Nifty Gateway wants NFT curators to sell art with “Publishers” Pilot

With NFT trading volumes falling across the board, Nifty Gateway, the Gemini-owned NFT art marketplace, hopes to inspire digital art curators to start making a mark with their own custom storefronts.

Traditional art world curators typically work with artists to develop career strategies, which often involve securing effective gallery exhibitions to help sell their art.

In an effort to translate this endeavor to the NFT landscape, Nifty Gateway’s “Publishers” pilot – a beta program – will see 50 curators select a roster of artists and run their own NFT storefronts, in the vein of e-commerce giant Shopify.

Issuers can drop first-come, first-served releases, one-of-one auctions, and open releases, which have no limit on the number of NFTs available in a coin.

Duncan Cock Foster, Nifty Gateway’s co-founder, told Blockworks that the “biggest missing piece” in the NFT space is tools built specifically for art curators. The digital art space lacks the so-called “gallery layer” from the traditional art market.

Nifty Gateway already enlists in-house curators to help artists release collections, unlike non-curated NFT marketplaces like OpenSea or Rarible. The company says it has worked with 400 artists to earn more than $500 million since 2018.

“There is a limit to the number of artists we can curate. You really have to have a strategy to succeed as an artist, said Cock Foster. “The best way to help artists is to have more curators.”

Can NFT Curators Increase Nifty Gateway Volumes?

Cock Foster expressed that the new Publishers pilot is an attempt to guide a fresh crop of curators – and eventually artists – to increase the amount of people making a living selling NFTs full-time.

This initiative comes at a time when NFT trading volumes have shrunk significantly since peaking earlier this year.

OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace, has seen its dollar-denominated trading volumes plunge to the lowest level not seen in more than a year. Trading volume peaked on May 1 at $405.7 million, a week that saw daily averages of around $163.7 million per DappRadar. Now, daily volumes now average less than $11.5 million – representing a drop of more than 90%.

While OpenSea caters to secondary sales, Nifty Gateway is a much smaller platform that aims to serve NFT art collectors. Still, Nifty processes only a dozen trades per day on average, compared to OpenSea’s 50,000 plus. Notably, the platform only handled three NFT sales on Wednesday, totaling $2,800, according to NonFungible.com.

No doubt statistics like these have encouraged Nifty Gateway to strategize and is now turning to curators in a bid to attract volume.

Over time, the firm plans to expand the Publishers program to include artists who publish their own works and brands with NFT projects.

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