I’m pointing you in the right direction and giving you a rundown of the top five Best NFT marketplaces in the space. I also have a few hints and tips that you definitely want to take advantage of, so be sure to stick around till the end. The largest NFT marketplaces has been booming this year, with multiple NFTs selling for millions of dollars apiece, collections coming out left, right, and center, and new non-fungible token marketplaces being developed on a regular basis.
Now, to keep things streamlined, I’ve decided to structure this review by compartmentalizing the nft platforms & marketplaces I’m about to discuss into a few different sections based on the native blockchains that they’re built on. While there are a plethora of new up-and-coming and exciting marketplaces set to launch on a variety of different blockchains.
Ethereum nft marketplace, Solana, and Flow. Now, this is primarily because these are among the most developed NFT ecosystems in the space and arguably offer the most optimal environment for popular NFTs to thrive. For instance, the extensive amount of liquidity inherent in the Ethereum blockchain as a whole allows for consistency, ease of tradability, as well as a reliable, sturdy infrastructure.
But, of course, those incessant gas fees need to be addressed when it comes to Ethereum’s usability. ETH 2.0 really cannot come soon enough, as I’m sure Vitalik and his team are all too aware of. Nevertheless, Ethereum reigns supreme in the non-fungible token space, and for good reason, too, as the majority of projects pioneering the NFT space originated from the ETH galaxy.
In addition, Ethereum was the first to provide the infrastructure to start experimenting with the concept of an NFT, and it was also Ethereum that authored the now universally recognized ERC-721 token standard specifically for non-fungible assets. Now, when it comes to Solana, its high throughput functionality and lightning-fast transactions per second, TPS, the architecture allows buy NFTs to be minted cheaply and seamlessly traded on the Sol blockchain.
Now, I hold Sol as well as ETH in my cryptocurrency portfolio, but I will do my best to remain as unbiased as I possibly can. Solana is so incredibly cool, and while it remains a rather young blockchain at heart, the road ahead of it is indeed very promising, and its future is most likely primed for success. Solana has only just recently entered the NFT space, but it has given birth to some very utility-rich collections, highly valued individual NFTs, and successful marketplaces.
Thus, it’s most definitely worth a look from us. Now, Dapper Labs has been in the NFT game since 2017, when it first launched the CryptoKitties, a type of non-fungible cat issued, managed, and stored on Ethereum. These ignited a manic, blockchain-infused artistic movement in the space and nearly broke the Ethereum blockchain. I know, it’s utter madness.
Now, since then, Dapper has invested substantial amounts of capital into its ongoing development, which subsequently led to the imagination of its in-house Flow blockchain. Now, Flow was primarily designed for games, apps, and the digital assets that power them, and it has historically proven to be a pioneering force in the development of non-fungible tokens, NFT-based games, and applications.
Best NFT Marketplaces
Opensea
OpenSea was founded by Alex Atala and Devin Finzer, two computer scientist masterminds who previously worked as software engineers at both Palantir and Pinterest. This superstar duo and their team are currently based in NYC, and since its very early days, OpenSea has sparked the interest of some of the most heavyweight VCs in the blockchain and NFT sales spheres.
The list here is pretty hefty, but here’s the TLDR. In early 2018, OpenSea raised $120,000 in a seed round led by Y Combinator, a US-based seed accelerator operating since 2005 with an investment portfolio composed of appealing early-stage positions in companies such as Airbnb, Dropbox, Reddit, Stripe, and Coinbase, among many others. Subsequently, in both May of 2018 and November of 2019, respectively, OpenSea raised an additional $2 million in a second seed round led by major VC funds One Confirmation, Animoca Brands, and Coinbase Ventures.
Now, OpenSea’s incredibly rapid ascent saw multiple private investors wanting in on the action as well, with notable individuals such as NBA All-Star Kevin Durant and Ashton Kutcher participating in the latest funding round spearheaded by Andreason Horowitz. Compared with the other NFT marketplaces and platforms available, OpenSea sits comfortably at the top. In fact, since its launch four years ago, OpenSea has seen exponential growth in terms of user adoption, trading volume, and the number of best NFTs listed. If you need more convincing, well, here are some stats for you.
At present, OpenSea has over 300,000 active users, over 1 million collections, more than 34 million NFTs listed, and billions of dollars in cumulative trading volume. On OpenSea, users can also create their own customizable NFT marketplaces, set their fees for the items they wish to sell and initiate NFT auctions, which people can participate in with several different cryptocurrencies. You may think of OpenSea and all these other NFT marketplaces as platforms akin in many ways to eBay in that they provide users with a full suite of economic applications to buy and sell NFTs, as well as the venue to seamlessly trade and nft exchange these tokens.
