Introduction to NFT?
An NFT is a digital asset that can come in the form of art, music, in-game items, videos, and more. They are bought and sold online, frequently with cryptocurrency, and they are generally encoded with the same underlying software as many cryptos.
Although they’ve been around since 2014, NFTs are gaining notoriety now because they are becoming an increasingly popular way to buy and sell digital artwork. The market for NFTs was worth a staggering $41 billion in 2021 alone, an amount that is approaching the total value of the entire global fine art market. But many NFTs, at least in these early days, have been digital creations that already exist in some form elsewhere, like iconic video clips from NBA games or securitized versions of digital art that’s already floating around on Instagram.
Famous digital artist Mike Winklemann, better known as “Beeple,” crafted a composite of 5,000 daily drawings to create perhaps the most famous NFT of 2021, “EVERYDAYS: The First 5000 Days,” which sold at Christie’s for a record-breaking $69.3 million.
Anyone can view the individual images—or even the entire collage of images online for free. So why are people willing to spend millions on something they could easily screenshot or download?
Because an NFT allow the buyer to own the original item. Not only that, it contains built-in authentication, which serves as proof of ownership. Collectors value those “digital bragging rights” almost more than the item itself.
How to Create an NFT?
Blockchain technology has opened doors for the future of art. For the first time, you can own digital assets in cyberspace with assurance. The tech is so strong that ownership of a physical object is arguably less secure than ownership of an NFT.
Blockchain technology has opened doors for the future of art. For the first time, you can own digital assets in cyberspace with assurance. The tech is so strong that ownership of a physical object is arguably less secure than ownership of an NFT. NFTs, non-fungible tokens, make this possible. These cryptographic tokens add uniqueness and scarcity that strengthens the value of a digital asset. Otherwise, JPEGs hosted on any web platform are effortlessly reproducible and, hence, not as valuable.
Top 10 NFT Marketplaces
Historians could look back and point to 2021 as the year when NFTs exploded onto the world stage. NFTs are beginning to command staggering amounts of wealth. In January 2021, the total NFT sales for 6 major marketplaces tracked by cryptoart.io amounted to just shy of USD 12 million. By March 2021, this had ballooned to over USD 200 million. That’s a sixteen-fold increase in two months. The scary part about all of this: NFTs are still a young space in the decentralized ecosystem. Bitcoin was born in 2009. NFTs have only been accessible since 2017.
There are ten marketplaces chosen here into four categories:
- Open marketplaces
- Curated marketplaces
- Collectibles marketplaces
- Games marketplaces
The open marketplaces are ones where you can find anything under the sun, from visual art to music files, to collectibles, to game items. In this way, these NFT marketplaces are more open to any person who wants to enter the NFT space. Collectibles are sets of NFTs that are all branded with a similar quality, like CryptoPunks, for example. The collectible marketplace for CryptoPunks is all made in the same style, but they have varied faces and colors. The games marketplaces section will include NFT marketplaces that are motivated by assets bought on gaming applications.
Open Marketplace NFTs
1. OpenSea
OpenSea is often considered the first NFT marketplace and claims to be the biggest NFT marketplace out there right now. DappRadar analytics agrees. As far as general marketplaces go, OpenSea has had the most monetary volume in the last 30 days, or the month of March 2021.
The interface is calming to use as the white background and blue make the links pleasant to engage in. For being perhaps the oldest open marketplace around, the user interface is surprisingly intuitive. OpenSea should also be considered good for beginners to get started on because the tutorials they give are easy to understand. Yyou can learn a lot about how the NFT marketplaces work by using the platform.