How should novice players choose among 10 mainstream NFT trading platforms?

This article was published on PANews, authored by Nancy.

No one expected that the speed at which NFTs (non-fungible tokens) transitioned from niche circles to mainstream would be so rapid. In the past few months, NBA superstar Kevin Durant, Grammy winner The Weeknd, renowned Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, legendary American film company Legendary Pictures, graphic software giant Adobe Photoshop, The New York Times, Time Magazine, GUCCI, and other celebrities and enterprises have been paying attention to, and even participating in, NFTs.

With the surge in participants, various NFT platforms and projects have increasingly attracted capital. For example, the NFT trading platform OpenSea secured $23 million in funding led by top internet venture capital A16Z, and NFT development team Dapper Labs raised $305 million with participation from Jordan and Durant.

As NFTs become a hot topic of conversation both within and outside the crypto circle, the trading volume of NFTs is growing daily. Taking crypto art as an example, data from Cryptoart.io shows that the total value of crypto art is currently about $490 million, with over 170,000 works sold. In March alone, the total trading volume on crypto art platforms exceeded $200 million, setting a new historical record.

As the NFT trend surges, various distinctive NFT trading platforms are improving the NFT trading market from different aspects. Amidst the chaotic competition between old and new forces, how to choose has become a dilemma for newcomers. Therefore, this article outlines the characteristics, secondary sales fees, commissions, and transaction fees of 8 mainstream NFT trading platforms, which may help guide newcomers on their journey.

Nifty Gateway

Nifty Gateway is an NFT trading platform supported by the Gemini exchange, co-founded by twin brothers Duncan Cock Foster and Griffin Cock Foster. In addition to supporting cryptocurrencies, Nifty Gateway also provides fiat currency deposit channels, allowing users to purchase NFTs using credit or debit cards, and cash out directly to their bank accounts upon sale. Currently, Nifty Gateway only allows U.S. users to withdraw fiat currency, but it plans to offer the same functionality to international users in the future.

According to Cryptoart.io, in March 2021 alone, Nifty Gateway's trading volume exceeded $140 million. The rise of Nifty Gateway is largely attributed to its emphasis on collaboration with artists, featuring a dedicated index for crypto artists on its official website. Additionally, Nifty Gateway has brought in heavyweight crypto artists like Beeple, FEWOCiOUS, and Jones, collaborating with celebrities to release exclusive NFTs approximately every three weeks. Of course, other artists can also apply to issue NFTs through the official website. During the creator's sale process, Nifty Gateway charges a 5% sales fee for the first sale, a 5% fee for secondary sales, and a service fee of $0.30.

For collectors, they only need to complete email registration to trade on Nifty Gateway, and the platform does not charge any gas fees, only charging 10% of the bid amount when using credit cards; for creators, Nifty Gateway requires artists to submit a short video introduction and their medium to long-term goals when applying.

OpenSea

OpenSea is currently the largest NFT trading platform, covering various subfields such as digital art, crypto collectibles, gaming items, virtual land, and domain names.

In May 2018, OpenSea completed a $2 million seed round of financing, with investors including Blockchain Capital, 1confirmation, Founders Fund, Foundation Capital, Chernin Group, Coinbase Ventures, Blockstack, and Stable Fund;

In March 2021, OpenSea secured $23 million in Series A funding led by a16z, with participation from the Cultural Leadership Fund. Additionally, numerous angel investors, including Ron Conway, Mark Cuban, Tim Ferriss, Belinda Johnson, Naval Ravikant, and Ben Silberman, also participated in this round of investment.

Compared to other NFT trading platforms, OpenSea is more "user-friendly," allowing anyone to create and sell NFTs for free, with no gas fees required upon sale. However, a gas fee must be paid when initializing an OpenSea account or after a product is sold. Recently, OpenSea announced it would integrate the Ethereum Layer 2 solution Immutable X, meaning users will no longer need gas fees for transactions on OpenSea.

