Look out OpenSea, Coinbase is the latest exchange to break into NFTs. Today, the powerhouse crypto exchange announced an initial waitlist for an upcoming NFT marketplace. The platform, deemed ‘Coinbase NFT,’ will be offering users the ability to mint, purchase, and show off their NFT collection.
The move signals an initial step to what company representatives signaled earlier in the year with the firm’s desire to launch a crypto app store, as reported by our sister network NewsBTC.
Coinbase: Expanding Into New Verticals
The initial play into NFTs for Coinbase will support Ethereum-based NFTs, with support extending to other blockchains from there. According to initial reports, the platform will utilize self-custody wallets and will not require KYC verification as it does for standard exchange transactions. The announcement was drafted and released from Coinbase VP of Product, Ecosystem Sanchan Saxena.
Additionally, Coinbase’s announcement comes after competing exchanges FTX and Gemini announced their respective NFT marketplaces. Q3 2021 NFT sales surpassed $10B after a monster August and September, with a large bulk of those occurring on OpenSea. While OpenSea has predominantly been the biggest NFT marketplace that the market has seen yet, the list of potential competitors grows by the day.
After a rocky start to a public listing on the NASDAQ earlier in the year, Coinbase (COIN) has begun finding what seems to be stable ground over the past few months. Nonetheless, it is still down significantly from it's IPO price. | Source: NASDAQ: COIN on TradingView.com
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It’s No Coin-cidence
The marketplace aims to be “creative and creator first.” Coinbase looks to achieve this by designing the marketplace for social engagement, one area that OpenSea has generally missed the mark on. The worlds of crypto and social engagement continue to blur and are clearly a natural fit; Twitter recently added payment support via crypto for it’s tipping feature, and TikTok has jumped into NFTs in recent weeks as well. It’s becoming clear that the crossover between blockchain technology and social platforms is present.
Coinbase is continuing to aggressively look at new product offerings for consumers. The exchange was aggressively putting the rubber to the road on Coinbase Lend, it’s yield-generating interest project. That was put to a halt last month after SEC threats. Additionally, consumer research groups have found that Coinbase received the third-most complaints among crypto wallet companies since 2017. The company is approaching nearly 70M verified users.
While Coinbase won’t have the first-mover advantage that other exchanges will have, it will have a notable name recognition – especially stateside.
More more on non-fungible tokens and each week’s latest action, check out Saturday’s weekly Bitcoinist publication, ‘NFTs In A Nutshell.’
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Featured image from blog.coinbase.com, Charts from TradingView.com