Compared with 10 mainstream NFT trading platforms, how should novice players choose?

Text | Edited by Nancy | Produced by Tong | PANews

Text | Edited by Nancy | Produced by Tong | PANews

No one expected that NFT (Non-Fungible Tokens) would move from niche circles to popularization so quickly. In the past few months, NBA superstar Kevin Durant, Grammy Award winner The Weeknd, famous Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, American Legendary Pictures, graphics software giant Adobe Photoshop, New York Times, Time Magazine ", GUCCi and other celebrities and famous companies are paying attention, and have even participated in NFT.

With the rapid increase of participants, various NFT platforms or projects are increasingly favored by capital. For example, the NFT trading platform OpenSea received US$23 million in financing led by top Internet venture capital A16Z, and the NFT development team Dapper Labs received Jordan, Durant Participated in financing of US$305 million, etc.

When NFT has become a topic of endless conversation inside and outside the encryption circle, the transaction scale of NFT is increasing day by day. Taking encrypted art as an example, according to data from Cryptoart.io, the current total value of encrypted art is about 490 million U.S. dollars, and a total of over 170,000 works have been sold. In March of this year alone, the total transaction volume of encrypted art platforms exceeded 200 million US dollars, a record high.

Nifty Gateway

The NFT trend is coming, and various NFT trading platforms with their own characteristics are also improving the NFT trading market from all aspects. When the new and old forces are in a melee, how to choose has become a difficult problem for novices. To this end, this article sorts out the characteristics of 10 mainstream NFT trading platforms, secondary sales fees, commissions, handling fees, etc., which may point the way for you as a novice.

Nifty Gateway is an NFT trading platform supported by Gemini Exchange, co-founded by twin brothers Duncan Cock Foster and Griffin Cock Foster. In addition to supporting cryptocurrencies, Nifty Gateway also provides fiat currency deposit channels. Users can purchase NFTs with credit or debit cards and cash them directly into bank accounts when selling. Currently, Nifty Gateway only allows U.S. users to withdraw fiat currency, and the same feature will be rolled out to international users in the future.

Cryptoart.io shows that in March 2021 alone, the transaction volume of Nifty Gateway exceeded 140 million US dollars. The rise of Nifty Gateway is largely due to the emphasis on cooperation with artists, and there is a special index for encrypted artists on its official website. At the same time, Nifty Gateway has also introduced heavyweight encrypted artists such as Beeple, FEWOCiOUS, and Jones, and it will cooperate with celebrities to issue exclusive NFTs about every three weeks. Of course, other artists can also apply for the issuance of NFT through the official website. During the creator’s sale process, Nifty Gateway charges a 5% sales fee for the first sale, 5% for the second sale, and a service fee of USD 0.3.

OpenSea

For collectors, they only need to complete email registration to conduct transactions on Nifty Gateway, and the platform does not charge any gas fees, only 10% of the bid amount will be charged when using credit card transactions; for creators , Nifty Gateway requires artists to submit a short video introduction with their application, along with their medium and long-term goals.

OpenSea is currently the largest NFT trading platform, covering various segments such as digital artwork, encrypted collectibles, game items, virtual land, and domain names.

In May 2018, OpenSea completed a $2 million seed round of financing, with investors including Blockchain Capital, 1confirmation, Founders Fund, Foundation Capital Chernin Group, Coinbase Ventures, Blockstack and Stable Fund;

In March 2021, OpenSea received US$23 million in Series A financing led by a16z, with the participation of Cultural Leadership Fund. Additionally, numerous angel investors including Ron Conway, Mark Cuban, Tim Ferriss, Belinda Johnson, Naval Ravikant and Ben Silberman also participated in the round.

Compared with other NFT trading platforms, OpenSea is more "people-friendly". Anyone can create and sell NFT for free, and there is no need to pay any gas fees when selling. However, a gas fee is required when initializing an OpenSea account for the first time or after the product is sold. Not long ago, OpenSea revealed that it will integrate the Ethereum Layer 2 solution Immutable X, which means that users' transactions in OpenSea will no longer require Gas fees.

