Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, are unique digital assets that are equivalent to digital certificates of authenticity, are verified using blockchain technology, and can be sold in the digital world.
NFT markets exist to buy and sell non-fungible tokens or digital assets, and can be of different types, shapes, and sizes. NFTs are unique digital items on the blockchain and can be, for example, a collectible card, a work of art, and also a virtual land or a sword within an online game.
NFT stands for non-fungible token, it functions as a certificate of ownership attached to a digital product – a music, collectibles, digital art, digital trading cards, crypto art, an image, a video, or other digital goods. In the world of physical goods, it would be equivalent to the deed to a house.
So, simply put, NFTs are tokens generated from a blockchain and serve to give a specific item a sort of unique identity, like an official rare item seal.
It is considered crypto-active: it carries with it the promise of being worth something in the future, which differentiates it from a cryptocurrency, which has a daily price quote (like Bitcoin (BTC), for example). Its trading takes place on a decentralized Internet network called Ethereum (from the cryptocurrency Ether), where information is recorded and secured by cryptography. But other blockchains like Flow, and the Binance Smart Chain (BSC) also support non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
The most common token standard for NFTs is ERC-721, while ERC-1155 was added recently. However, with the emergence of alternatives to Ethereum, the token standard has also been copied for different blockchains. On the Tron blockchain for example, there is the TRC-721 protocol standard, while Binance Smart Chain supports the BEP-721 and BEP-1155 protocol. In addition, Wax and Flow have their own standards for NFTs.
Consequently, non-fungible tokens created under the ERC-721 standard solve the interchangeability problem. Unlike cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (Ether), where all tokens are created equal, each non-fungible token (NFT) is unique and limited in quantity. The latest and most sophisticated standard is ERC-1155. This allows a single contract to contain both fungible tokens as well as non-fungible tokens, opening up a whole range of new possibilities for the new creative economy.
What are NFT marketplaces?
NFT marketplaces are online platforms where digital art collectors and cryptocurrency enthusiasts can buy any digital item, and digital artists can create, and sell their own digital artworks for fixed prices or at auction.
How to create NFTs?
Several platforms allow the creation of NFTs, with OpenSea and Rarible being the most widely used. The former is free and the latter charges a commission for placing the NFT on the market. Obviously, both apply fees in ETH for transactions.
There are four steps one can follow to create such a token:
- The first step is to connect your digital wallet directly to the platform. Being digital tokens, NFTs are obviously stored in cryptographic wallets. Therefore, you will need a cryptocurrency wallet that supports Ethereum and can easily connect to NFT markets. Metamask is the best known, but you can use any other.
- Next, it is time to create your digital art , keeping in mind that any digital object can be minted as an NFT, as long as the file to be used is not copyrighted.
- The next step is to mint your NFT , which must be accompanied by an image, a name, a description and some other fields that will identify the collection. You can mint your token under ERC standard 721 or 1155.
- Finally, take the NFT token you have created to the NFT marketplace, a process that can take a few minutes. After your NFT token is released, it will be shown to the Internet public with its selling price in ETH, details of its creator, who owns it, and its sales history.
It should be remembered that NFTs are tokens on a Blockchain, so creating one entails, in most cases, an expense. This is because any transfer on the Blockchain implies a cost for that network. Most of the NFT market is currently built on the Ethereum Blockchain, where the network fee for tokenizing your art is called gas.
How much does it cost to create NFTs?
Platforms based on the Ethereum network charge a transaction fee, these fees are called ” Gas “.
Ethereum gas is simply an amount of Ether needed to perform a certain function on the Ethereum blockchain. In this case, it would be a matter of adding a new NFT to the market.
How to sell NFTs?
If you want to make a sale of your own non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on an online platform, you need to locate them in your own collection, click on them, and find the “sell” button.
Clicking on it takes you to a pricing page where you can set the terms of the sale, including whether to hold an auction or sell for a fixed price.
Ether and other tokens of the ERC-20 standard are the most commonly used cryptocurrencies for which you can accept as payment when selling your NFTs. However, some platforms only support the native token of the blockchain on which they were created. VIV3 , for example, is a marketplace created on the Flow blockchain and only accepts FLOW tokens.
