Coinbase is jumping into the NFT craze! The cryptocurrency exchange announced Tuesday it plans to launch an NFT marketplace that lets users mint, collect and trade NFTs, or nonfungible tokens. Users can sign up to a waitlist for early access to the feature, the company said.
The NFT market has been booming since the beginning of this year. There is no indication that the market will slow down anytime soon. According to DappRadar, NFT sales volume has topped $10 billion in the third quarter alone. The entrance of Coinbase into the NFT market could further lead to even more inflated prices in the burgeoning NFT market.
In a blog post, Coinbase said, “Today, we’re announcing Coinbase NFT, a peer-to-peer marketplace that will make minting, purchasing, showcasing, and discovering NFTs easier than ever. Just as Coinbase helped millions of people access Bitcoin for the first time in an easy and trusted way — we want to do the same for the NFTs.”
Coinbase said its decision to get into the NFT market was driven by the ambition to empower creators to own, control, and benefit from their creations, particularly in the digital world. “Our ambition with Coinbase NFT is to allow everyone to benefit from their creative spark; to contribute to a future where the “creator economy” isn’t a small subset of the “real” economy, but a central driver,” Coinbase said.
But a more practical motivation for Coinbase is probably because of a truckload of money being made by the other platforms currently dominating the NFT space. For example, OpenSea takes a 2.5% fee from every sale made on its platform, which equates to about roughly $75 million considering the platform is handling billions of dollars in turnover every month.
The digital art market has exploded in recent months after the report of a single piece of a non-fungible token (NFT) art sold at Christie’s Auction for a record-setting $69.3 million, making it the most expensive digital art ever sold. Since the beginning of 2021, the digital art world has been dominated by human artists, musicians, and creators.
Coinbase is not the only company looking to get a share of the NFT market. In August, payments giant Visa also jumped on the NFT bandwagon after it revealed it bought CryptoPunk,” one of the thousands of non-fungible token (NFT)-based digital avatars for $165,000.
Coinbase NFT is creative and creator first
Coinbase said the NFT marketplace, called Coinbase NFT, will make it effortless for artists to maintain creative control through decentralized contracts and metadata transparency. The marketplace would also include “social features” and tap into the so-called creator economy, a term used to describe the world of people who make money posting videos and other content online.
Coinbase said the initial launch will support Ethereum based ERC-721 and ERC-1155 standards with multi-chain support planned soon after.
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