Jamie Wilde
Business Writer
Francis Scialabba
Coinbase is launching a marketplace for NFTs—which, yes, we’re still talking about.
On the marketplace, called Coinbase NFT, users will be able to buy, sell, and mint NFTs, or tokens that verify you’re the owner of a digital asset. Coinbase also said it would include “social features” and pitched the platform as more user-friendly than the other guys.
The “other guys” include two rival cryptocurrency exchanges: Binance and FTX, which both recently launched their own NFT marketplaces. But they’re all just guppies compared to OpenSea—which has a 97% stranglehold of the NFT market. In the past month alone, OpenSea facilitated nearly $2.8 billion in NFT transactions, per DappRadar.
NFTs have survived and even grown beyond their “fidget spinner” phase this spring, when the digital artist Beeple sold an NFT at Christie's for $69 million. Google searches flagged for months after, but interest has climbed back up since…perhaps best exemplified by an NFT of a rock selling for over half a mil at the end of August.
Plus, it’s not just your old college roommate who believes NFTs have a bright future.
Skeptics say the NFT space is plagued by scams and is essentially a hype bubble ready to burst.
Big picture: Coinbase’s stock has fallen 27% since it went public in April, as competitors like Robinhood crowd into crypto trading and regulators bare their teeth. Coinbase NFT marks the company’s second shot at finding a new revenue stream in about a month, after the SEC scrapped its last launch—a crypto lending product called Lend.
Looking ahead…anyone can join Coinbase’s waitlist for its NFT marketplace, which the company plans to launch this year. *Adds Pudgy Penguin to Christmas list.*—JW
Neal Freyman / 10.18.2021
Mary Tobler / 11.7.2021
Neal Freyman / 11.5.2021
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