When creators successfully mint NFTs without gas fees, OpenSea charges a 2.5% commission on each successful sale, while some game developers may charge 7.5% of the transaction amount. Creators can set their own royalties for secondary sales, and developers or creators can receive secondary earnings every two weeks, with future automatic execution of this process allowing for immediate receipt of earnings.

MakersPlace

MakersPlace is an established crypto art platform. In April 2019, MakersPlace announced it had completed a $2 million seed round of financing led by private equity fund Uncork Capital, with participation from Abstract Ventures, Draper Dragon Fund, Pinterest, Coinbase, Facebook, and Zillow.

MakersPlace has very strict quality control over crypto artworks, currently accepting only by invitation (though applications can be attempted). MakersPlace generates a blockchain fingerprint for each NFT created by artists and creators to prove the work's provenance and identity, making it a symbol of the artwork's uniqueness. Even if the work is copied, there will be no authentic original signed version.

For creators, MakersPlace is also a low-threshold platform; they only need to provide a photo ID, and MakersPlace can generate ERC-20 tokens for trading their works. However, while MakersPlace is free to use, all transaction fees must be borne by the creators or collectors.

To help creators better understand the popularity of their works, MakersPlace has introduced social features, allowing creators to analyze through "views," "likes," and other functions. Additionally, MakersPlace provides each creator with a unique digital wallet to store their works.

When creators sell their works, MakersPlace will charge a 15% commission on the final sale price, with the remaining 85% going to the creator. For each secondary sale, MakersPlace will charge a fixed 5% service fee for royalties, and creators can receive 10% in royalties. Of course, whether for the first or secondary sale, any items sold via credit card will incur an additional 2.9% fee to the platform.

Currently, MakersPlace accepts credit cards, PayPal, and Ethereum payments.

Rarible

Rarible is a community-driven, open-source, non-custodial platform that allows any user to create and showcase their works and own NFTs.

In 2021, Rarible completed a $1.75 million seed round of financing, with investors including 1kx, Coinbase Ventures, Parafi Capital, CoinFund, and others.

Compared to other trading platforms, Rarible is more decentralized. In 2020, Rarible issued the governance token RARI, which significantly improved the sales process and conditions, greatly increasing Rarible's trading volume through a "trade-to-mine" model. Rarible not only distributes RARI token rewards to platform traders weekly, but also allows the platform's most active creators and collectors to vote for platform upgrades using their governance tokens and participate in management and review.

The minting fees on Rarible are borne by the creators themselves, and royalties are also set by the creators, with default amounts of 10%, 20%, and 30%. A 2.5% service fee will be charged during the first sale.

SuperRare

SuperRare is a social network platform for artists and collectors, allowing artists to publish limited edition digital art collectibles that are traceable on the blockchain, possessing rarity, verifiability, and collectability.

In March 2021, SuperRare completed a $9 million Series A funding round, led by VelvetSea and 1confirmation, with follow-on investments from Mark Cuban, Chamath Palihapitiya, and Marc Benioff.

SuperRare has strict review standards for artists. To join SuperRare, artists must apply to the platform, and only approved original creators can sell NFTs, and they cannot tokenize their works elsewhere on the internet. Additionally, SuperRare conducts weekly reviews of artists.

Of course, under such strict requirements, SuperRare also offers a good incentive mechanism for crypto artists; regardless of the initial price, artists can earn 10% of the transaction price as royalties.

On the SuperRare platform, a 15% commission will be charged on the initial sale, and a 3% fee will be charged on secondary sales (paid by the buyer).

VIV3

VIV3 is the first comprehensive NFT marketplace on the recently popular underlying platform Flow, with one of its most notable features being composability.

On VIV3, every creator's works are minted by their own blockchain smart contracts. Under this mechanism, any application within the Flow ecosystem can directly integrate with individual artists' contracts without affecting the entire market pool. This allows countless new use cases to be built on individual assets or collections, unlocking unprecedented experiences.

