFTs.

Robbie Ferguson (Co-Founder), brother of James previously mentionned, has previously built an automated capital gains tax platform at KPMG which was licensed to Australia’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. Robbie believes that future generations will spend most of their waking hours in virtual reality, and wants to ensure the digital worlds they live in are as economically meaningful as the one we currently inhabit.

Alex Connolly (CTO), has been passionate about in-game assets his entire life. At 9, he wrote scripts to gather pricing data from the Runescape grand exchange. At 13, he was the top contributor to the largest TF2 item pricing website in the world, while playing as a semi-pro at the same time. Alex became involved in the Ethereum open-source ecosystem in 2017, building a blockchain agnostic programming language for smart contract VMs. He joined Immutable after meeting James at the University of Sydney.
In April 2019, Alex popularised the most scalable system for creating NFTs then designed, which has been used to create millions of Gods Unchained cards with no network impact on Ethereum, now commonly referred to as “batched minting.”

How does Immutable X works?
Immutable X uses a process called a "ZK Rollup", which takes thousands of off-chain trades, creates a proof that these trades were all valid (owners of the assets signed the trades), and then publishes that proof on chain, where it is then verified by a smart contract.

Throughout this process, the on-chain user assets are held in the smart contract and can only be released after a valid proof including the assets has been published in a batch.

What about the other NFT marketplaces?
This all sounds great, but how about trading NFTs on other platforms such as OpenSea or Rarible, for example?
Immutable X allows users to trade whatever they want to trade, wherever they want to trade it.

As of now, Ethereum is the blockchain that is the most decentralized, has the best developer and community support, and is the chain which nearly every ICO has originally been drafted from.

Ultimately, the most important thing that Immutable X has done is create a solution that is not competing with Ethereum, rather it is built on top of Ethereum, ensuring that users still benefit from all the advantages which the Ethereum mainchain offers.