Makersplace

FTX US Launches NFT Market — Users Can Trade and Mint Solana NFTs, ETH Support on the Way

11/10/2021 by Idelto Editor

On Monday, FTX US announced the launch of its marketplace for non-fungible token (NFT) assets. FTX explained that the marketplace will feature Solana-based NFTs but support for Ethereum-based NFTs is coming in the near future.

FTX US Reveals New Solana NFT Market, Plans to Support Ethereum in the Near Future

West Realm Shires Services Inc., the parent company of FTX US, revealed on Monday that the U.S.-based regulated cryptocurrency exchange has launched the FTX NFTs Marketplace. The market will give FTX US users the ability to mint NFTs, as well as transfer the digital collectibles. The announcement published on October 11, indicates that the market will initially host Solana (SOL) minted non-fungible token (NFT) assets. “In the near future,” FTX NFTs plans to implement Ethereum support as well.

Brett Harrison, the president of FTX US explained during the announcement that the company has already become “immersed in the NFT ecosystem.” “In learning about so many of these projects, we’ve come to a comprehensive understanding of the needs of creators and collectors in the space,” Harrison said in a statement. “With the launch of this platform, we hope to provide both US and global users with a regulated marketplace that is intuitive and responsive to their needs.”

FTX Joins a Slew of Competitor NFT Marketplaces Raking in Billions, Exchange to Support all Solana NFTs That Conform to the Metaplex Standard

FTX NFTs Marketplace will indeed have a large quantity of NFT markets to compete with like Opensea, Rarible, Makersplace, Nifty Gateway, the Wax Atomicmarket, Aavegotchi, Foundation, Superrare.co, Hic et nunc, and more. Opensea by itself is nearing the $10 billion mark in terms of sales as the NFT market which supports both Ethereum and Polygon has captured $8.58 billion in all-time sales. While most of these markets do support Ethereum, some of them leverage Polygon, Tezos, Wax, BSC, and Flow.

FTX US planning to tap into the Solana ecosystem may give the market some initial advantages by separating itself. The company detailed that it plans to work “directly with Solana project creators to ensure authenticity verification” and highlighted that bids or listings can be done with a variety of assets including USD, SOL or ETH. “All Solana NFTs that conform to the Metaplex standard will be supported on the FTX US platform,” the firm’s announcement further explains.

Harrison and FTX US believe that the non-fungible token (NFT) collectible industry has gained access into our everyday lives. “The NFT ecosystem has started to infiltrate pop culture, but has been lacking a platform that provides easy access and exposure to the mainstream audience,” Harrison’s statement concluded.

What do you think about FTX US launching an NFT marketplace that supports Solana-based NFTs? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

NFT Market Sales Begin to Improve After Last Week’s Massive Market Slump

19/09/2021 by Idelto Editor

Seven days ago, non-fungible token (NFT) marketplaces saw sales nosedive after reaching all-time highs during the month of August. A week later sales have rebounded to a degree and NFT marketplaces like Opensea, Rarible, and Superrare have seen improvements in terms of seven-day trade volumes.

Opensea, Rarible, Hic et nunc, Makersplace, Superrare See NFT Weekly Volumes Improve

On September 12, 2021, Bitcoin.com News reported on the fact that non-fungible token (NFT) sales had plummeted 86% on September 10 from a mid-August all-time sales high. The report noted that the top NFT marketplace by sales volume, Opensea, saw its seven-day sales slide 52.47%. A variety of NFT markets and popular collections had seen sales slow down dramatically between September 10th to the 13th.

NFT marketplaces Aavegotchi, Superrare, and Foundation.

However, a week later, NFT sales are rebounding to some degree and popular markets and collections are picking up steam. Statistics from dappradar.com indicate that Opensea saw $629.35 million in trade volume across 172,267 traders.

Weekly volume has improved by 0.94% and the number of Opensea traders has jumped by 9.02%. Opensea is compatible with the Ethereum and Polygon networks. The second-largest NFT project by weekly volume on September 19 is Axie Infinity with $110.61 million in seven-day sales.

NFT marketplaces Rarible, Opensea, NBA Top Shot, Makersplace, Hic et nunc, Axie Infinity, and Atomicmarket.