This is because OpenSea relies entirely on smart contract applications to execute transactions on its platform, which in turn greatly reduces the bottlenecks of having to go through a centralized entity or a third-party escrow to finalize transactions. Furthermore, transactions on OpenSea are atomic, meaning that either the whole transaction goes through with the buyer getting the NFT and the seller their payment or the contract is totally reverted, and it’s back to business as usual.
Now, when it comes to fees, OpenSea provides its marketplace infrastructure free of charge, but it does, however, take a modest 2.5% cut from all transactions and sales happening on its platform. In my opinion, this is a very reasonable amount, especially when compared to the fees on some of the other marketplaces in the space. For instance, Nifty Gateway takes a 5% cut from any sales or purchases happening on its marketplace.
As if that weren’t high enough, other marketplaces are known to take much more, so please always be wary of this, as I’d hate to see any of you getting absolutely wrecked by some of these excessive fees. So, promise me you’ll always check those percentages beforehand. Capisce? Good. Now, I’m not going to dive too deeply into the technicalities of how to use the OpenSea NFT marketplace, but if you’d like to know more about how to set up your account, navigate the marketplace, create your collection, or mint your very own NFT.
Now, OpenSea allows users to easily skim through its vast list of NFTs and filter them through its extensive sorting system. For instance, if you’re looking for recently listed, brand-new NFTs or collections within a specific price range, or if you’re on the lookout for a particular property or rare trait, you can do so directly here. Here is where you’ll be able to look up the collection’s founding team, the main website, and social media channels, and you’ll also be able to double-check the authenticity of a particular collection by verifying its contract address on the chain.
Now, I cannot stress the importance of this step enough, as OpenSea is filled to the brim with bad actors trying to scam you into purchasing NFTs from unauthenticated collections. Another cool and useful tool offered by OpenSea is the ranking and activity section. This is where you’ll be able to check all the trading history for either a specific NFT or an entire collection.
In fact, I’ve found this section to be rather compelling, as it’s helped me on my quest to find that next non-fungible gem before it’s too late. Oh, and if you want to know more about my in-depth research process to find 100x NFT gems. It’s up there in the top right, as ever. As it stands today, the all-time most traded NFT collections on OpenSea remain the classic Lava Labs CryptoPunks, Yuga Labs’ funky-looking Bored Ape Yacht Club, the Mutant Ape Yacht Club, and Decentraland’s Plots of Land and In-Game Items.
The respective trading volumes on these things are absolutely jaw-dropping. For instance, the all-time cumulative volume traded on CryptoPunks is almost 700,000 ETH, nearly 200,000 ETH for the Bored Apes, 92.7k for the Mutants, and 162k for Decentraland assets. Anywho, when it comes to buying NFTs on OpenSea, the process is pretty straightforward.
Once you’ve found a collection you think has potential, you can either purchase an NFT through the Buy Now button, make the holder an offer for it, or participate in an ongoing auction. This is a quick and simple way to purchase NFTs, and it’s even more efficient if you’re an artist or creator, as OpenSea puts you and your work in front of thousands of potential buyers, collectors, and art investors.
SuperRare
SuperRare is yet another peer-to-peer NFT marketplace leveraging the power of the Ethereum blockchain. The SuperRare platform has often been deemed as a marketplace where, quote, Instagram meets Christie’s, a definition that I like. T
his is because, apart from functioning purely as an NFT market, SuperRare also provides users with Instagram-like posts outlining any notable developments within the industry or any major sale by a major artist on its platform. I’ve actually found this to be a rather cool way to stay up to date with everything non-fungible in the art scene, and it has, at times, also helped to scout out some rather interesting gems. Now, SuperRare is a US-based NFT marketplace. It’s been active since 2017, and the great majority of the NFTs traded on its terminal are ETH-based ERC-721 tokens.
The company is based in Newark, New Jersey, and it was founded by John Crane, Charles Crane, and Jonathan Perkins, who are also SuperRare’s current CEO, CTO, and CPO. These rather suave-looking gents are also the founders of Pixura, which is the entity building the crypto-collectible and underlying NFT technology running SuperRare. During the NFT boom of 2021, SuperRare raised $9 million in a Series A funding round from top-tier investors. It’s a pretty impressive list, with names including Mark Cuban, Chamath Palihapitaya, and Ashton Kutcher.
Damn, Ashton really loves those NFTs, doesn’t he? As mentioned previously, ever since its launch in 2017, SuperRare has been considered not only a pioneering NFT marketplace but also a rather cutting-edge decentralized social network. Defined by a very clean gallery-like UI, SuperRare is a simple-to-use decentralized application for artists, creators, and collectors, which in turn also makes it the ideal portal for them to sell, trade, and collect art.
