Coinbase Releases Much-anticipated NFT Marketplace in Beta

Coinbase – America’s largest cryptocurrency exchange – has finally launched ‘Coinbase NFT,’ on which users can trade NFTs and explore digital collectibles. The Web 3.0 social marketplace, as described by Coinbase, aims to facilitate buyer and seller interactions, provide advanced tools for discovering NFTs, and “empower people to create, collect, and connect.”

The platform is currently in its beta stage, with only a selected group of users from a waiting list having full access. Currently, users can buy and sell NFTs with a self-custody wallet without any transaction fees, though this is a temporary feature. The marketplace was created with the intent of being user-friendly, featuring a simple interface and straightforward navigation.

“We’ve been able to successfully bring the complexities of cryptocurrencies in an easy-to-use way to the masses. We believe we have a similar opportunity to do so for NFTs as well,”

said Sanchan Saxena, Coinbase’s vice president of product.

At this time, only Ethereum-minted NFT collections are available, but the company has pledged to add other blockchain-based NFTs in due course. Some of the well-known collections on Coinbase’s new platform include ‘Azuki’, ‘Bored Ape Yacht Club’, ‘Doodles’, ‘Moonbirds’, ‘World of Women’, ‘Cryptobatz’, and others.

Coinbase NFT has enabled a ‘Comment’ section under each digital collectible, with an ‘Upvote/Downvote’ function which allows for deeper community engagement. Hopefully, the feature will be well filtered and moderated, since bots and spammers could cause issues on the platform.

Coinbase is widely used and is one of the largest global crypto trading sites with around 90 million users – it’s no surprise then that the brand’s new NFT platform could be set to outperform current NFT marketplace leader OpenSea. The crypto exchange has $278 billion in cryptocurrency and $547 billion in quarterly volume traded.