Dear Bankless Nation,
I’m heading out to the NFT store — need anything?
Jokes aside, this week NFT marketplace OpenSea faced a snafu. Blockchain sleuths discovered one of the platform’s employees had surreptitiously capitalized on the platform’s front-page NFT spotlights.
OpenSea is addressing the episode, and with the team’s track record there’s no reason to believe they won’t get things right and continue to facilitate incredible things in the NFT ecosystem from here.
That said, people were clamoring for more marketplace options long before this incident, and they’ll be clamoring for more options long after it because of how early things are around NFTs in general. Variety is a tasty spice, after all.
So this week when I started thinking about the current state of Ethereum’s NFT marketplace scene, I realized … wow. It’s much larger than when I last checked! Accordingly, this post is me sharing a snapshot of the scene as it stands — may it aid you in your creative NFT adventures, however so!
-WMP
🛒 In the market for NFTs ...
Below I’m going to cover L1 marketplaces (namely ones live on the Ethereum mainnet) and L2 marketplaces (using the wider meaning of platforms on layer-two rollups and/or sidechains).
Before moving on, I’ll note that the L2 ecosystem is only just beginning to take off. I expect to see a blossoming of NFT projects around L2s in the months ahead, so keep your eyes peeled for that!
⛽ Metaversal mint tip:
Check out NFT Gas Station— This awesome resource helps you estimate current buyer and seller costs across top NFT marketplaces!
1️⃣ L1 NFT markets
- Async Art — Platform and marketplace for interactive, dynamic NFTs.
- Ephimera — NFT marketplace custom-tailored for photographs and video art.
- Foundation — Web3 platform for the “creative economy.”
- Fractional— Platform for facilitating fractionalized NFT markets.
- KnownOrigin — Digital art marketplace.
- MakersPlace— Another respected digital art marketplace.
- Mintable— Community-controlled NFT marketplace.
- Mintbase— NFT marketplace that’s focused on the NEAR Protocol now but still has a legacy Ethereum platform.
- Nameless— Upcoming NFT storefront platform.
- NIFTEX— NFT fractionalization platform and marketplace.
- nft20— Liquidity protocol offering pools of floor-level NFTs.
- NFTfi— Marketplace for NFT-collateralized loans.
- NFTX— Decentralized NFT marketplace underpinned by a bespoke liquidity protocol.
- Nifty Gateway — NFT marketplace that just opened up its platform to external NFTs.
- Nifty’s— Social NFT network that just launched its own native marketplace.
- OpenSea — The cryptoeconomy’s leading NFT marketplace.
- Rarible — Another one of the ecosystem’s most popular NFT marketplaces.
- Shoyu — Upcoming NFT marketplace developed by the Sushiswap community.
- SuperRare — Leading cryptoart marketplace, in the process of decentralizing via $RARE.
- Unicly — A platform for fractionalizing NFTs and trading NFT fractions.
- Universe— Upcoming NFT marketplace and creative suite.
- Zora — Protocol for permissionless, on-chain NFT marketplaces.
☯️ L2 NFT markets
- Cargo — NFT marketplace and minting platform for Ethereum and the Polygon and xDai sidechains.
- Immutable X — Gas-free NFT marketplace offering underpinned by ZK rollup technology.
- Nifty Ink — NFT platform built by Austin Griffith on xDai.
- Loopring — No one has built an NFT market atop the Loopring L2 yet, but it’s completely possible at this point.
- OpenSea — Also supports minting and trading on Polygon, with support for more L2s surely in the works.
- Palm — NFT platform built on Palm, a sidechain based on the Ethereum Virtual Machine.
- Showtime — NFT social network that now supports minting and trading via Polygon.
- Smol Puddle — Experimental NFT marketplace built on “optimistic” Arbitrum One rollup; tread cautiously as it’s young and could have bugs!
Markets to come?
Expect to see plenty more movement around the NFT marketplace scene in the near future.
For example, Yearn founder Andre Cronje has recently been hinting at a new marketplace project tentatively dubbed Artion. Additionally, talented dev Owen Shen may be cooking something up, and the Art Blocks community may be starting its own AB-focused platform. Be on the lookout for upstarts, then!
Action step
- ➿ Read “How to bridge NFTs to Polygon”