Non-fungible tokens or NFTs have been appearing in the news since late last year for mind-blowing reasons: Grimes selling digital art pieces for up to $6 million, Jack selling his first-ever tweet, and the Beeple NFT that sold for about $6.6 million. The market has raged on, with over 1198% increase in total market cap from last year and more celebrities auctioning their flagship NFTs to fans.
Regardless of the inflated expectations surrounding the space, it is crucial to understand the potential drawbacks to full adoption. This article briefly highlights the NFTs, the existing NFT marketplaces and their shortfalls, and why AirNFTs — an upcoming marketplace — is an ideal fit.
What are NFTs?
Non-fungible tokens or NFTs are proofs of ownership of digital items on a blockchain. They represent anything — art pieces, game collectibles, trophies, tweets, screenshots, meme, GIFs, or even this article. They are, by nature, non-interchangeable, and their worth is purely subjective, as opposed to fungible assets like the US Dollar or cryptocurrencies like Ethereum.
Why are NFTs Important?
NFTs’ ability to confer uniqueness to anything in the most secure way makes it a golden extension of the creator economy, taking it up by multiple notches. With NFTs, digital artworks now have real value, all verifiable on a blockchain.
It doesn’t take a leap of faith to see where the NFT space is headed considering how much mainstream adoption that blockchain — the underpinning — tech is getting.
On NFT Marketplaces
NFT marketplaces are blockchain-based markets where NFTs are bought, sold or auctioned.
As with any other asset, liquidity necessitates a marketplace. This is why NFT marketplaces have sprung up almost in equal proportions to the NFT boom. Below are the ideal qualities to look out for in marketplaces, some of which are absent in the existing ones.
- Speed: transactions on an ideal NFT marketplace should be fast. Activities taking minutes or even hours to complete makes for a disappointing experience for users.
- Cost: transaction fees should be meagre.
- User experience: to fast-track adoption, marketplaces should be simple and easy to use.
- Community: active communities increase liquidity; thus, NFT DApps and marketplaces must have a large and active user-base.
- Governance: the ideal governance setting is a decentralized structure where all holders of a platform’s native utility token have a right to vote and make decisions.
- Extras: include bonuses, referrals, launchpads etc.
What’s out there?
Two prominent blockchains support hundreds of marketplaces: Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain (BSC). Let’s look at each of them and examine their leads and inadequacies.
Ethereum based NFTs marketplaces
Ethereum blockchain, with its ability to run transactions using smart contracts and being the early platform to support programmable decentralized applications, it has become the leading chain for the largest marketplaces such as Opensea, Rarible, Superrare, and Nifty Gateway.
The significant advantage that Ethereum based marketplaces have is the community size. Most marketplaces have solidified their place as household names in the NFT space. In addition to the earlier mentioned third-party marketplaces, many ETH-based NFT DApps like games, sports also have in-app marketplaces, making their digital collectibles highly liquid.
Shortcomings of current NFT marketplaces
Minting an NFT on Opensea, for example, can cost more than triple the price you’re hoping to sell it for.
Ethereum based marketplaces, for all their active communities and NFT varieties, are very expensive to use.
Gas fees fluctuate heavily, and some times, they may cost more than the price of the NFT you’re minting or putting out for sale. This is a long-standing issue that must be kept in mind when making purchases.
Also, transactions can be frustratingly slow; withdrawals can take up to hours sometimes.
Binance Smart Chain
Binance smart chain, the smart contract-enabled chain that runs in parallel to the Binance chain, was launched in September 2020, and ever since, several NFT projects have hopped on the train.
Everyone knows BSC has a considerable edge over Ethereum in transaction speed and low fees. However, the major drawback is that the available marketplaces are just a minute section of these DApps. And navigating these exchange markets for beginners can be pretty tricky. It is high time sole NFT marketplaces sprouted on Binance Smart Chain.
AirNFTs Holds Promise
AirNFTs is an upcoming NFT marketplace on Binance Smart Chain that is designed be at the same time fast, easy to use and the best easy to use for even the less tech savy NFT artists. The platform combines BSC edge in transaction speed, low fees and extremely easy to use user experience to bring NFTs to everyone.
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The Marketplace
The AirNFTs DApp has a very simple, easy to use design and here’s a quick walkthrough.
Home page
The homepage features a collection of NFTs. Each NFT is an art piece containing the owner tab and price in BNB (and its USD equivalent)
Search
The search feature allows you to search for artworks by name and sort by price if you have specifics in mind.
Profile
Your profile displays your account name and available asset balance.
Create
The create function allows you to make your NFT with ease.
Here’s how to do that:
- Upload the file — in GIF, PNG or JPEG formats, with a maximum size of 10MB. And, of course, all files must be original.
- Fill in the name and description boxes.
- Set the price. There’s an inbuilt price calculator that tells you what you will receive (in BNB and the USD equivalent).
- Click on Create.
And that’s it! You have your first NFT.
Note that Airnft charges a meagre 2.5% on NFT sales.
Future Plans
In addition to setting up the ideal NFT marketplace, the platform plans to:
- Release AirNFT token— the native utility token used to incentivize users, for airdrops and with which holders will be able to suggest and vote on plans to move the project forward;
- Support digital creators with NFT launchpads;
- Build Auction where users can bid between each other
- Introduce royalties which enable creators to get a cut on secondary sales of their NFTs;
- And bridge the BSC network with Ethereum 2.0, making it a one-stop cross-chain hub for all collectibles.
The Take-Away
NFTs have real potential to transform the digital creative world entirely, and AirNFTs will undoubtedly  change how we perceive the idea of digital arts marketplace.
Visit airnfts.com today and keep a tab on our socials to step into the seamless world of NFTs.