MakersPlace

When creators successfully mint NFTs without Gas fees, OpenSea will charge a commission of 2.5% after each successful sale, and some game developers will charge 7.5% of the transaction amount. The creator can set the copyright fee for the secondary sale of the product by himself, and the developer or creator can receive the secondary income every two weeks. With the automatic execution of this process in the future, the income will be obtained immediately.

MakersPlace is an established encrypted art platform. In April 2019, MakersPlace announced the completion of a $2 million seed round led by private equity fund Uncork Capital, with participation from Abstract Ventures, Draper Dragon Fund, Pinterest, Coinbase, Facebook and Zillow.

MakersPlace strictly controls the quality of encrypted artwork, and currently only accepts invitations (you can also try to apply). MakersPlac will generate blockchain fingerprints for each NFT work of artists and creators to prove the source and identity of the work and make it a symbol of the uniqueness of the artwork. Even if the work is reproduced, there will never be a true original signed copy.

For creators, MakersPlace is also a low-threshold platform. MakersPlace can generate ERC-20 tokens for them to trade works only by providing a photo ID. However, although MakersPlace is free to use, all transaction fees must be paid by the creator or collector himself.

In order to allow creators to understand the popularity of their works more intuitively, MakersPlace has introduced social functions, and creators can analyze through functions such as "viewing volume" and "favorite". At the same time, MakersPlace also provides each creator with a unique digital wallet to store their own works.

When a creator sells a work, MakersPlace will charge 15% of the final sale price of the work as a commission, and the remaining 85% will go to the creator. Every time a work is sold secondary, MakersPlace will charge a fixed 5% of the royalties as a service fee, and creators will get 10% of the royalties. Of course, there will be an additional 2.9% fee paid to the platform for any item sold via credit card, whether it’s the first or second sale.

Rarible

Currently, MakersPlace accepts credit card, Paypal, and Ethereum payments.

Rarible is a community-driven open source, non-custodial platform that allows any user to create and display their own works, and owns the ownership of NFT.

In 2021, Rarible completed a seed round of financing of US$1.75 million, with investors including 1kx, Coinbase Ventures, Parafi Capital, CoinFund, etc.

Compared to other trading platforms, Rarible is more decentralized. In 2020, Rarible issued the governance token RARI. The introduction of the token greatly improved the sales process and sales conditions, and greatly increased Rarible's transaction volume through the "transaction is mining" gameplay. In addition to issuing RARI token rewards to platform traders every week, Rarible also allows the most active creators and collectors on the platform to vote for platform upgrades through its governance token creators and collectors, and participate in management and auditing.

SuperRare

Rarible's minting fees are borne by the creators themselves, and the royalties are also set by the creators themselves. The default amounts are 10%, 20% and 30%, and a 2.5% service fee will be charged in the first sale.

SuperRare is a social networking platform for art creators and collectors. Its smart contract platform allows artists to release limited-edition digital art collections tracked on the chain, which are rare, verifiable and worthy of collection.

In March 2021, SuperRare completed a $9 million Series A round of financing led by VelvetSea and 1confirmation, followed by Mark Cuban, Chamath Palihapitiya, and Marc Benioff.

SuperRare has strict review standards for artists. If artists want to enter SuperRare, they need to apply to the platform. Only the original creators who have passed the review can sell NFT, and they cannot be tokenized elsewhere on the Internet. At the same time, SuperRare also conducts a weekly review of artists.

Of course, under strict requirements, SuperRare also has a good incentive mechanism for encrypted artists. Regardless of the initial price, artists can receive 10% of each transaction price as royalties.

VIV3

On the SuperRare platform, it will charge a 15% commission on the initial sale and a 3% fee (paid by the buyer) on the secondary sale.

