Analyzing GEM: The Most Popular NFT Trading Aggregator

Author: Will, The SeeDAO

NFT aggregators are a new product that has emerged in the recent NFT craze. They allow collectors to buy and sell their NFTs in bulk in a single transaction. GEM is currently the best NFT market aggregation platform.

Pain Points in the NFT Ecosystem

One of the main issues with purchasing NFTs is that users are limited to buying only one NFT at a time. If users want to buy multiple NFTs from a high-quality project, they must purchase each asset individually and conduct separate transactions.

Users are forced to execute multiple transactions, which consumes a lot of gas and is very slow. This means that while you are buying one by one, others can purchase your target NFTs.

People should be able to efficiently buy multiple NFTs at once, and they should be able to purchase multiple NFTs across various platforms, as liquidity has now begun to spread to other markets such as Rarible, X2Y2, NFTX, and LooksRare.

The emergence of NFT aggregators solves this problem.

Main Advantages of GEM

GEM directly aggregates NFT listings from multiple platforms (including OpenSea, Rarible, LooksRare, X2Y2, NFTX, and NFT20). Its ultimate goal is to consolidate listings from all NFT markets, so users no longer need to jump between platforms to compare prices;

The user experience for purchasing NFTs becomes much closer to online shopping, with a shopping cart feature that allows users to buy multiple NFTs at once;

Buying in bulk on GEM can save up to 33% in fees compared to purchasing one by one on exchanges;

GEM accepts all ERC20 tokens as payment, allowing users to pay with multiple currencies at once, greatly increasing payment flexibility;

GEM provides Dune Analytics data analysis for NFTs on the platform, allowing users to view key data (sales volume, floor price, trading activity, holding distribution, etc.) directly on the GEM platform.

GEM User Experience

The GEM interface is clean and simple, with a clear information framework, so users can get started without much learning, and all functions appear where they should. Currently, GEM is still in beta, and some features are still missing, such as favorites and viewing individual NFT transaction history. The biggest highlight of GEM is the ability to buy NFTs in bulk, and it thoughtfully indicates the amount saved in the transaction. Although I don't have the money to buy Azuki, it doesn't stop me from adding my favorite Azuki to the shopping cart. Similarly, bulk listing on GEM is also cheaper, making it convenient for users to sell their projects in bulk.

Taking Azuki as an example, GEM uses Dune Analytics data to provide users with more comprehensive NFT data than OpenSea. At checkout, users can settle using multiple ERC20 currencies together; if your ETH is insufficient, you can add other tokens as payment methods. (Fig.3) The following two images show a transaction record on GEM. A user spent 340 million SOS tokens to buy 8 NFTs. GEM automatically converted SOS to WETH through Sushiswap, saving a lot of gas.

Competitors of GEM

Currently, GEM has partnerships with many exchanges. However, GEM does have a competitor: Genie.xyz.

Genie is also an NFT aggregator and competes with GEM. The UIs of the two websites are not just similar; they are identical. With a strong curiosity, combined with data and social dynamics, several key differences have been summarized:

Compared to Genie, the resources on the GEM platform are much better. GEM has data from OpenSea, LooksRare, X2Y2, and NFTX; while Genie only has OS, Rarible, and NFTX. (Just on this point, GEM achieves a dimensionality reduction strike)

GEM provides data analysis, making it easier for users to analyze projects. Genie does not have similar functionality.

GEM also has a FLASHBOT (anti-sniping tool) feature that prevents users from losing miner fees due to failed transactions caused by malicious wash trading.

According to feedback from the Discord community: Genie’s data is slow and outdated, leading to a poor user experience. Many former Genie users have gradually moved to the GEM community.

You can feel the stark contrast between the two platforms. (I personally tested it, and Genie’s website is indeed not user-friendly and slower than GEM)

GEM Data Analysis

As of April 1, GEM facilitated 2,300 transactions in the past 24 hours, with a transaction volume of 14 million USD. After three months of launch, GEM achieved a total transaction volume of 410 million USD, which is an outstanding achievement.

The comparison of transaction data between GEM and Genie also illustrates the point: since GEM launched at the end of January 2022, its transaction volume surpassed Genie after March, showing Genie’s decline (Fig.8).

95% of transactions on GEM originate from OpenSea listings, while the remaining 5% come from LooksRare (Fig.9). Source Source

GEM Community & Platform Planning

GEM’s community discussions are mostly constructive: community members have been providing developers with the necessary features, and the development progress is transparent. They are building the NFT platform that users need.

GEM engineer VASA has also been updating platform progress and answering community questions on Twitter.

GEM's Ecological Cooperation

Currently, GEM has not reached formal investments with capital but has established partnerships with multiple NFT platforms and projects.

Additionally, the various collaborations between small exchanges and GEM indeed give a feeling of approaching parity with Opensea. X2Y2 and GEM have partnered to eliminate marketplace fees and refund users for gas fees previously paid on GEM;

GEM and LooksRare have reached a partnership, allowing GEM to automatically help users claim LOOKS rewards, sell WETH rewards, and convert them into LOOKS for re-staking to earn compound interest, all without requiring users to pay gas fees;

FloorDAO and GEM have collaborated to add 5 million USD in liquidity to the CryptoPunk treasury;

The popular NFT attribute survey plugin—Trait Sniper—has also partnered with GEM. The imagination for GEM's token issuance is vast: if the team can link the GEM token with the platform's transaction process, GEM's transaction volume will visibly increase daily; in the future, a large transaction volume will positively empower the GEM token, making this project very promising.

GEM currently supports all mainstream NFT platforms and will continue to add more in the future. High-quality user experience and excellent, user-centered features give GEM a unique advantage in the NFT ecosystem; in the future, other exchanges may become warehouses for GEM, which captures the flow entry. Unless various NFT exchanges launch unique features, the primary entry point for everyone may likely be aggregators like GEM.

It must be said that the emergence of GEM is indeed a gem in the NFT ecosystem, shining with the light of more possibilities.