Auctions make sense for NFTs, since scarcity is what creates value in this market. However, since not every artist has a fan base capable of bankrolling an auction, there is also the possibility of limited sales, in which there are a limited number of copies of an NFT available, each at a single or fixed price. Once minted on the blockchain, NFTs cannot be changed. This gives a strong sense of ownership and permanence.
Royalties allow NFT creators to earn a commission each time the asset is sold on the secondary market. This has the potential to automatically create lifetime passive income streams for artists and other content creators through smart contracts.
List of top NFT marketplaces
Listing your digital artworks on a marketplace sometimes requires a fee to complete the process. While this is not the case on all platforms, this should be taken into consideration when creating the NFT.
There are different marketplaces that cater to different types of NFT collections. From general and specific non-fungible tokens such as games or art, there are marketplaces to cater to all audiences in all sorts of different niches.
These are the top NFT platforms
OpenSea is the largest marketplace for digital assets at the moment, including rare
digital artwork, digital collectibles, online game items, digital art, and other digital assets. OpenSea is a decentralized marketplace based on the Ethereum network, and offers trading via a smart contract, which means that no central authority ever has custody of your items.
With thousands upon thousands of products registered on the platform, OpenSea allows anyone to buy and sell crypto collectibles, gaming items, digital art, and other blockchain-based digital items, offering different projects.
This marketplace is one of the most popular places where the most followed artists like Beeple, Grimes, LOGIK and other NFT artists have decided to release their own artwork. You can take a look at each artist profile, registered on the platform, and use the search engine or view different exhibitions online. Within each of the works you will see how much it costs or the editions that exist, for example. You can see all available editions, the highest bid, the last sale. Just tap the “Discover” option to find many of the popular works or “Drop” to discover all kinds of digital artists. The site describes NFTs as “Nifties”, tradable, collectible digital assets that you can trade or sell on this platform.
One of the best and most popular marketplaces for NFTs is Foundation. This marketplace focuses on the new creative economy based on NFT art, and at the moment, you can only sell your artwork after you have been invited by a user or community members. By default, all works are sold in auctions, and the platform also allows secondary sales. Therefore, the Foundation is an ideal place to collect artwork directly from the artists themselves. However, as an artist, you will need to connect with your audience or have a pretty solid fan base before you can sell anything on the Foundation platform.
SuperRare was one of the best crypto art platforms in 2020. The platform only allows more popular artists to sell their work and curates the art they sell. As a result, being approved by SuperRare is considered a great achievement by many digital artists. All purchases on SuperRare require ETH (Ether), the native currency of the Ethereum blockchain. Artwork on the SuperRare site generally tends to be a bit more unique. All items sold are unique, meaning that there is only one edition.
This platform became popular after Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey auctioned off his first tweet for $2.9 million. So for those who want to take their first steps into the world of NFTs, the Valuables platform is the right place, as it focuses exclusively on selling and buying Tweets.
Anyone with ETH can simply log into the site, copy and paste the URL of the Tweet into the search bar. From there, Valuables will notify the sender of the tweet that someone is interested in buying. However, someone else may be interested in the same Tweet and make a counter offer to beat the offer. Once the owner of a Tweet accepts an offer, an NFT with the owner’s signature will be minted for the buyer. Valuables’ unique focus on Twitter means that virtually anyone is selling their Tweets, opening up a level of accessibility never seen before.
NFT Showroom is a marketplace for digital art projects, created on the Hive blockchain, which is a fast and free technology, and makes the creation and collection of rare digital art simple and accessible for everyone. Open to any internet user, and welcoming all art styles and experience levels, they claim to have an easy to use interface and tools and are one of the best affordable alternatives for digital creators and collectors.
The only thing required to start creating and collecting is to make a Hive account and have Hive Keys. To tokenize and buy art, the platform uses a linked token called HIVE. NFT Showroom charges a 10% commission when you first sell your art, while for secondary sales, it charges a 5% commission and gives 5% to the original artist.
Decentraland is a 3D virtual reality, and digital real estate platform that is fully decentralized, and created with the Ethereum blockchain. In the shared virtual world of this platform, users can buy land, so-called “lots,” which are registered on the blockchain.
The virtual land that any user can create using the platform’s tools is a type of non-fungible digital asset or utility token called LAND that is stored in Ethereum blockchain smart contracts.
