Coinbase, cryptocurrency exchange, has announced that a waitlist will be opened for a nonfungible marketplace it hopes to launch later this year, this could provide competition for established marketplaces like OpenSea.
Coinbase vice president of product and ecosystem Sanchan Saxena stated in a blog post on Oct. 12 that the nonfungible token, or NFT, marketplace will allow users to mint, purchase, find, and exhibit Ethereum-based tokens.
With all NFTs on-chain, Saxena claims that the service will help creators to keep control of their work “via decentralized contracts and metadata transparency.”
Coinbase’s announcement comes after crypto exchange FTX and its U.S. affiliate launched a marketplace that allows users to trade NFTs cross-chain via the Ethereum and Solana blockchains.
In June, Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, entered the NFT sector by opening its own marketplace with the goal of lowering transaction costs.
Coinbase’s entry into the NFT industry, with 68 million verified users and 8.8 million monthly active users as of Q2 2021, could put established markets like OpenSea and Rarible in competition.
Nate Chastain, OpenSea’s head of product, has been chastised for utilizing burner wallets to buy NFTs on the platform so that the artwork may be featured more prominently on the website’s top page. The platform mostly employs Ethereum, which dominates the NFT market in terms of sales.
The overall transaction volume on OpenSea was $8.7 billion at the time of writing, according to DappRadar data, making it the largest NFT marketplace. With $2.5 billion in NFT sales, the Pokemon-inspired Axie Infinity game finished in second.