The NFT sites marketplace and decentralized social network crossover is a relatively new concept in the non-fungible token space. SuperRare truly has a first-mover advantage in this matter. To showcase this in further detail, SuperRare’s dashboard displays a sequence of tabs, with these being Market, Features, Community, and Search. On the Market page, users can search through a variety of different NFTs on sale and use filters to select the ones they’re most interested in.
For instance, if you’re looking for an asset within a specific price range, move the icon to your desired price target. Alternatively, if you’re looking for some newly listed NFTs, tap on Newest. Pretty self-explanatory. Now, SuperRare charges a simple 3% fee on all purchases, which are all paid by the buyer. And while this is 0.5% higher than OpenSea, 3% is very reasonable in the grand scheme of things. Each feature is an opportunity for NFT artists to showcase their work to the well-established SuperRare community, similar to what happens on Instagram, for instance.
However, SuperRare’s Editorial tab features daily updates to catch up with the latest activities of SuperRare’s most relevant artists and creators. But if you’re looking to have a mosey around SuperRare’s magical NFT land, then just hit Search. This will open up a new page with all of the hottest trending collections and the most up-and-coming NFT artists, like the ones shown here. I am quite tempted.
Now, Web3 development has always been an integral component of the SuperRare marketplace, according to its team and documentation. But in order to fully scale up and truly take advantage of the power of Web3, SuperRare is embarking on a path to attain ultimate decentralization via its own Decentralized Autonomous Organization, or DAO.
The goal here with SuperRare’s DAO is to ultimately shift ownership and curation of the platform’s assets to the community. In order to do so, SuperRare has introduced its native governance token, RARE, an ERC-20 token built on Ethereum. The RARE token is capped at 1 billion tokens, and its performance is very much linked to the trading volume, exposure, and the number of users actively trading on SuperRare’s NFT website marketplace.
According to data from DappRadar, SuperRare has seen almost $170 million in trading volume so far and counts more than 5,000 active traders. These metrics lead me to believe that this marketplace still has a lot to give, and with the gradual transition to SuperRare 2.0, it wouldn’t surprise me to see the RARE token performing rather well in the long run.
Rarible
In true decentralized fashion, this Moscow-based marketplace is not restricted and can be accessed by anyone who wishes to use it. On RAREable, ART NFTs can be easily created without any coding knowledge, and users are able to seamlessly purchase the pieces they like the most with just a few clicks of a button. According to DappRadar, RAREable comfortably sits in sixth place amongst the top NFT marketplaces, with a total number of traders equating to 82,000 and an all-time cumulative volume of $260 million.
Not too shabby. In February of 2021, RAREable raised $1.75 million in a seed round led by 1KX, Parify Capital, and Coinbase Ventures. Then, in June, RAREable closed a $14.2 million Series A funding round led by Venrock Capital, CoinFund, and ZeroOne Advisors, placing it among the top NFT platforms in the space. No listing requirements. But once again, folks, please always be wary of scams here, as crypto and NFT marketplaces are absolutely riddled with them.
So keep that in mind because I don’t want you to fall for something as ridiculous as this. Anywho, two of the coolest sections on RAREable are the Activities and Explore tabs. By clicking on Explore, you’ll be able to scroll through all recent sales and trending collections, which is also a great way to get a sense of what’s been performing well. The Explore tab will also highlight the top collections of the day, the week, and the month. Unsurprisingly, those bored ape beauties still reign supreme. I do love a good old ape.
Now, the Activities section is a bit more Instagram-like, as you’ll be able to see who is liking whose work, the most highly rated NFT pieces, all ongoing bids and auctions, and all of the most recent listings. This is also where you’ll be able to mint your very own NFT and list it on RAREable’s marketplace. You can set up a single or multiple-item collection, add your desired files for tokenization, decide on a pricing structure, and even initiate your auctions.
RAREable takes a 2.5% service fee on all primary sales. But as this is your work, you’ll be able to choose the royalty percentage that most suits your appetite. This will also allow you to enjoy recurring income from all the secondary and tertiary sales of your NFT. Now, just like with SuperRare, RAREable also introduced its native governance token, RARI, in July 2020.
The introduction of RARI is part of RAREable’s aspirations to become a fully decentralized, community-owned DAO NFT platform. This will allow users to govern ongoing activities in the marketplace and also have a say in its future development and propositions. Since July, every Sunday, RARI tokens are distributed to all platform users via a process called Marketplace Liquidity Mining, with approximately 41,250 RARI tokens being distributed among applications building on the RAREable NFT protocol.