Creators can create NFTs on VIV3 without gas fees, and the NFT minting costs and profits come from the 12.5% service fee charged on initial and secondary sales. In addition to receiving 87.5% of the proceeds, creators can also receive 10% as royalties.

Zora

Zora offers limited edition tokenized products and is an invitation-only crypto art platform. In October 2020, Zora completed a $2 million seed round of financing led by Kindred Ventures, with participation from individuals or institutions such as Trevor McFedries, Alice Lloyd George, Jeff Staple, and Coinbase Ventures.

According to Zora's rules, each new artist has 3 invitation slots to invite friends or other artists. In February of this year, Zora introduced a verification mechanism to support artists applying to join Zora.

On Zora, creators can set "creator shares," which is the percentage of all future sales they will receive. These revenues will be automatically paid through smart contracts and are auditable.

Foundation

Unlike other "application review" platforms, Foundation is an invitation-only NFT art platform where only invited artists' works can be listed.

Foundation adopts a community-led curation model, initially inviting 50 artists to the platform and then giving these artists 2 invitation codes. When a resident creator successfully sells an original work on the platform, they will receive two invitation slots to invite newcomers. If the invited person also successfully sells their first work, they will also receive 2 invitation codes. This is similar to the model used by the social audio app Clubhouse. It is worth mentioning that if an artist maliciously buys and sells invitation codes, they will be permanently disqualified from joining.

In addition to peer-to-peer invitations, "Community Upvote" is a new way to join; all Twitter-verified community members can obtain 5 votes to support 5 eligible artists after joining "Community Upvote," and the top 50 artists can join Foundation to create NFTs. However, Foundation does not rule out using "Community Upvote" as the main entry point for creators in the future.

In addition to the special invitation mechanism, Foundation's sales mechanism is also unique; artists must set a reserve price when uploading their works, and after the first bid, the work will automatically enter a 24-hour auction.

NFTs generated on Foundation will automatically be issued on OpenSea, which will charge a 15% service fee after the work is successfully sold, with the remaining 85% going to the creator. For secondary sales, Foundation will charge a 10% service fee, while creators can permanently receive 10% as royalties, with OpenSea making payments every 1 to 2 weeks.

KnownOrigin

KnownOrigin is an established crypto art platform, and due to its unrestricted model, a large number of artists have applied, leading to its current suspension of applications. KnownOrigin's investors include the European blockchain development lab BlockRocket.

According to KnownOrigin's regulations, once creators are successfully approved, they can upload 1 work every 24 hours. When a work is sold for the first time, KnownOrigin will charge a 15% service fee, with creators receiving 85% of the income; for secondary sales, the platform will charge a 2.5% service fee, with creators receiving 12.5% of the income, and sellers receiving 85% of the income.

Of course, if creators collaborate with other artists, they can pre-set the percentage of each sale during NFT minting, such as 10%, 25%, 50%, etc.

Async Art

Async Art is a programmable crypto art platform built on Ethereum. In February 2021, Async Art announced it had secured $2 million in seed funding, led by Lemniscap, with other investors including Galaxy Interactive, Signum Growth Capital, Semantic, Blue Wire Capital, Collab+Currency, Inflection, Divergence Ventures, The LAO, and Placeholder.

Async Art's works consist of "Master" and "Layer" components, where the Master is the main form of the work, and a Master can consist of multiple Layers. Async Art allows artworks to change based on "layer variations."

After applying to become an Async artist, creators do not need any programming knowledge; they simply need to slice their works into layers during the upload process. In the sale of works, creators can set "buy now" or "open auction," with the auction end time determined by themselves.

Async Art adopts a "cut" model for revenue from sales, charging a 10% service fee on the first sale, with the remaining 90% going to the artist, and a 1% service fee on secondary sales. Of course, creators can also receive 10% in royalties. However, for custom artworks, Async Art will charge a 20-30% service fee, with creators receiving 70-80% of the income.