Top 6 NFT Marketplaces for Fine Art NFT
Opensea is the most common example of an NFT marketplace. Recently, Blur, with its trendy events and community engagement, is attempting to challenge Opensea’s market dominance. Marketplaces that use PFP NFT such as Opensea or Blur have become popular with the NFT crowd. However, among various NFT marketplaces, there are ones that purely focus on art.
Most users focus on PFP’s fast turnaround and profit creation when dealing with NFT. Therefore, the fine art market that doesn’t handle PFP is inevitably at a disadvantage in terms of the number of users and is prone to low ratings compared to popular NFT marketplaces. Artists who create the artwork that is being dealt with in fine art marketplaces wish their creations to be viewed from a fine art point of view and they cannot offer advantages for fast profit turnaround.
Art de Finance is also a fine art marketplace that focuses on Art NFT in a strict sense and we have tried to introduce similar platforms, introduce ourselves, and how we try to differ from them.
Often, the competitors’ goals do not align with ours and some of the markets offer collectible NFT as well. However, they have been included because the nature of their business centers around art.
Existing Top 6 NFT Marketplace for Art NFT
The Foundation refers to itself as the “new creationism economy” and places emphasis on digital art. Art NFT creators can mint NFT only when they have an invitation and they can list or sell on the platform.
Foundation sold a total of one hundred million dollars worth of NFT since it was released at the beginning of 2021 and the sales have been conducted within the Ethereum-based platform.
The seller must be invited to the platform by the Foundation community but anyone who possesses an Ethereum-based Web3 wallet can be a purchaser.
Foundation’s uniqueness comes from 1. Focus on exclusive art drop, 2. User-friendly UI/UX, 3. Relatively lower secondhand trade royalty at 10%.
2. SuperRare
Super Rare is an Ethereum-based NFT marketplace that exclusively deals with a limited number of selected artists.
They use the DAO Curation method, an uncommon approval mechanism, to include art NFT in the sales list.
Super Rare issues Ethereum-based tokens and uses these tokens to establish DAO and to evaluate the value of artwork through “group-based intelligence.”
Super Rare has established a social network comprising artwork collectors, aficionados, and developers and turned it into a tight-knit community.
John Crain, who is the CEO, an art aficionado, and a market builder, is the most visible member of the platform. Super Rare is active on SNS and this caused the platform to attract people from all over.
Those who wish to develop Web3 Project earnestly should take a close look at John Crain’s example and try to learn from him.
3. Rarible
Rarible is a large-scale NFT marketplace that mostly focuses on art-related assets but also possesses NFTs of various kinds.
Unlike the other markets introduced above, Rarible includes a wide range of users and deals with PFP and other popular assets.
Rarible uses its own tokens for purchasing and sales within the platform and its token supports three different types of blockchain networks; Ethereum, Tezos, and Flow.
In addition, the platform is actively expanding with its main blockchains being Polygon, Solana, and more. Currently, their biggest advantage is multichain.
Tokens can be used not only for purchasing and sales but to reward and to be used as transaction fees for the active users on the platform.
Within Rarible, a creator can maximize their profit by creating more than two NFTs for a single image. By programming royalty for newly issued NFT and making it easy to cultivate, the platform is an example of the well-balanced needs of purchasers and creators.
Grimes, who is Elon Musk’s girlfriend and a singer, sold War Nymph through Nifty Gateway and earned $5.8m from this sale. The transaction incidentally served the purpose of marketing and PR for the company.
Nifty Gateway is under the management of Gemini which is known to be the Winklevoss brothers’ cryptocurrency exchange, and it is an Ethereum-based NFT marketplace.
While it is a fact that Grimes’ art sale made them famous, their popularity was able to last because of their highly sophisticated internal art appraisal and verification process.
A creator can easily program royalties to the digital asset and Nifty Gateway also offer the option to create an “open edition” so the creator can create an unlimited number of editions for a certain period.
