If you want to buy or sell an NFT, you have close to a dozen mainstream options today. To an outsider, they all look the same, with their homepage walls of square cartoon characters.
However, there is an evolution underway from standard buy-and-sell marketplace—OpenSea, X2Y2, LooksRare—to models that try to make NFT trading less expensive through innovative solutions. In this article, we will explain the three main emerging ones: aggregation, collateralization, and tokenization.
What are general and art NFT marketplaces?
A general marketplace is a platform that sells a broad range of NFTs. An art marketplace hosts a curated selection of vetted artists and collections. Unlike a general marketplace where anything goes, art marketplaces use curation to give their platforms a desired aesthetic.
Most NFT trading markets allow Trader A to sell his assets at a specific price. When Trader B is willing to pay this price, the trade takes place.This behavior is generally known in the market as the “buy now” approach. OpenSea, LooksRare, X2Y2 and SuperRare trade on this fixed price basis.
Another method is to bid with other buyers, just like a traditional auction market, and the highest bidder gets the NFT asset. OpenSea is an example of such a marketplace.
In both cases, buyers must pay gas fees for transactions, and a lack of liquidity makes NFT trading inefficient.
What are NFT aggregators?
One persistent problem in the NFT market is spending too much time and gas buying multiple NFTs.
Not to be outdone by the fast-growing trend of the NFT marketplace, OpenSea, the top trading marketplace, announced on October 5 that it officially supports bulk listing and purchase functionality, allowing users to now bulk listing and purchase up to 30 items in a single transaction on OpenSea.
According to the data, while OpenSea has integrated bulk buying of a single collection, making life easier for less active traders, serious NFT traders will still find it troublesome (and expensive) to transact on all these different marketplaces when trading.
Footprint Analytics – OpenSea Daily Active Users
GEM, Genie and Element marketplaces are new platforms that aggregate multiple marketplaces. Instead of comparing prices on different websites, aggregators have all the data in one place and can buy in one place as well. This allows NFT enthusiasts to save time and money (in gas fees) when buying multiple items.
Furthermore, GEM (though not Genie, yet) accepts all ERC-20 tokens as payment. This allows users to make one payment with a variety of corresponding tokens of their choice.
What is an AMM NFT marketplace?
Sudoswap is a decentralized on-chain NFT exchange using the AMM model.
An AMM (automatic market maker) in DeFi refers to a dispersion asset trading pool that allows users to seamlessly trade cryptocurrencies through their liquidity.
The operation mode of AMM is different from the traditional order book transaction mode. Both parties to the transaction of AMM are interacting with the liquidity asset pool on the chain. Liquidity pools allow users to seamlessly switch between tokens on-chain in a fully decentralized and non-custodial manner. Liquidity Providers (LPs), on the other hand, earn passive income through transaction fees, which are based on a percentage of their contribution to the asset pool.
NFT tends to be volatile because they lack liquidity, and Sudoswap brings some of the features from DeFi to the NFT market.
- Users can buy or sell from different pools of the NFT collection
- Pools can buy or sell to different users
- Users are able to create NFT liquidity pools with ETH within the same pool
What is NFTX?
NFTX where users can collateralize and tokenize their NFTs, which the platform hopes will solve the problem of liquidity in the NFT market. An NFT holder can transfer his digital assets to a vault and mint fungible tokens (vTokens) representing the NFT’s value. For example, a CryptoPunk NFT mints a corresponding fungible CryptoPunk vToken.
Users selling NFTs on NFTX are equivalent to minting an ERC-20 token and paying a 10% minting fee, which they can exchange for ETH on SushiSwap. The tokens are fungible, meaning there is sufficient liquidity in the NFTX pool. To remove the NFT from the vault, a user must deposit a replaceable vToken.
Critically, a user can easily trade their NFTX token for another on a DEX, essentially bypassing the lengthier, more expensive process of trading one NFT for another on a marketplace.
Summary
NFTs are blockchain tokens yet do not act as such—being illiquid and inefficient to trade. Several new models of NFT marketplaces have emerged to solve this problem and make trading NFTs a smoother process.
This piece is contributed by Footprint Analytics community.
The Footprint Community is a place where data and crypto enthusiasts worldwide help each other understand and gain insights about Web3, the metaverse, DeFi, GameFi, or any other area of the fledgling world of blockchain. Here you’ll find active, diverse voices supporting each other and driving the community forward.
Oct. 2022, Vincy
Data Source: Footprint Analytics – NFT Marketplaces
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