Despite being the second-largest in terms of seven-day volume, Axie Infinity volume is ultimately down 23.93% during the last week. Rarible’s volume during the week was $4.9 million and it’s up 60.27% higher than last week.

The Tezos-powered Hic et nunc NFT marketplace raked in $4.51 million and is up 35.69% this week. The marketplace Superrare.co took in $3.31 million and increased 11.92% in seven days. Makersplace did well this week raking in about $557K in trade volumes and an increase of 31.83%.

NBA Top Shot, Atomicmarket, Aavegotchi, Foundation NFT Volumes Slide — Old 2017 Rare Pepe Series 1 Card Enters Top Ten Sales

NBA Top Shot, Atomicmarket, Aavegotchi, and Foundation all saw losses in weekly trade volume as percentage losses range between 17.94% to 59.53%. The largest NFT sale this week stemmed from the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) collection, as BAYC #81 sold for $1.9 million this week.

Top non-fungible token (NFT) sales during the last seven days according to statistics from dappradar.com.

A dominant force in this week’s top ten NFT sales includes NFTs stemming from the Artblocks collection. An older NFT, RAREPEPE Card 1, Series 1 sold for $683.75K or 200 ether 18 hours ago making it into the top ten NFT sales category this week.

Weekly stats from nonfungible.com’s market data indicates that last week’s NFT sales on September 11 were around 36,095 sales. This week there are now 46,390 NFT sales with an increase of around 28.52%. In terms of the number of unique wallets which bought or sold an NFT asset, nonfungible.com stats show 31,255 active market wallets.

What do you think about NFT trade volumes from different marketplaces rebounding from last week’s slump? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

Alibaba’s NFT Marketplace Allows Content Creators to Copyright Work via Blockchain IP Service: Report

17/08/2021 by Idelto Editor

The Chinese multinational technology giant, Alibaba Group, has launched a non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace. According to regional reports, the Alibaba NFT platform not only provides customers with the ability to purchase and sell NFTs, but the marketplace also allows people to license and sell intellectual property (IP), as it is copyrighted by blockchain technology.

Alibaba’s NFT Market Offers Blockchain Copyright Service

Alibaba is a large corporation from China that specializes in internet services, technology, and e-commerce solutions. The company, founded in 1999, quickly catapulted to being one of the biggest in the world with $257 billion in assets under its wing. Alibaba has raked in $21.8 billion in revenue so far in 2021 and the company has been involved with cryptocurrency and blockchain solutions for years now.

The billion-dollar company has launched its NFT marketplace this week according to a report published on August 17 by the South China Morning Post (SCMP). It’s worth noting that the Hangzhou-based tech giant also owns SCMP. The report says that the NFTs issued are minted on what’s called the “New Copyright Blockchain” and that it is operated by the Sichuan Blockchain Association Copyright Committee.

One of the Alibaba NFT marketplace services is called “Blockchain Digital Copyright and Asset Trade,” and it allows any content creator to copyright material via the blockchain and sell the rights (tokens) as well. The copyright is basically tokenized, and only the owner of the token truly owns the content according to the Alibaba NFT marketplace intro page. SCMP reporter Josh Ye details that the Alibaba NFT platform “already has numerous products listed,” but they won’t see an auction until next month.

South China Morning Post, Tencent, Ant Group Launch NFTs

Josh Ye also notes that one item is a Star Wars illustration and a painted rendition of Sichuan’s West Pearl Tower. “Each auction starts at 100 yuan (US$15), and bidding requires a 500 yuan deposit,” the SCMP writer notes. The reporter also details that SCMP will be issuing non-fungible token assets similar to American magazine corporations like TIME, USA Today, and Fortune.

In addition to Alibaba, the company’s fintech affiliate Ant Group is jumping into the NFT industry and the Alibaba NFT market is connected with Tencent Holdings as well. On the global playing field, Alibaba will have to face challenges from other markets that have raised millions of dollars this year like Rarible, Opensea, and Makersplace. Further, the Crypto.com and FTX-branded NFT marketplaces will also be Alibaba’s competitors.

