What you need to know about NFT marketplaces

NFT marketplaces are platforms where you can create and store tokens, as well as buy them and sell them for cryptocurrency. You can’t pay with regular money.

What is a cryptocurrencyFor transactions, you will need a crypto wallet — an application that allows you to use cryptocurrency. The most common is MetaMask, which is supported by almost all marketplaces. If you don’t already have one, there are plenty of video tutorials on the internet on how to create and manage crypto wallets.

Marketplaces work in the format of auctions. This means that the seller puts up a token for sale, and potential buyers leave offers for how much they are ready to buy it for. The one who offers the highest price wins.
On most marketplaces, there is no way to promote your works. This means that if you just put up an NFT marketplace development for sale, then there is no guarantee that someone will buy it. Novice sellers should take this into account and take care of advertising on their own. An option is to contact NFT consultants who will help develop a promotion strategy.

It may seem to a beginner that all marketplaces are about the same, but in fact they differ in audience, blockchain, and additional options. Let’s look at the differences in more detail.

Audience. There are marketplaces for different audiences.

For example, the Axie Infinity and CryptoKitties sites are aimed at gamers — you should go there for game items and avatars with game characters. Others are designed for sports fans — for example, on the NBA NFT site, you can become the owner of a video clip from the match. But the Foundation, Sotheby’s and Christie’s sites are suitable for artists and collectors — they create and put up for sale digital works of art or look for something unique in the collection.

There are also universal platforms — OpenSea, LooksRare or Rarible. Here you can find digital paintings by famous artists, videos of singing schoolgirls or gifs of unicorns.

“Payment for gas”. Any cryptocurrency exists in the blockchain — a database distributed across different computers. Everyone who makes a transaction in cryptocurrencies must “pay for gas” — to reimburse the cost of energy that is needed to produce this cryptocurrency. The fee goes to miners — those who keep the blockchain in working condition. “Pay for gas” depends on the workload of the blockchain. Most NFT marketplaces operate on the Ethereum blockchain. It is the most popular, and therefore the “gas” is the most expensive here.

You will have to “pay for gas” every time you transfer cryptocurrency to someone or issue an NFT. The problem is that the amount of “payment for gas” is not fixed. Unlike the bank commission, the commission changes several times during the day — you just see the final amount in the crypto wallet. If the “gas fee” seems too high, you can refuse to pay and enter the site at another time.

The buyer of NFT “gas” costs a penny — it does not take much energy to complete a transaction.

But the creation of an NFT marketplace platform development is a very energy-intensive process, so it is especially important for NFT sellers to navigate the prices of “gas” and at least a little understand their daily fluctuations. On Ethereum, you will have to pay at least $60 for this, and more than $100 on busy days. For comparison, in the less busy Tezos blockchain, the fee for creating an NFT is no more than $0.5, but the chances of a successful sale are much less here. The attention of collectors is more riveted to the sites on Ethereum.

Marketplace commission. In addition to the “payment for gas”, there is also a commission of the marketplaces themselves. It can be paid by the seller, buyers, or both, depending on the conditions of the site. Unlike the “gas fee”, this amount is fixed in the marketplace rules and changes infrequently.

Additional options. This can be a low commission, free creation and promotion of web3 marketplace development , the ability to upload several NFT objects to the platform at once, paying a commission as for one, or receiving bonuses for activity on the site.

Experts rank marketplaces not only by the number of users, but also by the volume of transactions, the number of well-known artists exhibiting their work, the convenience of the interface, and the type of content exhibited — photos, digital art, items from computer games.