Key Takeaways:
- Nifty Gateway is a walled garden of NFT marketplaces.
- Rarible is one of the few NFT marketplaces with its own utility and governance token, called RARI.
- Foundation’s focus is on organically created artworks. Specifically, coming out of a community that is more collaborative than competitive.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are steadily revolutionizing the art world. Ahead of any other function, NFTs enable digital artists to track their work. No matter how many times it is sold on the secondary market.
Before NFTs, it wasn’t possible to get royalties so easily and without a middleman.
Now that the global market for NFT has reached $22 billion and is starting to be accepted by most people. Both artists and NFT traders are looking for the best place to mint new NFTs and buy them.
OpenSea still controls the entire NFT market with a $13.25 billion trading volume. Which is more than all others combined.
While it is true that every artist wants to get most exposure for their work. There is a reason why art galleries in the physical world are exclusive and diverse.
By the same token, one has to pick the NFT marketplace with the best “vibe,” instead of following the numbers. After all, for NFT whales, exclusivity and unique vibe may be preferred over OpenSea’s mass-market appeal.
So, with that in mind, here are the top 3 NFT marketplaces. Each of which is aimed at a different group of people and offers different benefits.
Different NFT Marketplaces
1. Nifty Gateway
Owned by the US-exclusive crypto exchange, Gemini, the Winklevoss twins have made Nifty Gateway even more exclusive, but in a good way. If you have heard of record-breaking NFT sales, it likely happened on Nifty Gateway.
Here are some of them to give you an idea of how Nifty’s curation works.
- Iconic Crypto Queen NFT by former reality TV star Paris Hilton and Blake Kathyn, sold for $1,111,211.
- Gunky’s Uprising NFT by electronic musician Justin David Blau, aka 3LAU, sold for $1.3 million, among over $11 million other tightly animated, surreal, minimalist, and abstract NFTs.
- Ocean Front and Crossroads NFTs, by Mike Winkelmann aka Beeple, achieving $6 million and $6.6 million, respectively.
- Most recently, Nifty Gateway hosted the biggest NFT sale ever. Titled the Merge, the NFT project was created by the pseudonymous artist(s) Pak. Over 28,000 buyers bought 266,445 units of mass, as digital tokens altogether worth $91.8 million.
The Merge has a unique twist, not yet seen on NFT auctions. As the name implies, after each secondary sale, the NFT merges with the tokens already present in the holder’s wallet.
This adds up the Mass value, as the scarcity of the tokens increases. The artist explained it as a “game of extinction”.
Merge is a game of extinction.
— Pak (@muratpak) November 29, 2021
Each secondary sale merges what you get with what you already have, reducing the total quantity of tokens.
Collect mass.
Merge mass.
Consume mass.
Merge is a very inclusive Open Edition with collector early access and future $ASH utility.
⚫⚫ pic.twitter.com/Wwrw9tobUS
As you can see, Nifty Gateway hosts NFT minters of all kinds: musicians, artists, and celebrities. Their NFTs, called Nifties, use the largest smart contract platform — Ethereum.
As a curated platform that attracts unique or accomplished artists. Nifty Gateway is also the only one that allows you to buy NFTs with fiat currency (USD) via credit cards. So you don’t even have to make a fiat-crypto conversion.
Nifty Gateway is a walled garden of NFT marketplaces. Even to the point of storing users’ NFTs, so they don’t have to bother.
Among the already listed notable authors are Carl Cox, A$sap Rocky, Grimes, Deadmau5, Trevor Jones, Kenny Scharf, and Lil Yachty.
Even though most of the authors are musicians, the art at the NFT is both traditional and new. As long as the artists have something to bring to the Nifty Gateway’s exclusive table.
Because of this VIP status, Nifty Gateway has a wider range of NFT auctions. Including lottery-style draws, open edition sales, global offers, and online silent auctions with blind bids. For these services, Nifty takes a cut of 5% + 30 cents of every secondary sale.
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2. Rarible
Rarible is one of the few NFT marketplaces with its own utility and governance token, called RARI.
With a plan to create a completely decentralized platform structure known as DAO. The holders of RARI tokens have the power to vote on the development of Rarible.
This makes it the opposite of Nifty Gateway. Which is an NFT marketplace with no curation or other entry barriers.
By trading on Rarible, users have the opportunity to earn RARI tokens. With 75,000 RARI distributed on a weekly basis. Taking blockchain integration even further. Rarible has expanded to include three blockchains: Ethereum, Flow, and Tezos.
This will go a long way for traders who wish to avoid Ethereum’s enormous gas fees. The difference is quite dramatic as Tezos asks for only a few cents vs. Ethereum’s volatile gas fee up to $100 or more.
With that said, Rarible doesn’t boast many celebrity heavyweights. Its best features are its great search and filtering tools, quick interface, and many NFT categories, including one for NSFW.
In other words, Rarible is more focused on the secondary market. Thanks to its RARI reward system and minimal gas fees.
However, there are some notable names you may be familiar with: Jenni Pasanen, Kelly Richardson, John Karel, Portrait XO, Alex Crouwers, Memo Akten, Des Lucréce, The Bade Lament, and Joanie Lemercier.
With both sellers and buyers giving Rarible a 2.5% cut, Rarible is a solid choice and will become so.
Case in point, Canadian video gaming giant Ubisoft launched its NFT marketplace Quartz for its upcoming triple-A games.
It is also based on the Tezos blockchain precisely because of its energy efficiency and minimal gas cost. Likewise, big corporations have seen Rarible in this light. Yum!
The owners of Taco Bell franchise, and digital powerhouse Adobe. Have picked Rarible as their go-to NFT marketplace.
Adobe’s partnership is of particular importance because the company had recently made it possible to create NFTs with Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite.
In conclusion, Rarible may not give off an air of exclusivity, but it more than makes up for it with more features.
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3. Foundation
If you prefer the embodiment of a minimalist design. Foundation is the NFT marketplace to visit. Also running on Ethereum, Foundation’s focus is on organically created artworks. Specifically, coming out of a community that is more collaborative than competitive.
Foundation’s featured gallery reflects this spirit by showing off a lot of NFT projects that are about social activism.
So, it shouldn’t be a surprise that one of Foundation’s best-selling books was about Edward Snowden. The world’s most famous whistleblower who showed how the US surveillance system was being abused in huge ways. Snowden sold the piece, titled Stay Free, for $5.4 million in April.
But, not anyone can join the Foundation collective. A prospective NFT creator has to be invited by the community. Which implies some level of notoriety on social media as an entry barrier.
Moreover, given that Foundation is based in San Francisco. People who might run for office should be expected to be on the left side of politics.
Is Investing in NFTs a Good Idea?
No matter which NFT marketplace you pick. It bears keeping in mind that NFTs are illiquid assets, like physical artwork. This implies that a bought NFT cannot be as easily resold for a higher price tag.
There would have to be a wider audience that to tap into to make it happen. And the width of that audience depends on the cultural or memetic potential of the NFT in question.
Also, metaverse NFTs are a different kind of NFT. They are much more valuable and easier to resell. The reason for this is simple.
Such metaverse NFTs — creatures or land plots — are within a contained, evolving universe that is thematically unified. These are Axie Infinity, Decentraland, The Sandbox, Star Atlas, and many others.
In contrast, an NFT as general artwork is dispersed, not belonging to any ecosystem holding other utilities, such as gaming or staking. Therefore, their market traction is more likely to be less sustainable.
LEARN MORE: What Is An NFT? Finally We’ve Made An Easy Guide
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