NFTs are used to represent and prove ownership of unique,non-transferable digital items such as artwork, songs, films, and games, among other things. Although being around since 2017, NFTs have become extremely popular this year, with NFT artwork setting the trend with multimillion-dollar deals.
Digital art has seen some high-profile sales, one of the most significant being “Everyday: The First 5000 Days” NFT sold by Beeple at Christie’s for $69 million, followed by the sale of a music video by a digital artist Slime Sunday and musician 3LAU for $1.3M. Meanwhile, in sports, fans can collect and trade NFTs related to a particular player or team.
Christie’s had never offered a new media artwork of this scale or importance before.
Noah Davis, Associate Vice President in the Post-War and Contemporary Art department in New York
NFTs have opened the door for many digital artists to be identified and valued and will soon expand beyond trading art, music, video clips, etc. According to Silicon Valley investors, the moneymaking opportunities in the NFT world are endless.
At the time the iPhone was created, nobody would’ve thought that one of the killer apps was going to be hailing a ride.
Haun of Andreessen Horowitz, NPR
According to NonFungible.com, which aggregates statistics from NFT marketplaces, NFT trade volumes total over $800 million for the last month with 123,703 primary sales and 51,166 unique buyers. $176 million was spent in the first week of May 2021, followed by a slow down to $10 and $20 million per week.
Overview
Influencer Marketing Hub is one of the world’s leading marketing resources platforms. They have recently gathered a list of the top NFTs marketplaces where the users can buy, sell or create non-fungible tokens. In this post, we will explore some of the names they’ve chosen and the story behind them.
Name picks
OpenSea
OpenSea is a peer-to-peer marketplace for NFTs, rare digital items, and crypto collectibles. It allows users to buy and sell collectibles, gaming items, and other virtual goods through smart contracts. The company operates on the OpenSea.io domain name, with OpenSea.com currently listed for sale at Sedo. In the last 30 days, OpenSea processed 1.39 million transactions worth $1.26 billion.
Update: In November 2021 OpenSea upgraded their domain to OpenSea.com
SuperRare
SuperRare is an NFTs marketplace with a strong focus on digital art. Artists authentically create artworks that are tokenized as crypto-collectible digital items that can be owned and traded. The transactions are made using ether, the native cryptocurrency to the Ethereum network. SuperRare raised $9M in Series A round raised in March 2021, funded by Mark Cuban and Naval Ravikant.
The company has chosen an exact brand match domain name SuperRare.com for its platform.
Foundation Labs
Foundation Labs is a blockchain-based art marketplace for live auctions of digital art and NFTs. The company was founded in San Francisco Bay Area in 2020 and raised $200K in a Seed round in February 2021. Creators have earned a total of $84M using the platform since then. Bids can be submitted 24 hours after work is listed with a reserve price.
Foundation Labs has chosen Foundation.app for their main domain name.
Highlights
The companies on the list use different extensions for their online presence with 3 using .com, 3 .io, 1 .art, 1 .org, 1 .app, 1 .market. The spread of domain extensions is something very typical for young industries especially in the digital space, where projects can be started with minimal capital and grow quickly. This creates conditions for entrepreneurs to find themselves with a successful brand almost overnight, operating on a compromise name they secured when they were not sure if the idea will work out at all. Still, the majority of the companies tend to have at least the main word/s of their brand name in the domain itself, which helps to improve the SEO and avoid confusion with their target audience. They also seem to aim for domain names that are short and memorable.
Most of the companies have chosen the .io extension, popular with technology startups. It is the country extension for the Indian Ocean which appeals to tech brands due to its meaning as an acronym for input/output. It has also been involved in quite a few scandals making many questions if it’s a reliable choice for a global brand in the long run.
All the data
| Domain extension | Top 10 NFT marketplaces using it |
|---|---|
| .com | 3 |
| io | 3 |
| .art | 1 |
| .org | 1 |
| .market | 1 |
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