Online marketplace Ebay is looking at options to enable the sales of NFT assets on their website. CEO Jamie Iannone told CNBC that they are ‘exploring opportunities’ to enable NFTs on the platform ‘in an easy way’. The platform is also still looking at crypto as payment option, even though that’s a position they’ve had for quite some time.
“One of the great things about eBay is when there’s a new trend, it just shows up on eBay. That’s what we’re seeing in areas like NFT, which we’re looking at how can we explore that better”, Iannone told CNBC. For many years Ebay has been home to digital sales, think for example about download codes for games. Doing a quick search on Ebay for the keyword NFT already brings up more than 119,000 results on the marketplace.
However, when you buy an NFT through Ebay you do need to trust the seller to actually send it. NFT marketplaces are more trustworthy, as smart contracts make sure everybody gets their money or their NFT. However, there’s no simplified process on Ebay itself as the marketplace for example doesn’t integrate crypto wallets into its user dashboard.
Most popular marketplaces
In the first quarter of this year Ebay had 187 million unique buyers on their platform. In the past 30 days the most used NFT marketplace according to data from DappRadar is Atomic Market, with 211 thousand traders. NBA Top Shot follows with 206 thousand, while OpenSea is in third place with 31 thousand. You can see that Ebay entering the NFT market would bring a whole lot more potential buyers to this space.
However, with the increase of buyers there will likely also be more scammers. In general trading NFTs can be quite anonymous, and therefore buyers should always verify that they are buying the real deal. For example, connecting marketplace accounts to verified social media accounts can help preventing scams. Anyway, Ebay exploring the NFT market is something exciting. Last week we already wrote about Warner Music, Sega and Hasbro getting into NFTs, so I can’t wait to see where we are 12 months from now.
While you’re busy fantasizing about that, why not use your earned PLAY tokens to buy some NFTs? We’re selling awesome The Sandbox characters through OpenSea.
What are NFTs?
NFT is the abbreviation for non-fungible tokens, which are tokens that signify ownership over unique digital assets. These assets can for example be items in a game, crypto art, or digital collectibles. In addition it could also be a ticket for a cinema or perhaps a subscription for public transit. The usability of NFTs doesn’t end with gaming, it only starts there.
A non-fungible token can’t be swapped one-on-one with another non-fungible token. It represents something unique. That’s why non-fungible tokens can be based compared with rare art, an owned house or a signed mint edition of a certain comic book. These products are unique and in the same way a non-fungible token is unique as well. This gives non-fungible tokens also an unique value that only represents that one specific token.
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