Dear Bankless Nation,

Gem, the NFT marketplace aggregator that helped pioneer batched buys and listings, is gearing up to launch its V2 platform, which promises to be even faster, more gas-efficient, and user-friendly than its predecessor infra.

With these improvements and support for 170 marketplaces and counting, Gem's V2 platform could potentially challenge the dominance of Blur.

Having had the opportunity to explore the V2’s private beta already, I do believe that Gem's new platform can be a strong contender here.

If you're interested in trying out the V2 platform yourself, you can apply to join the waitlist ahead of the public rollout. It's worth noting that large batches of users are being accepted every two weeks at the moment.

In the meantime, let’s walk through a preview of what you can expect from the new and improved Gem for today’s post!

-WMP

Previewing Gem V2

What’s New

Gem V2 is very fast and very gas-efficient, but it also introduces a range of notable new features that improve upon the original platform’s market aggregation experience. These features include:

• 🧹 Advanced Sweeps — Users can specify the exact number of items they want to purchase within their defined price limit, and if any item fails, the next cheapest available option will be purchased automatically.
• ⛽ Gas Indicator — Users can monitor Ethereum’s congestion here and set their own gas fee using preset speeds or custom inputs to ensure faster transaction confirmations during periods of high network traffic.
• 🏷️ Instant Sells — Users can sell their NFTs for the best offer available across all payment tokens, either through “Card View” UI or “List View” on their profile, with a simple click to confirm the sell price.
• ⌨️ Key Binds — These are keyboard shortcuts for streamlining UX, such as pulling up the search box with the “/” key, mass selecting NFTs with “Shift + click,” and moving through items and collections with arrow keys.
• 📱 Portfolio — A new dashboard where users can analyze their NFT holdings and view insights, e.g. the estimated value of their collections and gains from unsold and sold NFTs, either through the “Toolkit View” UI or through the “Portfolio” tab on the Profile page.
• 🗒️ Watchlist — Here you can simply track your favorite NFT collections on Gem by from the “Trending” view on the V2 homepage or by searching for them directly using the search box.

Navigating the Platform

Once you arrive at the new V2 homepage, you can use your mouse to hover over and thus expand the navigation bar that runs vertically along the left side of the page. You’d then arrive at the menu for navigating around the platform’s main pages, like so:

The “Market” tab will bring you to an overview dashboard where you analyze the trading activity around NFT collections that are trending, that you’ve watchlisted, that you own, or that have recently been “swept” with batch buys. Here, you can also search out activity according to minimum or maximum floor prices or according to timeframes, e.g. from “All Time” stats to “1 minute” stats.

Clicking on a specific NFT project will bring you to a bespoke dashboard for that collection where you’ll be able to review the project’s main links, aggregated listings, real-time market activity, current offers, sale insights, and more. Of course, here you can also sort items with popular filters like “Lowest Price” or by categories like “Rarity” and “Traits.”

As for the “Watchlist” tab, this is where you can curate your own list of NFT collections that you want to watch closely. You simply find and click on the star next to a collection’s name to add or remove it from your watchlist. This resource makes it so you don’t have to scroll wildly across dozens or even hundreds of NFT projects to have all the information you want closely on hand.

Lastly in the “Explore” section of the navigation bar is “Mints,” which provides a real-time dashboard for ongoing Ethereum NFT mints. If you’re interested in finding new mints as they happen, this resource is a great starting point — not only because it makes the discovery process simple, but also because it makes the minting process safer. This safety stems from Gem searching the chain for mint events, simulating mint transactions with a random wallet on a mainnet fork, then passing up safe mints that have passed the check.

As for the “Wallet” section of the navigation bar, here you’ll find the “Profile,” “Sell,” and “Send” dashboards. As mentioned earlier, the new Profile hub is a one-stop spot where you can review all your wallet’s main info, like collection holdings, listings, current all-time gains, and beyond. The Sell and Send dashboards, like their names suggest, make it easy to list or transfer multiple NFTs simultaneously.

Also, keep in mind that on Gem V2 you can go into your settings and use the “Customize Gem” option to flick between “Pro” and “Collector” visual modes as you please.

“We’re Keeping Score”

In April 2022, NFT marketplace giant OpenSea acquired Gem to expand its product suite toward pro NFT traders. Since then, people have speculated, myself included, that OpenSea would opt to eventually launch a native token for the Gem platform.

With Blur having recently released $BLUR, a $GEM token could help OpenSea claw market share back from its biggest challenger and further consolidate Gem’s community. Interestingly, then, the Gem V2 beta’s UI does seem to suggest a token is coming. That’s because if you click on the Gem icon at the top of the homepage, a pop-up appears that says “We’re keeping score” regarding users’ trading activities.

That’s not a direct declaration, of course, but it does appear to be a very strong hint that using the Gem V2 beta now will qualify you for a reward of some sort later, and it’s no stretch to assume that could be an airdrop.

How to proceed here, then? To start, you can join the V2 waitlist while it’s still running ahead of the platform’s public release. Then you can use the Gem Discord to track when new batches of applicants are let in; the current entry cadence seems to be every two weeks, so another group is poised to be approved circa March 28, 2023.

Once you’re in, explore the platform and consider migrating some of your regular NFT collecting and trading activities over to rack up some points for your score. Also, keep in mind that the V2 is in beta for now, so the Gem team is actively interested in hearing early users’ thoughts. If you have any suggestions, there’s a dedicated “feedback” channel in the platform’s Discord!