Landowners control the content that is published on their land that is encoded in a smart contract. This content can be anything from scenes and images to games and apps. Users can explore, travel, and visit locations similar to the real world. A gamer’s paradise.
Decentraland’s online community is gaining a lot of popularity, especially in the art world. Digital artists have moved to Decentraland to buy real estate and build art galleries to display their work. Even Sotheby’s, one of the world’s most famous auction houses, is now in Decentraland with a virtual gallery.
Rarible is an NFT marketplace where everyone who trades digital assets, i.e. NFTs automatically earn RARI tokens. This is the first governance token in the NFT space, and they give the owner a stake in the platform and a vote in governance decisions. The platform also allows its users to sell online gaming items, but has a strong focus on artwork and digital collectibles.
On this platform, you can sell all kinds of NFT, from digital art and digital collectibles to online game items, virtual land, and web domain names. Each digital artist when submitting their NFT on this platform needs to wait for approval. Rarible also allows any web user to be listed on its platform. The platform allows content creators to specify their own royalty fee for secondary sales.
What is the best marketplace for NFTs?
Indisputably, OpenSea is the largest NFT marketplace at the moment. Here users can buy and sell NFTs of digital art, digital business cards, web domain names, land in virtual worlds, collectible cards, game items and so on. On OpenSea you can also find NFTs from popular projects like Decentraland, Cryptokitties and The Sandbox. In total, the NFT marketplace supports hundreds of projects on different blockchain platforms. OpenSea supports the blockchains: Ethereum and Polygon
Anyone who logs into the platform using Metamask can create their own NFT without paying any gas fees. On this platform content creators can create their own NFT collection for free. The platform only charges a fee when you make a sale of your tokens. Games and other blockchain projects that use their own smart contracts can also be easily added to OpenSea.
To buy and sell NFTs on OpenSea can happen in several ways. Sellers can set a fixed price, allow the price to decrease over time, or set up an auction with an end date.
Can I sell NFTs on Coinbase?
No. You cannot create, buy, sell or trade non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on Coinbase. However, you can buy Ethereum (Ether) on Coinbase to later buy your digital token on popular NFT markets such as OpenSea, Nifty gateway, SuperRare and Binance NFT.
How to buy and sell NFT on Binance
The only requirements to bid on any of these tokens are to have a verified Binance account and to hold BNB, BUSD or Ether (ETH) at the time of bidding in an auction. The procedure is simple and the exchange withdraws funds directly from the Spot account (the same one used for trading ).
Binance users who wish to list their own digital artworks can also do so. Simply, the interested party must click on “Create” and choose the file to upload from their computer or cell phone. Binance NFT supports JPG, PNG, GIF, PDF, MP4, MP3, MPEG, AVI, WAV, and SVG formats.
Unlike on other decentralized platforms, such as OpenSea, on Binance NFT, these works go through a selection process.
In general, the approval process takes 4 to 8 hours, and upon completion, the digital artist’s NFT immediately appears on the online marketplace as a fixed-price auction or sale, depending on the artist’s choice.
Buy NFTs: digital collectibles, digital art, and other digital assets
Unlike the previous one, this option allows you to invest by buying and selling various collectibles for short, medium, or long-term benefits. In fact, some of these markets are booming right now.
Some examples are:
- OpenSea : Having reached a funding of $23 million on March 18 according to the TechCrunch portal, OpenSea is an evolving digital realities platform that allows the creation and exchange of NFT tokens, including collectibles, game items, domain names, digital art and other assets.
- Rarible: is one of the most popular NFT art marketplaces at the moment. The platform also allows users to buy and sell digital collectibles. The Rarible marketplace is defined as an effective platform for content creators to sell their creations..
- NBA Tops Shot: having generated over $500 million in NFT sales according to Dapper Labs, NBA Top Shot is a series of collectible cards issued as non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, each of which represents a “moment” from USA Basketball, the world’s largest basketball league.
Other examples are NiftyGateway, Sorare, SuperRare and Mintbase.
Can you resell NFTs?
Yes, you can resell an NFT. To sell NFT, you can do it in two different ways. First, you can buy an existing NFT artwork and then sell it on any digital art Marketplace. Second, you can create your own NFTs and then auction and sell them on other platforms.
Article sponsored by https://weplaycollectibles.com/ – a platform on which you can buy NFT items — digital and physical esports memorabilia and rewards associated with a specific tournament.
