NFTs have stormed a massive influence over the digital asset community in the year 2021 and have redefined the standards for creating and distributing digital content. With the concept of NFT becoming a success, many marketplaces have popped up to allow sellers and buyers to connect on a single platform for exchanging digital artwork with an economic value.
Before we proceed further, it is recommended to check out this popular post on – What is NFT and How Does it Work: The Complete Guide.
Now since you are aware of the NFT space and how it works to create a difference by providing true digital ownership, it is time to navigate the way into the seven best marketplaces to buy and sell NFTs in 2021.
Let’s Begin.
OpenSea
Founded in the year 2018, OpenSea has emerged as the largest NFT marketplace for digital products that involves a wide vertical of gaming items, digital art, digital collectibles coded on a blockchain.
Founders
OpenSea was founded by the duo – Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah, and since then, this NFT marketplace has been leading the industry to provide the best experience in favor of creators and collectors who have a strong belief in digital goods.
Daily Trading Volume
OpenSea is the largest NFT marketplace that maintains a daily trading volume ranging between USD 3 million to USD 5 million.
Transaction Fees
OpenSea levies a transaction fee of 2.5% from the seller along with the gas fee for mining the token. It is to be noted that buyers are not liable to pay the transaction fees.
Blockchain
OpenSea makes use of Ethereum blockchain standard ERC721 and ERC1155 as it helps the buyers and sellers on the platform to have true ownership of the digital items exchanged. The development team at OpenSea is also working to extend the support for Flow and Polygon Blockchains.
Advantages
- OpenSea maintains the largest repository of educational content based on NFTs.
- Trades on OpenSea are executed via smart contracts that ensure that no central authority can exercise custody of your digital items.
- Users are provided with an option to store digital items in the wallet of their choices like CoinBase Wallet, Opera Touch, and even in-browser extensions like MetaMask.
- OpenSea allows the digital creators to earn royalties in proportion to the total value of the token.
- OpenSea has recently made an announcement to integrate Ethereum scaling along with adding support for trading through ImmutableX.
Disadvantages
- Sometime the gas fees on the platform are substantially high.
- The platform accepts payments in cryptocurrency only.
- A crypto wallet is a must to buy and sell the NFTs.
Rarible
Rarible is an Ethereum based NFT marketplace that allows the users to not only trade digital collectibles but also create and display them. A wide range of NFTs can be traded on Rarible that include art & photography, games, music, metaverses, memes & punks, domains, etc.
Founders
Rarible is a Moscow-based project founded by Alex Salnikov and Alexei Falin recently in the year 2020.
Daily Trading Volume
Rarible is a community-owned NFT marketplace that observes the daily trading volume in the range of USD 1 million to USD 1.5 million.
Transaction Fees
Rarible levies a transaction fee of 2.5% from the seller as well as the buyer, along with the gas fee for mining the token.
Blockchain
Rarible is built on top of the Ethereum blockchain.
Advantages
- Rarible is a non-custodial marketplace that allows the users to have genuine possession of the tokens.
- The core objective of Rarible is to achieve complete decentralization by converting the platform into a DAO (Decentralised Autonomous Organisation).
- Rarible provides Intellectual Property (IP) rights to the users via Proof of Provenance.
- The marketplace has a native token – RARI, the first governance token in the NFT arena with a total circulating supply of 25 million RARI tokens.
- Rarible has a strong and competitive investment backup.
- Rarible is an open-source and non-custodial NFT marketplace.
Disadvantages
- Rarible accepts only ETH for all the transactions. Hence, if your crypto wallet doesn’t have ETH, then you might be charged additional conversion fees for transferring tokens.
- Rarible does not feature any API or IPFS storage.
- Sometime ETH gas fees leviable on the marketplace are very high.
- Rarible does not have any mobile application.
SuperRare
SuperRare is a digital art gallery that allows buyers and sellers to exchange unique and single edition digital production. Each digital artwork on this platform is created by an artist from the platform itself and is tokenized as a crypto-collectible that can be owned and traded.
Founders
SuperRare was founded in 2017 by the trio of John Crain, Charles Crain, and Johnathan Perkins. All three of them have also founded Pixura, the firm behind the crypto collectible technology running SuperRare.
Daily Trading Volume
SuperRare is a social platform that observes the daily trading volume of USD 0.5 million to USD 1 million.
Transaction Fees
The translation fee levied on the exchange of digital artwork on SuperRare is on the higher side. The platform charges a transaction fee of 3% from the buyers but charges 15% fees (inclusive of gallery exhibition fees) from the sellers.
The gas fee is also charged for minting the token in addition to the transaction fee.
Blockchain
SuperRare is made on the top of the Ethereum blockchain, where a standard ERC 721 token is offered against all the digital collectibles.
Advantages
- SuperRare rewards 10% of the transaction value in favor of the original creator of the digital collectible as royalty.
- SuperRare has a strong and extensive product development team.
- The process of designing rare digital tokenized art on SuperRare is super easy.
- The user interface and user experience of the platform are minimalist and intuitive.
- The platform features a diverse collection of digital collectibles.
