Coinbase NFT Beta Is Here But People Are Already Complaining

After nearly seven months, the long-awaited Coinbase NFT marketplace arrives to showcase its magnificence to the Web3 community. Yet,  NFT enthusiasts and traders seem unimpressed with Conibase NFT’s interface and improvements over their larger competitor Opsensea. Especially given Coinbase NFT’s lack of current decentralized features regarding their platform. For now, the Web3 community remains skeptical of Coinbase’s ability inside the NFT market. However, Coinbase’s vision for the future of its marketplace can provide some much-needed traction to compete with the larger markets.

Coinbase NFT Marketplace

Announced in October of last year, Coinbase began the official development of their NFT marketplace to compete with the current markets such as OpenSea by providing new and exclusive features to their community. While the platform mainly focuses on selling assets, the new NFT market offers users many similar features to leading social media platforms.

For example, users can grow their connections after setting up an account by following other members. Furthermore, Coinbase NFT users can “heart” NFTs and even comment on them with an added voting feature for worthy remarks inside the comment sections. At this time, Coinbase does not have an official timeline for the release of the complete marketplace. For now, those curious about the newly designed marketplace can head to their official site to create an account to start their journey.

Beta Testers

Those found on the Coinbase waitlist might receive early privileges on the Coinbase Marketplace. The team is currently going through the waitlist and selecting individuals to participate in buying and selling NFTs on the marketplace. Waitlist chosen members can buy and sell NFTs using any self-custody wallet. Moreover, to incentivize trading, no transaction fees will exist on the network for a limited time. For now, the team at Coinbase works tirelessly to expand more features to the public and throw their marketplace into full gear. Coinbase will showcase several NFT collections such as Doodles, World of Women, and Azuki during the beta launch.

“We learned that people don’t just want better tools to buy and sell NFTs. They want better ways to discover them, better ways to find the right communities, and better spaces in which they can feel connected with each other. That’s why we’re building a product that’s much more than a transaction. We’re looking to empower people to create, collect, and connect.” – Sanchan Saxena, vice president of product at Coinbase

The Competition

Without question, Coinbase has entered a yard vastly controlled by Opensea and the most recent NFT marketplace LooksRare. Though most of Looksrare’s activity has supposedly been linked to wash trading, Opensea remains vastly superior in trading volume. Established in 2017, OpenSea has seen more than 23.5 billion in trading volume since its release. Not to mention an absolute blowout to start off the year with just over six billion in January alone.

As the largest crypto exchange in the U.S, Coinbase’s reputation & user-friendly interface pushed it past its competition. While Coinbase NFT takes on the form of an NFT social media/exchange platform, it will be interesting to watch as rivals attempt to keep up with the UI interface and innovative platform features Coinbase will offer.