Now, I am a huge fan of utility-rich, non-fungible tokens and of the marketplaces fueling them. Thus, because of this, I foresee a very bright future for both SuperRare and RAREable within the NFT ecosystem.
Solanart
The top NFT marketplace in the Solana ecosystem is SolanArt. Since its launch in August of this year, SolanArt has reached over 400,000 sales and over 4 million sold traded, an absolutely jaw-dropping amount that’s reflective of Solana’s roaring NFT ecosystem as a whole.
For instance, in September, Moonrock Capital acquired the 18th rarest Punk on Solana for approximately $250,000, as well as the 13th rarest Degen Ape NFT for around $5,900 sold. Now, when it comes to using SolanArt, the first step to get started is to set up a Solana wallet, such as Fantom, for instance. Now, while there are many wallet options available, Fantom is the most NFT-friendly Solana wallet on the market.
All that’s required to do is to download the Fantom wallet browser extension and that’s it. Now, once you’ve done that and you’ve successfully funded your wallet with some Solcoins, you are fully ready to start trading some good old Solana NFTs. On the Solana main dashboard, you can check through the statistics of all the latest sales or scroll through all of the top collections on the marketplace. One major contributing factor to SolanArt’s success is the collections available on its platform.
For example, while there are many unique collections, there are also many that take after leading NFTs built on Ethereum, such as the SolPunks and the Degenerate Ape Academy, two projects that took direct inspiration from the OG CryptoPunks and the BAYC, of course. But the idea here is rather simple. A new chain, a new collection, another potential gold rush. While I do find the SolPunks pretty cool, I’m generally all for originality and creativity.
Thus, I might have to give the EthereumPunks the win here. I mean, each to their own. Now, another element contributing to the success of SolanArt is the ability to mint NFTs with near-zero gas fees, which is a major plus, especially when compared with the minting gas prices of Ethereum.
The variety of collections offered by SolanArt, combined with the incredibly low minting prices and the growth of the Sol ecosystem, definitely explains the parabolic momentum experienced by Solana NFT marketplaces.
NBA Top Shot
Next up, we have Dapr Labs’ Flow blockchain and its incredibly well-recognized NBA Top Shot marketplace. In mid-2019, Dapr Labs signed a multi-year licensing deal with the NBA to create a one-of-a-kind NFT marketplace specifically for iconic in-game moments. NBA Top Shot has since become an industry behemoth, especially when it comes to sports NFTs, and it has firmly established itself as a true pioneer in the space.
In March of 2021, Dapr Labs secured a $305 million funding round backed by a roster of professional athletes and media personalities. In September, Dapr Labs raised another $250 million in a round led by global investment manager Kotube, an investment that put Dapr at a valuation of approximately $7.5 billion. Now, Dapr Labs designed its proprietary Flow blockchain to power the NBA Top Shot NFT marketplace and to be as seamless and user-friendly as technically possible.
On NBA Top Shot, users can purchase packs filled with a variety of different in-game moments, with each pack being valued depending on the stardom level of the players contained within and on the quality of the highlights. It counts over 450,000 traders and almost 10 million sales at an average price of $72 per NFT. The highest last sale for an individual in-game moment was that of All-Star LeBron James’ Series 1 dunk, a highlight that sold for a total of $230,000 in August of this year.
The unbelievable success of Dapr Labs’ NBA Top Shot stems from the fact that, when it comes to the usability of the platform, it is absolutely flawless. Neither crypto nor blockchain are mentioned during the purchasing process. Payments are carried out in fiat currency. Collectors can buy, sell, trade, and speculate on the future price of their packs. And ultimately, NBA Top Shot is a delight to use.
Platform users can create their collections, store their packs, gain access to exclusive benefits, select moments from their favorite teams, join communities, and even embark on some rather exciting challenges with other users. Setting up your account is very straightforward. All you do is sign up by clicking in the top right corner, enter an email address, create a password, connect your payment method and that’s that. You’re all set.
Conclusion
While this NFT boom cannot last forever, I’ll say this. I’ve been going deep down the NFT rabbit hole recently, and I’m growing ever more fascinated by the concepts of non-fungibility, collectability, utility, and, yes, even the mighty metaverse.
But more on that to come. But of course, if NFTs are going to be around, they’re going to require some solid marketplaces for them to continue thriving and for their holders to exchange value. Thus, I foresee a very bright future for these top five best NFT marketplaces and I cannot wait to see what their upcoming roadmaps will look like.
While OpenSea is currently at the helm of the NFT marketplace ecosystem, I also foresee a scenario in which other marketplaces on, say, Solana, Flow, Cardano, Polkadot, and other exciting blockchains will also manage to get their share. This is because the future of blockchain and NFTs is and must be interoperable, and maximalist, unfortunately, is just a dead end.
