Image courtesy of Arstechnica.
Despite the hype surrounding NFTs in the last few months, many analysts believe that the NFT ecosystem is still in its infancy. NFT-related projects have seen a rapid influx of creators, artists, and investors, and platforms such as DapperLabs have attracted huge amounts of capital – $7.6 billion at the last estimate.
This is only the beginning, though. With celebrities like Mark Cuban, Lindsey Lohan and Tyga joining the NFT craze, NFTs are now appearing in the popular media. And while it would be easy to see this as just another crypto hype cycle being co-opted by celebrities, in reality it’s a sign that NFTs are about to go mainstream.
As they do so, the way in which they are bought, traded, and used is going to change. While the majority of NFT trades are currently related to sales of services, articles, and works of art, they have the potential to be used for much more. The explosive user growth in the use of NFTs is proof that the tokens can be used at scale, and that future iterations of NFT platforms could be used for digital rights management, including music or real world ownership.
Binance Launches the Largest NFT Marketplace
This potential for rapid growth has attracted many innovative companies, and this month saw the entry of Binance into the NFT space. Binance NFT is, in the company’s own words, a groundbreaking NFT marketplace that will bring together artists, creators, and investors from around the world.
The potential of the platform rests on two interlinked design goals. One is that Binance has sought to reduce fees for creators and investors to an absolute minimum, with artists paying only a fraction of the gas costs to mint NFTs on Binance Smart Chain.
Providing financial efficiency at scale has has been the explicit goal of the company, in fact, with Helen Hai, Head of Binance NFT, saying that “Our aim is to provide the largest NFT trading platform in the world with the best minting, buying and exchanging experience, by leveraging the fastest and cheapest solutions powered by Binance blockchain infrastructure and community.”
The second pillar of Binance NFT is the collaborative network the company has built around the platform. They aim to drive interest into the ecosystem in two ways – one is to offer unique offerings and exclusive collaborations, and the other is encourage investors already using Binance.com to access the NFT marketplace alongside the company’s other crypto ecosystem offerings.
Binance Invests in NFTb, the First Premier NFT Marketplace on BSC
Following the announcement of their upcoming platform launch, Binance is also keen to drive adoption and investment in the NFT space by investing in parallel platforms. According to a source working on the Binance NFT project, NFTb, a community owned NFT platform has received multiple funding rounds from Binance Labs, the company’s venture arm.
Alongside Binance investing in the platform directly, it has strong support across the Binance community.
NFTb – Combining Charities and Cross Chain NFTs
The support for NFTb – both financial and from the wider community – is based on the promise that it can overcome some of the current issues that limit liquidity and inward investment into the NFT space.
Primarily, this issue is one of cost. As the number of crypto “users” continues to grow, these protocols and Dapps find more ways to integrate and increase in complexity. This has meant that Ethereum has become slow and expensive to the point where it prices out a large percentage of would-be network participants.
The problem with the current NFT marketplace is two fold — high fees and lack of liquidity. NFTs launched on the Ethereum blockchain are subject to high fees, long wait times and unpredictable network fluctuations. This problem will grow exponentially as artists and creators around the world begin to learn the value of NFTs, and attempt to create them on Ethereum.
The team behind NFTb believes that Binance Smart Chain provides the necessary infrastructure to build a large scale NFT platform that can overcome these issues. And that is the idea behind NFTb.
The idea is simple enough – the 100% community owned platform will allow creators to reap more rewards, both in the form of NFT appreciation as well as access to the rapidly growing BSC user base. Then, as the platform expands, it will offer the opportunity for cross chain swaps for NFTs as well as oracle and price discovery instruments. NFTb looks to connect cross chain NFT liquidity using BSC as the focal point.
The Future is Cross Chain
Binance’s direct investment in NFTb, right on the heels of their own platform announcement, points to a technical partnership and integration with NFTb’s upcoming multi-chain NFT swap feature.
In a recent interview with Aliaksei Hiatsevich regarding NFTb, the topic of cross chain compatibility came up, “one of the biggest issues with NFT platforms is lack of intercompatibility. We designed NFTb to be the easiest onboarding point for NFT creators using BSC. By utilizing cross chain swaps from NFTb as well as wrapped NFTs we think BSC is a great technical choice for scaling NFTs.“
Can Binance Annex the Growing ETH NFT Space?
This is the billion dollar question. The last several months have seen a prolific rise in the number of BSC projects but to date no two sided marketplaces.
We believe that Binance’s NFT marketplace could aggregate a large amount of NFT liquidity and facilitate growth on both the buyer and seller side. NFT marketplaces like NFTb could easily integrate with Binance’s own NFT platform to leverage a huge user base while at the same time keeping costs low for new market entrants.
We plan to keep an eye on the growing BSC NFT ecosystem. Please subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get updates.
The post Binance Invests in NFTb and Growing NFT Market appeared first on The Tokenist.
