NFTs – What is NFT? And What are NFT Marketplaces

What are NFTs and NFT Marketplaces?  

There is a platform to buy and sell everything online these days, right?   

NFT Marketplaces are the platforms where the NFTs are stored, displayed, and traded, and in some platforms, they are also minted – created.   

You can create, sell, and buy or bid on something you would like to have, at NFT Marketplaces.   

NFT – Non-Fungible Tokens! Everyone might have heard about this thing online, right? Every day almost a new NFT is sold in millions and the value is assigned to art. The traditional standard of Art is changing, that said, the buying and selling of art have changed and taken a drastic change. 

Non-fungible Tokens are basically what you call something of Value that is unique and when traded online cannot be replaced by anything else. For example, a bitcoin can be exchanged for bitcoin as it is fungible and has the same value, but the exchange of any digital Art – like a meme or a baseball player’s card is not possible as it is unique and non-fungible and has its value. 

People are already spending millions on NFTs. Essentially, they are like any physical collector’s item, but instead of receiving the oil painting at home, you’ll receive the art in the form of a Jpeg. 

How do NFTs work? 

At a very high level, NFTs are a part of the Ethereum blockchain. So, they are individual tokens with some extra information stored in them which differs from ETH coins. That extra information is an important part that allows them to take the form of Jpeg, Mp3, video, and gifs. Because they hold value and they can be bought or sold just like any other Art. So, when you right-click the image and save it, it is not going to make you a millionaire, as that image won’t hold the essential details. 

A Non-fungible token is different from each other with the original identification code and metadata.   

Here are some of the popular NFT Marketplace platforms that list specific kinds of NFTs on their platforms as per their niche. 

• OpenSea – Opensea is one of the well-known Marketplaces. One can represent ownership of a variety of things such as Sports collectibles, artwork, virtual worlds, trading cards, and domain names. 
• Rarible – It’s an easy-to-use NFT platform with minimum barriers to the entry of artists. This marketplace is run by a small community that owns RARI tokens. It focuses mainly on art but one can find a wide variety of other NFTs here too.  
• SuperRare –Many industry experts praise SuperRare for introducing a new approach to interacting with art, culture, and collecting online. The main highlight of this platform is that the marketplace creates a very unique and authentic social network that helps the leading concept artists.   
• Nifty Gateway – It is one of the most trusted NFT marketplaces for trading crypto art. Nifty gateway’s partnership with the best brands, athletes, and famous artists such as Beeple (the one who sold his NFT for $69 million) brings exclusively unique works to interested collectors of crypto art.   

To access and use these NFT Marketplaces, you will need to have a 

• A user account.
• A Crypto Wallet  
• And a certain number of coins in a wallet  

NFT Blockchain Options  

By far, Ethereum is a popular system for buying, selling, and creating digital unique items. However, there few more emerging options such as – Flow (by Dapper Labs), Solana, Polkadot, Tron, and many more.   

Should you buy NFTs?  

Not without having full knowledge of how the world of NFTs work. Also, you will need a certain amount of crypto in your wallet. Also, you will need to be fond of Art and know the Artform or else all you need is to be a fan of the NBA or baseball. It is a risky process as the future of NFTs is uncertain, but guess what the same thing was said about Bitcoin!  

On a final note, it is still difficult to figure out all the A to Z of NFTs. Once done, you need to figure out how NFT Marketplace functions and how one can create, buy or sell NFTs.  

Shivani Mehta 3 Mar 2022