Coinbase Global, Inc. (NASDAQ: COIN) has made a beta version of its NFT marketplace available to a limited number of customers. As the platform is tested, more users will be added to a waiting list over the next three to five weeks.
“Coinbase will be onboarding a small number of users into the beta for Coinbase NFT,” Sanchan Saxena, VP of product at Coinbase, told The Block.
The world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange first announced its plans for it in October 2021.
It currently supports Ethereum-based NFTs as well as ETH payments. For the time being, Coinbase NFT only supports Ethereum-based NFTs and ether payments. Saxena says the marketplace will eventually integrate other blockchains, and “full fiat on-ramps will be coming soon.”
Coinbase announced earlier this year that users would be able to purchase NFTs using credit cards. The company collaborated with Mastercard to allow users to buy NFTs with their credit cards.
According to the cryptocurrency trading app, its NFT marketplace will be a Web3 peer-to-peer social platform focusing on making it easier to collect, create, and connect to NFT communities.
The company’s vision for the new NFT platform is to make economic freedom more accessible to more people by increasing the accessibility of the creator economy.
While the marketplace will allow users to transact securely, Coinbase NFT prioritizes social interaction, which sets it apart from other NFT marketplaces.
“We’re building a marketplace where you can buy and sell NFTs, of course, but more importantly, you can engage,” Saxena said at a press briefing attended by The Block. “You can engage with the creator. You can engage with the collector. And you can engage with fellow collectors from a community around that NFT. This is an important piece of our strategy.”
According to its website, Coinbase is a publicly-traded cryptocurrency exchange platform with approximately 89 million users, $278 billion in crypto assets, and $547 billion in quarterly volume traded.
COIN was up 2.9% to $155.69 at the time of writing.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are a crypto asset that uses blockchain to record the ownership of digital files like images, videos, or text.
