Most Popular NFT Marketplaces

Blockchain technology is at the forefront of technological e-commerce innovation as it offers the established digital world the transparency and true ownership that previously been lacking. 

Exchanges for trading cryptocurrency and ERC-20 or ‘fungible tokens’ have been established for nearly a decade now but specific marketplaces for trading ERC-721 or non-fungible tokens are a more recent development in the space. 

NFT Marketplaces: Blooming Platforms for a Blooming Industry

With crypto exchanges, an investor places their funds directly onto the platform to trade. 

With digital NFT marketplaces, it is different: your web3 wallet, such as Metamask, holds your assets and connects to the marketplace and your asset is only transferred after a sale. 

Among other aspects, the interoperability and ease with which NFTs can be used across platforms have helped create different types of marketplaces. 

NFT marketplaces have developed a lot in the last three years with OpenSea being the earliest example offering an eBay-style format for trading NFTs on their decentralized platforms. 

These innovations were followed by many other variants including art marketplaces where artists could upload their work to the platform to ‘mint’ or ‘tokenize’ their art and then sell from the same platform.

The art segment of the NFT marketplace ecosystem has often utilized the IPFS distributed file sharing protocol to help store some of the metadata. 

If you’re keen to mint NFTs, our chapter introducing Minting Platforms might be of interest to you. 

Comparing the most popular NFT marketplaces

Here, we’ll explain the differences among NFT marketplaces as we share some of the most popular platforms and what makes them unique. 

There are different types:

• The ‘bazaars’: generalist marketplaces where any type of NFTs can be purchased (video games, utility, collectibles, art…)
• The ‘specialists’: for example, artist marketplaces that are dedicated to art only.
• Outsiders: newer marketplaces using other blockchains.

Here are the criteria we’ve used to describe the different platforms. 

• Marketplace: the different marketplaces that exist, just click on each name to access directly to the marketplace.
• Type: bazaar, specialists, or outsider marketplaces.
• Blockchain: which blockchain is supported by the site.
• CC payment: if the platform allows the use of the Credit Card to buy NFTs.
• Fees: The percentage of fees taken by the platform in case of sale.
• Royalties: The percentage of fees taken by artists in case of resale of the NFT.
• Types of sale: Way to sell your NFT (traditional auction, Open Edition…).

Marketplace fees are not the same everywhere and in addition, fees related to the operation of the blockchain can be added. Besides that, who is the audience that frequents these marketplaces? On SuperRare, Foundation, or Known Origin, it will mostly be art collectors. On Binance NFT, mainly traders. Some platforms will accept payment by credit card, others only cryptos.

The choice of platform is therefore very important.

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