Coinbase NFT marketplace has opened in beta for a restricted group of clients, after the exchange initially announced plans for it in October
Coinbase NFT Marketplace
The beta NFT marketplace is now available for everyone to observe, but only a few people will be able to purchase or sell at first. “Coinbase will enroll a small number of people into the beta for Coinbase NFT,” Sanchan Saxena, Coinbase’s VP of product, told The Block. According to its website, Coinbase is a publicly listed cryptocurrency exchange platform with about 89 million customers, $278 billion in crypto assets, and $547 billion in quarterly volume moved.
Coinbase NFT is now available to select users who have been added to the waitlist, which has accumulated millions of potential members since October. According to the exchange, users will be included in the sequence in which they signed up, with intentions to add everyone in the “coming weeks.”
Coinbase NFT is currently only compatible with self-custody wallets like Coinbase Wallet and MetaMask, as well as wallets that implement the WalletConnect protocol. Users are solely accountable for their own funds maintained within a wallet, which may be linked to various markets, exchanges, and DeFi apps.
The beta version of the marketplace, built on the Ethereum blockchain, offers digital artwork from artists such as Cool Cats, Doodles, and Azuki that you may browse by. Coinbase is already choosing beta testers from its waitlist and won’t charge transaction fees for purchases. Testers may create accounts and use their crypto wallets to buy and sell NFTs. They may even utilize social features to communicate with other users and develop communities on the network.
Quotes
Sanchan Saxena, Coinbase’s vice president of product and ecosystem, speculated that the marketplace’s architecture will be a hybrid of a social networking platform and existing NFT markets such as OpeaSea. “While it is true that buying and selling NFTs is a big part of the ecosystem today, what we have learned by talking to many customers and creators is that there is more to it than just buying and selling. There is the community aspect of it.”
According to Saxena, the platform would allow for interaction between users and creators. Coinbase NFT, like many social networking sites, will let users to follow creators’ and others’ profiles, comment on artwork, and watch a tailored feed to find new NFTs based on interaction and purchases.
Regarding comment moderation, Saxena stated that the platform would work on the premise that users and politicians would determine “the law of the nation.” According to the Coinbase executive, the company’s team is “not in the business of evaluating what’s right and bad as long as it’s legal.”
BTIG fintech analyst Mark Palmer, added: “We believe Coinbase’s launch of its NFT marketplace could be a game-changer for both the firm and the NFT space. We believe the marketplace will provide an important source of diversification away from the crypto trading that is the source of the vast majority of its revenue at this point, and it will be an important component in what we view as an evolving, diversified digital asset platform.”
