blockworks.co
Coinbase announced the upcoming launch of a non-fungible token ($NFT) marketplace on Tuesday.
Dubbed ‘Coinbase $NFT’, the soon-to-be product offering allows users to purchase, mint, showcase and discover the crypto assets on a peer-to-peer marketplace, according to the company’s blog post. Additionally, users can join a waitlist for early access to the offering.
Coinbase $NFT will have “social features that open new avenues for conversation and discovery” and an “intuitive design built on top of a decentralized marketplace,” said the blog.
“Coinbase $NFT will help creators, collectors, and fans build community, which aligns with Coinbase’s mission of increasing economic freedom and bringing crypto to more people, in new, exciting and accessible ways,” a spokesperson for the publicly-traded company told Blockworks.
All NFTs will run on-chain via Ethereum-based ERC-721 and ERC-1155 standards. However, the company has plans for multi-chain support in the future.
“In the same way we helped people access Bitcoin for the first time in a trusted, easy way — we need to do the same for the decentralized cryptoeconomy,” the spokesperson added. “There is so much cool innovation happening in crypto — and we want to bring that to our customers.”
The exchange’s announcement comes following a slew of regulatory news around Coinbase, including previous threats of legal actions from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), putting its lending program on hold, and most recently word of a forthcoming regulatory proposal.
Elsewhere and on his own accord, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong previously released a collection of electronic music NFTs with DJ DAVI in April. Later, the collection was put up for bid on Zora.
“There’s a lot of $NFT praise happening right now,” Armstrong said in a previous interview with CNBC. “Generally, I am a fan of NFTs. It’s really cool that it’s making it possible for artists to get paid. It’s making it possible for artists to have a direct relationship with their fans (as well).”
As Coinbase adjusts to potential regulatory scrutiny, NFTs continue to rake in gargantuan amounts of cash across the board, according to a Dapp Industry Report in early-October. The $NFT space generated roughly $10.67 billion in trading volume during Q3, an increase of 704% from the quarter before.
“NFTs will become a trillion dollar asset class by the end of the year,” Jenny DAO’s Jae Chung recently said at the Messari Mainnet event in September.Coinbase (COIN) is trading at $247.33 per share down -3.57% at time of publication.
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