VIV3 is the first comprehensive NFT market on Flow, the underlying platform of the recent fire, and one of its most notable features is composability.

On VIV3, all works of each creator are forged by their own blockchain smart contracts. Under this mechanism, any application in the Flow ecosystem can directly integrate with the contracts of individual artists without affecting the entire market pool. This enables countless new use cases to be built on top of a single asset or collection, unlocking unprecedented experiences.

Zora

Creators can create NFTs on VIV3 without Gas fees, and VIV3's NFT casting costs and profits come from the 12.5% ​​service fee charged on the first and second sales. In addition to receiving 87.5% of the income, creators can also receive 10% as royalties.

Zora offers limited edition tokenized products and is an invitation-only crypto art platform. In October 2020, Zora completed a $2 million seed round led by Kindred Ventures, with participation from individuals or institutions including Trevor McFedries, Alice Lloyd George, Jeff Staple and Coinbase Ventures.

According to Zora's rules, each newly joined artist has 3 invitation quotas, and can invite friends or other artists. In February of this year, Zora introduced a verification mechanism to support artists to apply to join Zora.

Foundation

In Zora, creators can set a "creator share", which is their percentage of all future sales. These revenues will be paid automatically and auditable through smart contracts.

Unlike other "application review system" platforms, Foundation is an invitation-only NFT art platform, and only the works of invited artists can be put on the shelves.

The Foundation adopts a community-led curation model, first by inviting 50 artists to the platform, and then presenting 2 invitation codes to these artists. When the resident creator successfully sells an original work on the platform, he will get two invitation quotas and can invite newcomers. And if the invitee also successfully sells the first work, he can also get 2 invitation codes. This is similar to the gameplay of the voice social software Clubhouse. It is worth mentioning that if the artist maliciously buys and sells the invitation code, he will be deprived of the permanent entry qualification.

In addition to peer-to-peer invitations, "Community Upvote" is a new way to enter. All Twitter-certified community members can get 5 votes to support 5 artists who can be settled after joining "Community Upvote". The top 50 artists can join Foundation creates NFTs. However, the Foundation does not rule out using "Community Upvote" as the main way for creators to settle in in the future.

In addition to the special invitation mechanism, Foundation's sales mechanism is also special. Artists need to set a reserve price when uploading a work. After the first bid, the work will automatically start a 24-hour auction.

KnownOrigin

The NFT generated on the Foundation will be automatically issued on OpenSea, which will charge a 15% service fee after the work is successfully sold, and the remaining 85% will belong to the creator. Foundation will charge 10% service fee for the second sale, while the creator can permanently get 10% as royalties, and OpenSea will pay once every 1 to 2 weeks.

KnownOrigin is an old-fashioned encrypted art platform. Due to its unlimited model, a large number of artists apply, and it has currently suspended applications. The investor of KnownOrigin is BlockRocket, a European blockchain development laboratory.

According to the regulations of KnownOrigin, creators can upload one work every 24 hours after successful application. When the work is sold for the first time, KnownOrigin will charge a 15% service fee, and the creator will get 85% of the income; in the second sale, the platform will charge a 2.5% service fee, and the creator will get 12.5% ​​of the income, and the seller get 85% of the income.

Async Art

Of course, if the creator cooperates with other artists, he can pre-set the percentage of each sale when NFT is minted, such as 10%, 25%, 50%, etc.

The work of Async Art is composed of two parts: "Master" and "Layer".

After the creator applies to become an Async artist, he doesn't need any programming knowledge, he only needs to cut the work into layers during the process of uploading the work. In the sale of works, creators can set "buy now" or "open auction", and the auction end time is up to them.

After the creator applies to become an Async artist, he doesn't need any programming knowledge, he only needs to cut the work into layers during the process of uploading the work. In the sale of works, creators can set "buy now" or "open auction", and the auction end time is up to them.