What do you think about Alibaba getting into NFTs and the newly created Alibaba NFT marketplace? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

Slew of Venture Funds, Eminem, Paul Rosenberg Inject $30 Million Into NFT Platform Makersplace

05/08/2021 by Idelto Editor

On Wednesday, the non-fungible token (NFT) market platform Makersplace secured $30 million in a Series A financing round. The team behind the NFT marketplace says it plans to leverage the funds to “acquire additional talent and scale the business.” While the Series A was co-led by Pantera Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners, the world-famous hip hop star Eminem also invested in Makersplace.

Makersplace Raises $30 Million to Scale the NFT Business

The company that developed the non-fungible token (NFT) market platform Makersplace has revealed the firm has raised $30 million from a number of investors. Bessemer Venture Partners and Pantera Capital co-led the financing round with participation from Sony Music Entertainment, Coinbase Ventures, 9Yards Capital, Uncork Capital, and Draper Dragon Digital Assets.

Moreover, Makersplace revealed the investment round saw notable angel investors like Paul Rosenberg and 3LAU in music, Eminem, Acquavella Galleries, Sabrina Hahn and Bill Ruprecht in the arts, alongside Julia and Kevin Hartz.

The Makersplace market was founded in 2018 by ecommerce veteran Ryoma Ito and two Pinterest co-workers Dannie Chu and Yash Nelapati. Dannie Chu, the Makersplace co-founder and CEO said the company views the work it does as “an investment in the future of creativity.” The NFT marketplace Chu co-founded three years ago, has seen over $100 million in sales and 10x the increase in unique collectors during the last 12 months.

“Makersplace played a central role in sparking a global conversation about NFTs and the future of the creator economy this spring,” Chu said in a statement. “With this Series A we will further our commitment to uniting the best digital artists with the most passionate collectors and continue to bring this new medium for creativity and collecting to a mainstream audience.”

A Great Number of NFT Marketplaces Are Raising Capital This Year, Makersplace Boasts the World Famous Beeple NFT Sale

Makersplace will be dealing with a lot of competition as there are numerous NFT markets these days. A great number of the top NFT marketplaces have been raising millions of dollars in capital during seed rounds hosted in 2021. For instance, the NFT marketplace Mintable, backed by the billionaire Mark Cuban, raised $13 million in a Series A on July 1. At the end of July, Opensea announced it raised a whopping $100 million in a Series B round. The NFT marketplace Rarible raised over $14 Million in capital and revealed plans to launch on the Flow blockchain.

The company will also face the two major exchanges Crypto.com and FTX as well. While Crypto.com already launched its NFT market with help from celebrities like Snoop Dogg, FTX recently revealed it partnered with the film, media, marketing, and television giant Dolphin Entertainment.

In the recent announcement, Makersplace thanked specific NFT artists and said the company’s sales results were driven by creators like Beeple, Bosslogic, Trevor Jones, Pak, DeadMau5, Urs Fischer, Patrick Mahomes, 3LAU, Jose Delbo, and Lushsux.

The $30 million in a Series A financing round announcement also mentioned one of the largest NFT sales that ever took place. Makersplace is well known for working with Christie’s when Beeple auctioned his “Everdays: The First 5000 Days” NFT collectible, which fetched a massive $69 million.

“We firmly believe that NFTs will power the next generation of digital art, collectibles, media, experiences, and much more,” said Paul Veradittakit, a partner at Pantera Capital while speaking about the Makerplace Series A capital raise.

What do you think about Makersplace raising $30 million in a Series A financing round? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

NFT Criticism Heightens: Skeptic Calls Tech a ‘House of Cards,’ Claims NFTs Will be ‘Broken in a Decade’

21/03/2021 by Idelto Editor

On the week of March 7 through the 13th, the term “NFT” touched an all-time record high in terms of popular search queries according to Google Trends (GT). The highest score is 100 and this week, GT shows interest has dwindled a hair down to 97. Meanwhile, while the NFT hype affects the cryptocurrency and blockchain community, not everyone is thrilled with this technology. Some critics think NFT tech needs to be more robust in order for collectibles to last more than a decade without them disappearing.

The Rift Between NFT Hype and NFT Criticism

Over the last few weeks, the NFT craze has jumped to new levels as people have sold artwork for millions of dollars, unique audio recordings of farts have been tokenized, and even blockchain-backed signature dance moves are NFTs. And of course, by now everyone has heard about Beeple, the digital artist who sold an NFT via Christie’s auction house for a whopping $69 million. This sale propelled NFT mania to new heights, and Christie’s auction invoked Sotheby’s to partner with an artist named Pak.

