NFTs have taken the world by storm. There are numerous NFTs that you can make with myriad of uses. Individuals are now spending home money for rock clipart. For creators right now, there is a gigantic opportunity in the economic world. People like Logan Paul have made $5 million in a week from it, and musicians like Grimes have also made millions selling NFTs to followers. So, you can now take a digital file, be it a jpeg, gif, mp3, or mp4, and you can “mint” it and sell it on an NFT marketplace. The process of “Minting” works similarly to a big safety deposit box that cannot be altered, taking the digital file and storing it on the Ethereum networkas a non-fungible token. The movement of this file can then be tracked at all times, ensuring that the original file can always be seen. With the emergence of blockchain technology, things like digital art, music, social media posts, quite literally anything you have online can be an original and therefore can have a tremendous amount of value. Jack Dorsey recently turned his first-ever tweet into an NFT and sold it for $2 million! There are multiple platforms online that make it incredibly easy to buy and sell digital assets such as NFTs.
OpenSea is a fast and reliable marketplace for NFTs. It allows creators to make their items on the blockchain usingOpenSea’s item minting which can later be used to make collections of NFTs for free, without the need for a single line of code. If you’re developing your smart contract for a game or a digital collectible, you can easily get added to an OpenSea. When listed, you can start an auction or set a buy now price like eBay. Furthermore, when you click on a user, you can see what they have bought and sold too. You can see past prices NFTs have gone for so it’s easy to see what’s going up and down in value. Cost-wise, you pay a commission when you make a sale which is currently 2.5% on OpenSea. The gas fee that you pay initially goes to the Ethereum network miners to keep the business going.The fee changes from time to time depending on “demand”.
Another platform called Rarible allows you to list your items and have them passed over to OpenSea too.This marketplace is all about communities owned by the community. The project was based in Moscow and was founded by Alex Salnikov and Alexei Falin in early 2020. It also has its coin which it hands out weekly to community members. Collectors can use Rarible to mint new NFTs, sell their creations, and show sneak peeks to Rarible members. This platform is a non-custodial marketplace, so users have complete custody of their assets. In addition to this, the platform also offers Intellectual property (IP) rights to users. Rarible buys and sells NFTs in categories like art, photography, games, metaverse, music, etc. It has a “Decentralized Autonomous Organization” (DAO) governance model, under which all decisions are taken by the platform users and for this, the RARI token: the inhouse token of the platform, plays an important role of governance and enables holders of RARI to vote for platform upgrades and participate in curation or moderation.
SuperRare is a selective platform founded in 2017 by John Crain, Charles Crain, and Johnathan Perkins. It has built a social network on top of their marketplace. As digital collectibles have a transparent record of ownership, they are perfect for a social environment. The social layer can make it easier to assess value around items in the marketplace. At the moment, SuperRare works with a small number of handpicked artists, however you can use a form to submit your artist profile and to get on their radar for their up-and-coming full launch. SuperRare also pays 10% of the transaction value as royalty to the original creator of the NFT.
Enjin Marketplace is the official marketplace for engine-based NFTs and has its coin and currency. Today, it has enabled $43 million of Enjin coin to be spent on digital assets involving 2.1 billion NFTs. You can use their Enjin wallet to easily lift and purchase gaming items and collectibles.
Foundation is a specialist platform designed to bring digital creators crypto natives and collectors together to move the culture forward. It calls itself the new creative economy and mainly focuses on digital art. In the first blog site on their website, they announced an open call for creators to experiment with crypto and play with the concept of value. They invited creators to hack, subvert, and manipulate the value of creative work. Whenever an NFT trades on Foundation, the artist makes 10% on that secondary transaction and resale.
ThetaDrop was created as an open-source blockchain platform in 2021. To be part of this platform, you must purchase the Theta Token which can later be stored in your crypto wallet. The marketplace predominantly focuses on gaming, esports, and entertainment, allowing NFT drops and auctions to be streamed live and increasing user engagement and interaction. What is also exciting is that Katy Perry will be dropping “The Roar Package” on ThetaDrop which would be a one-of-a-kind collectible for Katy Perry fans!
Nifty Gateway is a centralized, USD-based digital art online auction marketplace powered by the crypto exchange Gemini and controlled by the Winklevoss twins. It was founded in 2018 by Duncan and Griffin Cock Foster. It has sold NFTs by Beeple, Grimes, and many other top artists and musicians, making collections of limited edition, high-quality NFTs exclusively available on the platform. The platform lets you showcase your NFTs and transfer or collect them to external wallets. Nifty sales can also be made in fiat currency even though this may not be ideal for NFT collectors who prefer greater flexibility.
Mintable is a Singapore-based company that enables all types of creators such as photographers and musicians to create, mint, or sell NFTs with the benefits of ownership, immutability, and traceability. It has attracted investment from entrepreneur Mark Cuban and is now backed and financed by him. Mintable currently has 300,000 users and over 6 million visitors and is striving to become the world’s largest NFT marketplace by classifying and systemizing all Ethereum based NFTs.To participate in this platform, you must first have Ethereum.
The Axie marketplace is an online Ethereum based NFT platform created mainly for the video game Axie Infinity. Since 2018, nearly 1000 Axies have been sold and with an increasing popularity of the platform, more are being sold at a faster rate now. Players of the video game can buy and sell their Axies at auctions and use them in the game.
The NBA Top Shot Marketplace is used by the National Basketball Association and the Women’s National BasketballAssociation to release a scare number of Top Shots which include video clips and licensed match highlights for the fans in the non-traditional television. Users can sell a “moment” for a price of their choice. The platform has done about $7 million in sales so far and this is continuing to increase rapidly.
NFT Marketplaces are lately providing a lot of scope for digital creators and the newly rejuvenated economic environment. Pick the online marketplace that you find appropriate for yourself and showcase or invest in NFTs of your choice.
