On Wednesday, Nasdaq listed cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase announced that Coinbase NFT which is a peer-to-peer community platform is officially going live in the beta version of its NFT marketplace.

Coinbase NFT will serve as an aggregator for any NFT built on the Ethereum blockchain. This NFT marketplace is accessible to a small set of beta testers those who will receive invitations based on their position on its waitlist before a wider rollout to more customers on Coinbase's waitlist. Using an algorithmic feed and a comment system, the company wants to compete with established players. The Coinbase NFT will also function as a social platform, where users can follow other profiles, browse and comment on NFTs, and by upvoting or downvoting discussions they can take part in those. Coinbase NFT beta testers will be able to use Coinbase Wallet or others for their profiles. Last year in the month of October, Coinbase first revealed its plan to launch an NFT marketplace.

Coinbase NFT is a social marketplace for non-fungible tokens where platform creators and collectors can come together to discover, display, purchase, and create digital assets.

As per the company, there will be no Coinbase transaction fees for a certain time. Eventually, the company will provide notice before adding fees and fees which will be in line with web3 industry standards. Sanchan Saxena, Coinbase’s VP of Products, detailed Coinbase NFT in a blog post that got published on Wednesday where he said Coinbase NFT is a Web3 social marketplace for NFTs. In addition, beta testers can set up a Coinbase NFT profile to buy and sell NFTs.

Coinbase's blog post includes screenshots that look similar to Instagram crossed with OpenSea, one of the largest NFT marketplaces. Profiles will be there where users can show off their collections and also discover feed. The marketplace also supports favoriting NFTs.

Coinbase NFT waitlist was set up when the NFT market was booming. Over the past 12 months NFT sales volume has hit $25 billion. As per the data from NonFungible.com, weekly sales have been more than cut in half from their peak in early January of nearly $1 billion. The prior week's sale was $207 million. Last week the data shows an 18% rise to $246 million in sales. As per NonFungible, five best-selling NFT collections over the past week include Bored Apes Yacht Club, Cool Cats, CryptoPunks, Doodles, and The Sandbox. 

Indrani Bose

CBW - External Analyst

INDIA