After announcing their upcoming NFT marketplace, Coinbase boss Brian Armstrong stated in a tweet that, “over 1M people have signed up for Coinbase NFT since we launched yesterday.”
Yesterday, Coinbase followed the footsteps of FTX US to announce the launch of their NFT marketplace expected towards the end of the year. The platform created a waitlist for anyone who would want early access to the NFT platform.
Although FTX US NFT marketplace currently focuses on Solana based NFTs, Coinbase’s will be focused on Ethereum based NFTs and that puts it in direct competition with the biggest NFT platform, according to DappRadar, OpenSea. So far, it seems that Coinbase might just win this race.
Data from DappRadar reveals that OpenSea has a rolling 30-day average of 260,903 unique wallet addresses which have conducted a combined total of 2.49 million transactions over the past month. This means that Coinbase’s waitlist is larger than OpenSea’s active wallets. Asides from this, Coinbase has about 68 million verified users and 8.8 million monthly active users as of Q2 2021.
Coinbase’s foray into the NFT sector comes after competing crypto exchanges like FTX and Binance both launched their NFT marketplaces. Binance NFT opened its doors in June, with the platform aiming to provide low transaction costs, while FTX and FTX.US launched NFT platforms with limited functionality last month but later expanded, offering Solana based NFTs.
Sanchan Saxena, the Vice President of product at Coinbase tweeted that the “insane” amount of traffic for the waitlist temporarily broke the site. He stated, “Thanks for your patience everybody – for the last few hours, we have ramped up and scaled things for you to be able to sign up for the NFT marketplace.”
Bottomline
COIN is trading at $246.78, down 1.02% at the close of the market. However, it is up 0.49% in pre-market skirmish.