Disadvantages
- Entry barriers of SuperRare are higher. The artists are required to submit their portfolios for approval before they get themselves listed on the platform.
- The platform supports only JPEG/PNG or GIF file formats as of now.
- The fees payable by the sellers on a transaction is exorbitantly high.
Foundation
Foundation is also a rising platform based on a community-led curation model set on a mission to help creators and collectors sell, buy, and list the work in exchange for value. The platform is non-custodial and runs on the smart contract technology of Ethereum.
Founders
Kayvon Tehranian is the CEO and Founder of the Foundation. In his words –
“You can’t just upload an image to a blockchain and have it have value. There has to be the context of the creator. That’s why we have a curatorial staff on the team who actually interacts with artists.”
These words of the founder put the spotlight on the core objective of the Foundation to help redefine the NFT industry.
Daily Trading Volume
Foundation is a non-custodial NFT marketplace that observes daily trading of USD 0.1 million to USD 0.3 million.
Transaction Fees
The foundation platform levies a transaction fee of 15% from the seller in addition to the gas fees.
Blockchain
Foundation is built on the top of the Ethereum blockchain. All the digital collectibles available on the platform are labeled on a non-fungible Ethereum-based token.
Advantages
- The artists on Foundation receive 10% of the sales value any time if the collector sells the work to someone else.
- Foundation has strong and extensive community support.
- Foundation has an intuitive user interface that provides the users with a good user experience while buying or selling the NFTs.
- The platform has made incredible sales of digital collectibles since the launch.
Disadvantages
- The platform does not allow transactions in fiat money, and thus a crypto wallet must be connected before a transaction.
- The fees payable by the sellers on the transaction is comparatively high.
Enjin
Enjin has been in the blockchain gaming industry for quite some time and has been successful in establishing a name for itself in the game-based tokens arena. Now, the firm is channeling its interest heavily towards the NFT trend with its new project Efinity and has also designed a five-step plan to invent carbon-neutral NFTs by the year 2030.
Founders
Enjin was founded more than a decade ago in the year 2009 by Maxim Blagov and Witek Radomski as a community gaming platform. It is originally based on the idea of using blockchain technology to administer gaming items throughout the different properties.
Blockchain
Efinity is built on the top of Polkadot with substrate development support provided by Parity Technologies.
Key Characteristics
- Corporate giants like Microsoft, Samsung, and BMW have merged Enjin’s blockchain products to their exclusive projects.
- As of May 2021, ENJ had a standing market cap of $1.2 B, which is quite a competitive figure.
- Efinity is built to solve some of the biggest problems in the NFT space, such as lack of incentives, exorbitantly high fees, inflexible smart contracts, etc.
- Efinity accepts the tokens from other chains as well, like ERC-721, ERC-1155, and ERC-20 standards, among many others, making it a one-stop-shop for all fungible and non-fungible tokens.
- Unlike Ethereum, Efinity plans to reward the network participants with the EFI token for events such as the users monitoring the direction of the network, buyers and sellers promoting price discovery, and many more.
- The Polkadot network has been created to run two kinds of blockchain, i.e., Relay Chain and Parachains. Efinity is built on the top of Polkadot and makes use of Relay chain validators to achieve consensus that helps this project to establish an independent economic framework.
- Enjin is working to develop a token standard called Paratokens which would be compatible with parachains, parathreads, and even smart contracts to establish true interoperability.
- Efinity would be able to process 700-1000 transactions per second based on the existing benchmarks.
Advantages
- Enjin has been successful in securing multi-million dollar investments during the past few years for the cause of its objectives.
- The project is moving to a proof-of-stake consensus model to enable faster transaction speed.
- The transaction cost for NFTs would be comparatively lower than the Ethereum network.
The development team at Enjin has built a plethora of SDKs (Software Development Kits) and APIs (Automatic Programming Interface) to help the project achieve its high-efficiency goals. - The team at Enjin has built its native wallet to help users trade and store digital items.
Fansforever
Fansforever is an innovative and decentralized social marketplace that brings together the creators, celebrities, and collectors via NFTs.
Blockchain
Fansforever is built on the top of the TRON blockchain, which is superfast and super-easy. This marketplace levies 0 gas fee from the users, which makes it more scalable.
Advantages
- Some of the world’s most talented individuals like Lindsay Lohan, Swae Lee, Tyga, Ne-Yo, and many more have joined this platform.
- Unlike Ethereum, no gas fee is charged from the users on Fansforever.
- The transactions on Fansforever are completed faster in comparison to other NFT marketplaces based on the Ethereum blockchain.
- After the launch, the platform will offer multi-chain support to various other blockchains such as Binance Smart Chain, Polkadot, Cardano, Solana, etc.
- The marketplace has its native token – FAN intended to work as a governance token to help users participate in the project’s important decisions.
- Fansforever has recently added USDT and credit/debit card on-ramp options to promote a frictionless purchasing experience.
Conclusion
This article has provided a quick walkthrough of the seven best marketplaces to buy and sell NFTs. Each marketplace brings its own USP to help the creators and collectors build a strong community together with the power of NFTs. If you still have any doubts or queries as to which marketplace is best for you, then let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.
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