Amazon to launch its NFT marketplace

E-commerce giant Amazon is set to launch its NFT marketplace next month, precisely on April 24.

Amazon and the launch of the NFT marketplace in April

According to a report by TheBigWhale, Amazon says it is ready to launch its NFT marketplace on April 24th.

E-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming and artificial intelligence will also make room for Non-Fungible Tokens.

From what emerges, it appears that initially around fifteen collections will be available on the website via a tab called “Amazon Digital Marketplace.” This tab will initially be available only in the US. The platform will gradually be opened to the rest of the world, including Europe.

In fact, it appears that the launch of the Amazon Digital Marketplace has been delayed twice in recent weeks due to the FTX crypto exchange failure that rocked the entire industry.

At the moment it appears that the date of April 24 is set, with the exception of new emergency events. On the other hand, it is still unclear whether the platform will accept crypto payments or if only credit card payments will be available.

Amazon follows eBay in selling NFTs

Amazon’s marketplace was somewhat predicted back in January of this year. But the American giant is not the first to decide to add NFTs to its e-commerce, or to launch a dedicated NFT marketplace.

Already in May 2021, eBay had added NFTs to the marketplace can be purchased via auction much like it happens on more “traditional” crypto art platforms.

On the other hand, eBay has not added crypto paymentsbut only in fiat currency via PayPal and credit cardwithout special KYC, but only via login to the marketplace.

This is a basic way to sell NFTs, unlike the other platforms that have some entry barriers instead. Not only that, the fact that Ethereum is not used as payment frees one from the heavy gas fees of this blockchain.

NFT industry data for February 2023

Amazon leaked its news just as the unworkable symbol the market seems to have started to breathe again, touchingly 2 billion dollars in trading volume for the first time since May 2022.

This is a 117% increase during January 2023. The star of this growth is Obscurityits NFT marketplacewhich seems to have surpassed the famous OpenSea in terms of trade volume.

And actually period Blur reached $1.3 billion, OpenSea stayed at $587 million. This is 64.8% of the entire NFT market trading volume for Blur, compared to 28.7% for OpenSea.

Despite this performance, Open sea still have a much larger one user base than Blur. That’s almost 317K traders compared to not even 97K for Blur.