I have been minting my artworks as NFTs (non fungible tokens) and selling them for a few months now, but sales have been slower than I would like. So I decided to do some research into the wider field of NFT art platforms that exist and have come to some interesting conclusions regarding how to improve my exposure to the collectors out there and access the wider market.
At present my artworks are minted on the Hive blockchain at nftshowroom.com. I love the Hive blockchain and am earning through blogging, which has been great. The price of Hive coin is increasing and my investment in time and currency there is paying off. However, the NFT platform where I sell my artworks in exchange for Hive coin is small.
That said, it is growing by the month, especially now as a wave of new artists jump on board the NFT train as it goes viral. Some newcomers are not even familiar with cryptocurrency and are entering the crypto industry purely through the NFT art doorway, only finding out about bitcoin and crypto afterwards. This is promising but still nftshowroom only has around 900 members, although it has grown by about 300 new members in the past few months, since I joined.
However, this is very small compared to some other NFT platforms out there. I realized that if I want to sell more artworks as NFTs I will need to branch out from the Hive blockchain and go mainstream, meaning accessing the Ethereum platforms. Most NFTs are by far sold for ETH, not for HIVE. One can’t be exclusive or tribal about our allegiances to only one blockchain, and it’s not being unfaithful either. Blockchain technology is vast and expanding daily. And for now ETH rules the waves, particularly regarding NFTs.
The most popular NFT platforms at present are OpenSea and Rarible, where NFTs are traded for ETH. According to the website dappradar.com transactions on Opensea are up 1400% in volume so far this year, as of a week ago. For example in the past month they have had over 47300 traders with accounts, with a total volume of $136.8 million in sales. This is mind blowing when compared to the NFTs on Hive which have only 900 members, not all of whom are active.
Rarible has had 17 700 traders spending $39 million in the month of March. These figures show clearly that the ETH platforms are leagues higher and worlds apart from the humble Hive NFT platform. There is simply no comparison. With OpenSea almost tripling their volume of traders in March, the trend appears to be growing everywhere for NFTs but especially there. Hopefully Hive blockchain will catch up as people find out about it, but it will have to 40x to match OpenSea and 17x to equal Rarible. Even the WAX blockchain – with their NFT market at Atomichub has 23800 traders over the past month. And there are others, but these are the most popular generally.
What was always preventing me from minting my NFT artworks on OpenSea is of course the high gas fees on the ETH blockchain. But I just found out that they have introduced free minting for single NFTs, which is massively appealing to artists. You only pay the transaction fee if and when your artwork sells. This is thanks to the recent MATIC/Polygon blockchain assistance, as well as the introduction of FLOW, a project that I wrote about here https://peakd.com/hive-167922/@julianhorack/nft-research-continued-flow-coin-learning-from-past-mistakes.
So it looks like all the NFT platforms and blockchains are growing at present as the craze takes hold, but the ETH platforms are vastly outpacing the HIVE blockchain. As a result I am now looking into minting my new NFT artworks there. If the current works on HIVE at nftshowroom show some improvement in sales, then I will obviously still utilize it, but for now I have to go where the market is.
