Non-Fungible Tokens On NEAR Protocol
NEAR is an open-source and next-generation blockchain, and this article was created to explain why NEAR is the best blockchain for NFTs.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are digital assets representing real-world assets like music, videos, art, property, game, etc. Using NFTs, we can trade real worlds assets through smart-contract, cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. The popularity of NFTs seems to have exploded because the NFT market grows to $2.5B so far this year, and more people constantly get into NFT by creating their NFT assets because it helps them sell their art worldwide independent of any borders.
There are many tools and marketplaces to create and sell your NFTs, but in this article, we will discuss only NEAR protocol and explain why NEAR is the best place for NFTs.
NFT minting tools and marketplace in NEAR
Minting or creating an NFT is not tricky, but some platforms like Ethereum cost a high transaction fee of around 60–120 dollars for minting an NFT, but NEAR protocol has some advanced platforms using which you can mint your NFT without any hassle.
If you want to create an NFT of your art, Defi, music, photograph, etc., then you can visit Mintbase, which is a NEAR-based platform that allows anyone to build their NFT store for a very reliable and cheap cost.
For NFT collectible card creators and lovers, NEAR protocol launched paras.id using which you can create and list your NFT cards, and anybody can easily buy them using NEAR tokens.
Many art lovers invest a tremendous amount of money to buy art, but some people are incapable of purchasing a luxurious painting. Still, now Snark.arts give them the ability to buy a small piece of pixel of extravagant art, which means now you can buy a small portion of art from your favorite artist.
Suppose you are pretty new to the NFT space and want to mint some NFTs for free to experiment with this technology. In that case, you can check out the Pluminite platform on the NEAR protocol, which give every user access to create their first three NFTs for free, which means you don’t even need NEAR tokens to mint your first three NFTs.
All of the above platforms in the NEAR protocol not only helps with NFT creation but also helps with NFT buy/sell, and because all are leveraging NEAR blockchain, so it reduces the gas cost by 10,000–100,000X and is super fast for making transactions.
Some unique NFT platforms on NEAR
NEAR collaborated with Ed Young for all hip-hop lovers and launched a collection of non-fungible tokens featuring portraits of iconic figures from the 47-year history of hip-hop where you can bid on your favourite character using a credit card which means crypto newbies can also take part in the auction.
To help with Fan Engagement for streamers, esports teams, influencers, etc. NEAR launched the Arterra platform, where fans can collect NFTs from their favourite creators or esports team.
Pixelparty is an NFT on the NEAR blockchain, which contains only 600 tokens, where each token represents a subframe of the Pixelparty-Frame where you can write your favourite characters or use that to run ads.
If you like blockchain-powered games, don’t forget to check the Metamon platform, where you can collect unique NFT based monsters, and you can combine two monsters to evolve, so when you evolve you become more powerful and rarer.
If you are a corgis lover, you can create, collect, send, or trade NFT corgis by leveraging NEAR blockchain at the corgis3d platform.
Why NEAR protocol is the best place for NFT?
NEAR is an open-source proof of stake blockchain that allows cheap and superfast transactions to create human-readable wallet addresses (Example-Alex.near). NEAR uses Rust or AssemblyScript for contract creation, so most devs can start their work without learning additional languages. To handle more users NEAR uses Dynamic Re-sharding like Facebook and any major high traffic site.
NEAR gives protocol level royalty for smart-contract users which means more transaction goes through your smart-contract you will get some portion of transaction fees. And NEAR is 10,000–100,000X cheaper than Ethereum.
NEAR has Rainbow bridge and Aurora EVM(Ethereum virtual machine), where you can use Rainbow bridge to move your Ethereum assets into the NEAR ecosystem. EVM helps build Ethereum compatible environments to build Ethereum compatible applications.
Conclusion
This paragraph is my opinion on the article where I always wish to buy NFTs for cheap transactions fees because sometimes I paid 2x gas cost of the NFT price and waited for <15 min to get that NFT in my wallet is not fair. And in the perspective of NFT creators, I guess they also want a cheap place to mint their NFTs. All the platforms above are affordable, reliable, and fast by leveraging NEAR blockchain and targetting different users according to their requirements.
