Coinbase Launches Social NFT Marketplace In Limited Beta Just As NFT Sales Plunge

Coinbase announced Wednesday that its NFT marketplace is now in beta and available to “a small set of beta testers who will be invited based on their position” on the waiting list. The company wants to take on established players in the space by adding social features, like a comment system (with upvotes and downvotes) and an algorithmic feed.

Visually, the screenshots Coinbase includes in the blog post look like a cross between Instagram and OpenSea, one of the largest NFT marketplaces. There are profiles where users can showcase their collections (and which others can follow) as well as a discovery feed that Coinbase says will recommend NFTs to you “based on what you buy, what’s trending, who you follow and more. ” The marketplace also supports favorite NFTs, as does OpenSea and other marketplaces.

Image: Coinbase

Of course, there is also a “Shop” tab that beta testers can visit to purchase NFTs. Currently, the marketplace only supports the Ethereum blockchain, and beta users log in with a wallet like the one offered by Coinbase or MetaMask. While the company has said that Coinbase NFT will support Mastercard in the future, prices are currently only listed in ETH.

While Coinbase is a major player in the crypto exchange world, it feels like it’s a bit of a latecomer to NFTs. As Bloomberg points out, the market is showing some signs of flagging: DappRadar’s NFT marketplace tracking shows that trading volume and the number of traders in the top marketplaces have almost universally declined over the past month. OpenSea, the largest NFT store, has around 67 percent fewer trades compared to what it had in March and 23 percent fewer traders. And while search interest in NFTs increased between October 2021 and January 2022, it has since fallen back to roughly normal levels.

Graph: Google Trends

The company announced its NFT marketplace in October and says there are a number of seemingly essential features that are not in the current beta version. Minting, NFTs on other blockchains (OpenSea currently has support for Polygon and Solana), and even the ability to purchase tokens with your Coinbase account or credit card are currently planned for the “coming weeks and months.” Of course, it’s also not available to everyone right now. The company says it will work through the waiting list, where people are ranked in part by how many others they’ve gotten to join the waiting list.