Sotheby’s, a globally recognized auction house, is expanding its presence in the digital art sphere. They are introducing a secondary NFT marketplace. The announcement was made on May 1, with the addition of a new section in Sotheby’s Metaverse designed as a platform for buying, selling, and collecting exceptional digital artwork.
Sotheby’s has expanded its Metaverse platform, initially launched in 2021 for art auctions, to now handle resales of blockchain-based NFTs, including those minted on Ethereum and layer-2 scaling network Polygon. The platform also features a rotating selection of digital artwork selected exclusively by Sotheby’s specialists. It includes renowned artists Tyler Hobbs, Claire Silver, Hackatao, Sam Spratt, and Refik Anadol.
Powered by the NFT commerce suite Mojito, the marketplace allows for automated smart contracts to govern the secondary sales process and enables payments in ETH or MATIC. Meanwhile, the platform will charge a 2.5% fee for sellers. According to Sotheby’s Vice President and Head of NFTs and Digital Art, Michael Bouhanna, the move represents an important step forward for the auction house in its evolution within the Web3 space. In January, Sotheby’s also announced that it would accept crypto as payment in an auction for a rare black diamond.
Slow NFT Market in 2023
Meanwhile, the NFT market has experienced a decline in trading volumes and prices this year. Only six out of the top 20 NFT collections by market capitalization have seen increased trading volumes in the past month. Furthermore, the number of daily NFT sales has decreased significantly. It went from approximately 40,000 in October to around 5,000 in mid-April, as reported by the Nonfungible market tracker. However, the platform has not been tracking NFT metrics since the middle of last month. Moreover, Cryptoslam has reported that there are currently more sellers than buyers in the NFT market over the past few weeks.
Closing Thoughts
2023 did not start out great for the NFT industry. However, there were still some noteworthy projects such as Blur NFT Marketplace. If you are an art collector, now might be the best time for you to snag up some amazing NFTs for a much better price!
In the meantime, check out our MEXC trading page and find out what we have to offer! Do not miss out on the golden window. You can learn more about crypto industry news and interesting articles to get you up to speed with the crypto world. Happy trading!
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