During the technology’s 2021 boom, OpenSea became the go-to NFT marketplace. The platform’s expensive fees, centralised model, and recent listing troubles, on the other hand, have prompted collectors to seek alternative avenues for purchasing and selling non-fungibles.
The rise of NFTs is synonymous with the rise of OpenSea.
OpenSea, which debuted in December 2017, was the first open marketplace for Ethereum-based NFTs. Over the next three years, OpenSea quietly expanded its platform, catering to the few blockchain geeks surviving the crypto bear market by trading CryptoKitties and MoonCats, two historical NFT projects that were among the first collections traded on OpenSea.
Other NFT marketplaces and trading systems have sprung up as well. Many of these competitors gained traction fast by recognising OpenSea’s flaws and launching cheaper, more decentralised, and user-friendly solutions for collectors to buy and sell NFTs.
Gem.xyz
As more NFTs become dispersed throughout multiple marketplaces, a central location to consolidate listings becomes increasingly important. Enter gem.xyz, a new NFT aggregator that makes it simple to compare listings across multiple marketplaces.
The ability to buy numerous NFTs in the same transaction, allowing for significant gas fee savings, is the most significant advantage of using gem. Users can choose the NFTs they want to buy from a collection, and the gem user interface will indicate the overall cost as well as the gas charge savings from combining all the trades into a single transaction.
LooksRare
A platform that directly targets OpenSea’s business strategy LooksRare was created last month and has attracted users with a token airdrop and trade rewards. Anyone who traded at least 3 ETH worth of NFTs between June 16 and December 16, 2021, was entitled to an allotment of LOOKS tokens, with greater trading volumes receiving more tokens.
LOOKS token holders can stake their tokens to gain a share of the trading fees generated by LooksRare sales. The current yield for LOOKS staking is around 600 per cent, owing to the large trading volumes on the market. Furthermore, LooksRare undercuts OpenSea by charging 1.5 per cent on trades instead of 2.5 per cent.
SuperRare
Traditional NFT marketplaces appeal to casual customers wishing to trade avatar collections or generative art runs, whereas SuperRare caters to a particular group of NFT collectors. It has become the go-to platform for exclusive artists offering one-of-a-kind, limited-edition artworks.
Because SuperRare is still in its early stages, the marketplace is only accepting a hand-picked group of artists. Even after the platform is fully operational, those who want to sell their NFTs must first submit their artist profile to SuperRare and be selected for inclusion on the site.
Nonetheless, despite the challenge of getting included on SuperRare, the incentives for artists are substantial. The programme rewards creators by ensuring that they receive 10% of all secondary sale revenue for art that was first sold on the SuperRare marketplace.
