If you have been among those who thought of the NFT ecosystem as a bubble, you got it wrong. Innovative uses of NFTs have been emerging of late, helping develop a separate economy around these tokens. NFT marketplaces are an intrinsic part of the economy and play a large role in keeping the wheels running.
Peek into 2021 and you will find figures related to the NFT transactions mind-boggling. Musician 3LAU worked with a startup to set up a platform for selling his new album as an NFT and got for it a whopping price of $11.6 million. A tokenized digital artwork of Beeple, a visual artist, got sold for $69 million. These figures have now become stuff of folklore!
Of late, prominent personalities from different walks of life have joined the NFT bandwagon. These are as broad as music, entertainment, fashion, music, consumer products, and more. More people have been trying to figure out novel ways to engage with NFTs and profit in the process. Some sellers have set up their own NFT marketplaces. However, partnering with a third-party platform is generally more feasible for the purpose. It helps slash upfront costs, provide a string of add-on services such as marketing and tech support, and offer access to a large customer base.
Understanding what an NFT marketplace is:
NFT marketplaces are built around the concept of the scarcity of the content i.e. the content available is limited in quantity, making it valuable enough for valuable ownership and trading. To establish the authenticity of digital content, the marketplace uses the blockchain technology. Ownership can be verified without doubt because of the very nature of blockchain technology. This is quite like a conventional auction house verifying that a particular art piece is original and not a replica.
Some marketplaces have the ability to burn items, which means dispatching these items to addresses where they will become irretrievable. Thanks to smart contracts, the marketplaces earn from automatically sharing a percentage of revenue from the second-hand sales of the NFTs.
For anyone, partnering with the right marketplace is key to unlock new revenue streams. However, in a new technology like NFTs, finding the right marketplace is always going to be a difficult decision.
Current NFT marketplaces
Broadly, NFT marketplaces can be segregated into two categories — streamlined and augmented.
Streamlined marketplaces roll out a wide array of NFTs and sellers get generic but more limited services. Augmented marketplaces offer services in a particular niche and sellers can avail of deeper services.
Platforms like OpenSea and Rarible fall into the category of streamlined marketplaces, offering auctions as well as fixed-price sales for a broad range of NFTs. Working on these platforms is quite like eBay. These platforms have all the infrastructure to accept payments in both fiat and crypto. Thanks to the sheer number of services they offer, these platforms have quite large user bases despite the fact that they offer minimal additional services.
Augmented marketplaces focus on narrow niches like sports collectibles and visual arts. They offer value-added services such as minting, curation, portfolio trackers, pricing recommendations, marketing, etc. Even full-fledged games might be built on top of NFTs. SuperRare is a fine example of augmented marketplaces, focusing only on visual art and offering a great range of curation and recommendation services.
Augmented platforms require more resources to develop a set of customized tools and experiences. This explains why these platforms tend to have a higher transaction fee. On streamlined marketplaces, transaction fee is low, but sellers need to arrange for their own resources for any specific services.
Are current NFT marketplaces good enough?
The NFT ecosystem is developing rapidly and what was advanced a few years before has become antique today. No more are NFTs just about art pieces or sports shots. Rather, NFTs have emerged to be brickstones of the metaverses and P2E games. In metaverses, all objects you see, right from the avatars to virtual land, are NFTs. Similarly, game items such as weapons, magical stuff, etc. are NFTs as well and can be sold outside the platform.
This, however, requires marketplaces the metaverses and P2E games can integrate with in a seamless manner.
Next gen NFT marketplaces
New age next generation NFT marketplaces are multichain web 3 platforms supporting metaverse, gaming and NFT economy. Metaverses bring together virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and several other technologies, the metaverses are venues of socialization, entertainment and wealth generation. However, they can’t function in the absence of advanced NFT marketplaces.
P2E games have been a revelation as well, taking the gameverse beyond the age of free-to-play and pay-to-play games. Economy of P2E games, however, is based on NFTs. Players buy or earn these NFTs in the form of various objects, and might want to take them outside the game platform to another one. Or they might simply want to sell them.
Next gen marketplaces have the technical wherewithal to support metaverses and P2E games.
The web 3.0 element
While NFT marketplaces should be compatible with web 2.0, based on the prevalent client-server model, they should be capable of working with web 3.0 technologies like IPFS (inter-planetary file system).
Web 3.0 is the next iteration of the internet and it is a given that web 2.0 technologies will gradually give way to it. Semantic web is the future and an NFT marketplace needs to work well with both iterations of the Internet to minimize issues for the users.
Public blockchains are a strong component of Web 3.0 as decentralized, trustless solutions. NFTs, metaverse, gaming — all innovative products of a new-age economy will be integral parts of Web 3.0.
Characteristics of a next gen NFT marketplace
Only a state-of-the-art marketplace can facilitate whitelisting of NFT drops by metaverse projects. Top marketplaces support seamless trading of NFTs, offering the right environment for distribution and trading of tokens. P2E gaming platform can also secure whitelisting of their NFTs, helping them obtain incessant trading.
Advanced NFT marketplaces feature trustless NFT trading executed by smart contracts on each integrated blockchain. This enables the users to safely discover, buy or sell any NFT sans exposure. Such a marketplace also has a full range of statistical and historical capabilities, meaning users can view the entire history of all NFTs they want.
Other features you can expect are event audited smart contracts, multi-wallet with integrations, advanced token search, and filters, among others.
Wrapping up
Response to NFT technologies has been massive and people/organizations from all walks of life have joined the bandwagon, taking the prices of NFT to soaring levels. Working around the concept of the eternity of content, NFT marketplaces can broadly be segregated into two categories — streamlined and augmented.
Streamlined marketplaces offer sellers a wide range of NFTs but not a lot of value-added services. On the other hand, augmented marketplaces roll out deep services in a particular niche.
In the advent of a rapidly changing technological environment, currently popular NFT marketplaces will soon find themselves replaced with the next generation avatars of themselves. Compatible with web 2.0 as well as web 3.0, these marketplaces enable the metaverses and P2E games to integrate seamlessly. Users on these platforms can take their NFTs to the marketplace in a frictionless manner and sell it. Next gen NFT marketplaces have a big role to play in creating the economy of these new age platforms.
Characteristics of an advanced NFT marketplace include whitelisting of NFT drops, multi-wallet with integrations, decentralized NFT wallet, and multi-wallet support with integration.
While platforms like OpenSea and Rarible have become sort of buzzwords, there is no denying the fact that next gen platforms have been emerging with tons of features and ready for the walkover, so better brace for it.
About Unicus:
An inter-chain marketplace enabling NFT traders to go on a no-bar trading binge, Unicus enables you to hook into the full potential of NFTs. A string of sophisticated tools, backed by fully audited contracts, allows you to discover, mint, buy or sell NFTs with alacrity and convenience. You cannot just transfer tokens to other blockchains with ease but also explore the full history of NFTs. In an ecosystem contoured by limitations, Unicus brings in complete transparency, inter-chain operability and seamless functional efficiency.
