Emerging NFT Markets That Everyone Should Know

The hype around non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has calmed down a bit in the past weeks. While at the beginning of the year and especially throughout the year 2021, everything seemed to be about NFTs, now, not as many people talk about this subcategory of cryptocurrencies.

However, times like these are the best for developing or improving products and platforms that are offering any types of cryptocurrency-related services. This is also true for NFT marketplaces, which are the go-to destinations for fans or collectors of NFTs.

Yet, while the current conditions do not look that favorable for NFTs, some NFT marketplaces have emerged out of nowhere, to become more important in the crypto sphere. Which NFT marketplaces are emerging as new leaders and are slowly threatening the dominance of NFT marketplaces such as OpenSea, Rarible, SuperRare or Nifty Gateway?

Top 5 emerging NFT marketplaces

While the above mentioned names of the likes of OpenSea or Nifty Gateway are very popular in the NFT world that does not mean that there are not new marketplaces being created regularly. Just like everything in the cryptocurrency world, where there is a demand for something, the supply will come as well.

And while the demand for trading NFTs have decreased a bit compared to last year, the NFTs are mostly thought of as the future technology that will be used day to day. That is one of the reasons that even though the current situation is not ideal, there are still new projects entering this market, to build a reliable name and brand before the next bullrun hits. So, what are these projects?

Top NFT marketplaces in sales volume, Source: sealaunch.xyz 

x2y2 – one of the main OpenSea competitors

Our first emerging NFT marketplace is x2y2. This project was only founded this year, however, due to an extremely experienced team it was able to quickly become one of the most used platforms in this market segment. Currently, it is the second NFT marketplace only to OpenSea.

This marketplace offers a wide variety of products, such as loans or rewards. Other than that, it also offers tools to creators to help them manage the minting process and royalty management. Thanks to these and many other features, the popularity as well as the traded volumes on this platform are increasing on average, as portrayed below.

Weekly volume of x2y2 NFT marketplace in ETH, Source: sealaunch.xyz 

Blur – a new whale in town

Blur is one of the newest NFT marketplaces out there. However, it has already gathered a lot of attention. It has been only released at the end of October 2022, but it has already become the 2nd biggest NFT marketplace when it comes to single-day trading and 24-hour trading volume metrics. On its first day of trading, more than 1 160 ETH (worth $2.5 million at the time of writing) was traded, putting Blur just behind OpenSea in this metric.

This marketplace has been backed by some of the most important investors in the NFT sphere. These are for instance Paradigm, 6529, Zeneca or Cozomo Medici. It has raised over $11 millions at the first funding round. And while it can clearly be seen that this marketplace is improving and rising, it has already managed to get into conflicts with one of its main competitors.

x2y2, the NFT marketplace that we have just introduced, has blocked Blur from hosting its listings on its site. According to x2y2, this is due to the violation of the guidelines of x2y2, which supposedly Blur did. This was announced via a tweet by the official Twitter account of x2y2.

Announcement of blocking Blur by x2y2, Source: twitter.com

Whether this was just a marketing stunt by any of the NFT marketplaces or whether there was any form of violation present is not upon our judgment. However, thanks to this, both of these marketplaces have received a relatively large amount of press coverage, which can hardly be considered a bad thing, even though some users of Blur are conflicted by the issue raised by x2y2.

Vaults – a NFT platform from Reddit

One of the least known platforms, which has a huge potential when it comes to NFTs, is the relatively new platform released by Reddit. Its NFT platform has surpassed some of the largest NFT marketplaces in terms of active users. The platform is called Vaults and was released in July this year.

However, Reddit has decided not to call this place “NFT marketplace.” According to Steve Huffman, CEO and Co-founder of Reddit, the platform did not want to confuse its users with cryptocurrency terminology. They apparently want to make collectibles “simple and not confusing, unlike NFTs.” Some, however, expect that there might be more to this decision.

While the reasons for this vary, the website has decided to call their platform Vaults, stating that they are offering “Collectible Avatars” in the digital form. So far, this platform has over 3 million Reddit users, with more than 2.5 million users already purchasing some NFT or Collectible. For comparison, OpenSea has estimated 2.3 million active users, with Axie Marketplace about 2.1 million users. In August this year, users who were being particularly active on the platform were airdropped free Avatars.

Currently the platform offers Avatars that range from $10 to $100. They can be purchased with credit cards rather than cryptocurrencies. However, they are stored on Polygon due to its low cost of transactions and sustainability commitments.

KnownOrigin – main competitor of SuperRare?

Next on the list is KnownOrigin. While this NFT marketplace is probably better known than any other marketplace on this list, it is still one of the most promising and emerging NFT marketplaces out there. It is an artist-driven NFT marketplace, which is evolving around CryptoArt. This means that KnownOrigin, unlike other NFT marketplaces, requires their artists to submit an application, before they are allowed to sell their art on the platform.

This Manchester-based MFT marketplace wants to support artists as well as the true art collectors. It tries to develop a different approach to the pieces that are shown on the platform, offering a more artistic and unique perspective on young or talented, but unknown, artists.

Similarly to SuperRare, this platform thus mostly showcases the NFTs of the highest quality and rarity. Just like most other marketplaces, KnownOrigin uses Ethereum blockchain.

LooksRare – community driven NFT marketplace

Priding itself with “by NFT people for NFT people,” LooksRare is one of the NFT marketplaces that have their communities in the very core. It launched rather unsurprisingly, with an airdrop, which was delivered to over 110,000 wallets of users that generated over 3 ETH of transaction volume on OpenSea. These accounts received LOOKS, the native token of this NFT platform.

LooksRare is defined by three key pillars that are stating that the users buying or selling NFTs on the platform will receive reward in the form of LOOKS, 100 % of the generated fees will go to stakers and the creators receive royalty payments at the moment of the sale of their artworks.

All these rules and features show how LooksRare wants to compete with other NFT marketplaces. First and foremost, it wants to create a more democratic and thus decentralised experience for its users.The fact that 75 % of all tokens from the total supply being reserved for the community is just one of the details that shows how LooksRare wants to differentiate by having a “community-first” approach.

Conclusion

While there are other platforms whose performance is improving, the above-mentioned list has a potential to challenge the best and most used NFT marketplaces in the world. It might be a bit too soon to judge now, but one can only assume that when the next bull run comes, the emerging NFT marketplaces that have built the best product and brand will definitely make more impact than they are making now.