They are different from most NFT marketplaces because they host the NFTs gained rather than storing them in a cryptocurrency wallet. Only art-related NFT can be issued and traded in the platform and with the direct support of Gemini, the platform provides more user-friendly applications but it also comes across as different from Web3.
They refer to their artwork as “Nifty” and call the sale of the pieces “Drop.” Nifty Gateway is closer to an all-encompassing art market because it sells famous musicians’ records and murals in addition to traditional art pieces.
5. Liveart
Liveart can be linked to Google and Facebook and it asks users to log in first to link to Metamask. Because of these characteristics and also because purchases can be made with credit cards, the platform emphasizes its friendlieness towards users than complete decentralization.
While most platforms are Ethereum-based, Liveart is based on BNB Chain (formerly BSC).
The platform issues NFT based on physical art and in-house curators determine the artwork’s value based on their preliminary review. There are several levels of membership and once the member has reached stage 4, they can claim authority over the physical art.
In addition to NFT based on physical art, the platform’s service also provides global artists’ data index.
And Art de Finance
Art de Finance uses a professional curator to evaluate the work of the selected artists. On top of this, users can utilize the voting token to express their thoughts on an artwork’s value from various standpoints and once the voting process is over, the artwork can finally be registered for sale. The complicated process can seem unfit for Web3 but the market that we are targetting is the creators and art collectors who are already invested in art.
This demographic tends to be more conservative than the crypto natives that we are familiar with. Therefore, we believe it’s necessary to be more thorough with the price establishment process which is also the cause of NFT’s volatility.
NFT that has completed this process will gain a solution to the NFT’s chronic problem of volatility and those who possess price-stabilized NFTs can access various services.
1. Solely Physical Art-Based NFT
Because NFT doesn’t have a physical form, its reputation has suffered by being called a fraud or a speculative asset during the market’s low point.
We believe we can expand the future of NFT ownership and the various activities that individuals can enjoy using their NFT.
To make this possible, a certain level of compromise must be agreed upon with the traditional market and create a system that stores and manages physical art to bestow a physical form to NFT.
We have partnered with ARSHEXA, which is building the world’s largest artwork storage space, to achieve our goal. ARSHEXA’s construction will cost approximately $300mil and once completed, the art pieces will be securely stored in a safe environment best suited for preserving their quality. Through this partnership, Art de Finance issued NFTs’ physical art will be stored in the art storage space at the Incheon International Airport.
Unlike Liveart which differentiates authority over art based on membership status, anyone will be able to claim ownership of their artwork.
2. Distinctive Curation System
Curators will evaluate the physical artwork’s value for Art de Finance. If curation is done in-house, objectivity can be an issue. We will be curating by attracting professional gallery curators to DAO. Users will take a vote using vADF (voting tokens) for the artwork that has been evaluated by professional curators. Doing so, we present a new solution to the preexisting, trouble-ridden art valuation method.
More information about this can be gleaned from our previous article, How Art de Finance measures the value of an artwork.
3. Scalability
We have recently announced our partnership with Polygon and that we will be working with them as we take the first steps in our business.
Polygon is a side chain that can interoperate with EVM. With this, users can experience expandability and low speed. Rarible tried to expand using multiple chains, but we will be mainly targeting the chains that can be compatible with EVM.
As readers are familiar with, most of the NFT trading takes place in Ethereum, followed by the Solana chain. However, due to the FTX situation, Solana’s risks increased, and many developers and users are increasingly moving from Solana to Ethereum.
We initially chose Polygon for the user experience, but if Ethereum’s user experience improves in the future we plan to expand to Ethereum and increase the number of active chains through EVM interoperable chains.
Check the news about our partnership with Polygon!
4. Collateral Loans Using NFT
NFT’s liquidity is another chronic problem and the solution for this is using Fiat or other cryptocurrencies as collateral for NFT Landing Protocol. However, in the case of using a volatile asset as collateral to exchange with Fiat, there are huge risks. More about this topic can be gleaned from our previous article, How Art de Finance will protect art NFT’s values.
Please see the link below to learn more about Art de Finance!
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