The mysterious digital artist Pak was selling an NFT on Makersplace called “Metarift.” An NFT art collector named “888” placed a bid on Metarift for $888,888 on March 19. The following day, the bid had been upped to $904,413 by a bidder named “Danny.” The auction ended on Pak’s latest NFT artwork sale on Saturday at 12:30 p.m. (PST) with Danny’s winning bid.

As of 3:30 p.m. (EST), Pak’s “Metarift” NFT’s highest bid was for $904,413 by a bidder named Danny who now owns the NFT.

Despite all the mega-auctions and all the celebrities joining in on the fun, non-fungible token (NFT) assets have come under a lot of criticism. Bitcoin.com’s newsdesk discussed the topic of NFT immutability which has been the industry’s biggest weak point so far. In that editorial tokenized NFT tweets were deleted and artwork was replaced with other images.

On March 17, the Twitter user Jonty Wareing told his 6,932 followers how non-fungible tokens reference the media people are purchasing today. His first tweet went viral with more than 27,000 likes and close to 10,000 retweets.

Out of curiosity I dug into how NFT’s actually reference the media you’re “buying” and my eyebrows are now orbiting the moon

— Jonty Wareing (@jonty) March 17, 2021

File Vanishes from the Host ‘Your Token Is Now Worthless’

He discussed a sale of an original Beeple sold on Nifty Gateway, and detailed how the Beeple JSON file was hosted on Nifty Gateway’s servers. Wareing then explained how the NFT is also hosted on Cloudinary. “So if Nifty goes bust, your token is now worthless,” Wareing said. “It refers to nothing. This can’t be changed,” he added. Then Wareing also talked about files that are using the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) as well. In this tweet, he specifically discussed the Beeple sold by Christie’s which is connected to IPFS.

“So, well done for referring to IPFS – it references the specific file rather than a URL that might break,” Wareing continued and showed the metadata link to an IPFS gateway run by Makersplace. But if something happened to Makersplace, then once again, the link may be useless over time. “You might say ‘Just refer to the IPFS hash in both places’” Wareing added. But further scorned that “IPFS only serves files as long as a node in the IPFS network intentionally keeps hosting it.”

Wareing also said:

Which means when the startup [that] sold you the NFT goes bust, the files will probably vanish from IPFS too.

Twitter Account Dubbed Check My NFT Discovers Current NFT Flaws in the Wild

Moreover, he also tweeted about an example of the issue happening today and said “NFT’s are built on an absolute house of cards constructed by the people selling them.” He claims the tech will be “broken” within a decade. The Twitter account called “Check My NFT” (@checkmynft) has also been tweeting about a bunch of missing art, and inaccessible NFT assets.

The Twitter account called “Check My NFT” has been investigating the permanence issue with non-fungible token (NFT) assets.

In our last report, Check My NFT explained that metadata, URLs, and image files “should be backed by an immutable and permanent storage provider.” One way of doing this is leveraging IPFS2Arweave.com, which utilizes a project called Arweave.

IPFS2Arweave.com leverages the Arweave network to store the files and also pin the NFT data to the Interplanetary File System.

The IPFS + Arweave solution claims to solve the permanence problem by using Arweave for storage and pinning the NFT data to the Interplanetary File System.

“IPFS is a popular P2P network for sharing data in a decentralized way, but it lacks one feature: Permanence. Content on the IPFS network can disappear. If no-one hosts the data, it could be lost forever,” the Arweave website details. “The Arweave blockchain can now store and pin files onto IPFS and keep them available permanently. This simple API takes an IPFS Hash, stores the data onto Arweave, and pins it to IPFS.”

It will be interesting to see if NFT projects take the recent scrutiny seriously, and leverage immutable and permanent storage as Check My NFT and Arweave recommends. Projects going forward may work toward building stronger permanence models. Projects that have already minted million-dollar NFT works might want to make sure the non-fungible token assets are truly deemed immutable.

Meanwhile, other blockchain NFT solutions believe their distributed ledger protocol alone is reliable enough to preserve an NFT for centuries to come. Much of this NFT debate will still require the test of time or exposure to vulnerabilities.

What do you think about the NFT permanence problem? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.