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Which latest projects won Polkadot’s parachain auction? There are four of them and they will be active in the Relay Chain from October 2022. Find out what they are all about!

Almost a year after the launch of the first parachain auctions on Polkadot, the Dotsama (Polkadot + Kusama) ecosystem is experiencing the peak of its technological development. According to GitHub data, more than 500 programmers per day were working on Polkadot’s infrastructure in September 2022. Polkadot’s developers, together with those of Ethereum and Cosmos, are the most active in the industry. At the end of September, the Polkadot team released an updated roadmap presenting upcoming features, including the launch of paratherads, i.e. blockchains that pay for the use of Polkadot’s Relay Chain without participating in auctions. In total, 30 auctions have taken place already and there are 27 active parachains on Polkadot (41 on Kusama). Let’s look at the four projects that won the auctions for Polkadot parachains between the end of August and the beginning of October 2022.

What are parachain auctions on Polkadot?

Parachain auctions on Polkadot are ‘sales’ of slots on the Relay Chain. Polkadot is a multichain ecosystem that offers its infrastructure to build blockchains with specific use cases. Projects that win one of the slots can develop their own blockchain idea using the core network for the consensus mechanism and security, becoming parachains for all intents and purposes. These are ‘candlestick’ auctions, i.e. auctions that end at a random time during a period of about a week. At the end of the auction, the project that has collected the most DOT, the Polkadot coin, wins. To participate in the auctions, various projects bid by locking in DOT (bonding) collected internally within the project or through crowdloans among the community. The slots on Polkadot last for a maximum of 2 years (96 weeks). After the end of the period, the DOTs in bonding are released and are made available again to the project that had initially blocked them. 

1. Aventus Network

Aventus Network won the 26th auction for Polkadot parachains by raising 200,000 DOT (approximately $1.2 million). It is a blockchain founded in 2016 with the aim of making decentralised services on Polkadot and Ethereum accessible to companies that want to include them in their customer offerings. Aventus Network thus proposes the development of NFTs, video games, loyalty programmes, event tickets, and supply chain management. One of the projects already using Aventus Network to manage its tokenomics and blockchain transactions is FruitLabs, the social network for gamers. On FruitLabs, gamers get PIP token rewards when they share their gameplay.

2. Watr

The winner of Polkadot’s 27th parachain auction was Watr, a blockchain that wants to introduce a method to market a ‘new class of ethical commodities’. By definition a ‘commodity’ is a raw material e.g. oil, coal, sugar. Watr was created to make commodity trading ethical and tracked via blockchain. The services this new parachain wants to offer are the tokenisation of non-digital assets (real world) and management of production chains. Watr’s project is still in its infancy: the whitepaper is in the works these days as well as the tokenomics of their WATR token. The mainnet is scheduled to launch in January 2023. To win its slot, Watr raised 125,224 DOT ($778,893) at auction.

3. OAK Network

OAK Network, with OAK standing for On-chain Autonomous Kernel, is the winning parachain of the 28th auction with 149,998 DOT in bonding ($932,990). OAK Network’s target sector is DeFi. Specifically, the project wants to build tools for ‘event driven’ automated payments and trading: ‘one of the great opportunities of blockchain technology is the concept of “programmable money”. The ability for entrepreneurs to create, trade and use digital assets globally will likely have the same impact as when people were able to create and consume information globally through the web’. According to the OAK team, this opportunity is not adequately exploited because “today most transactions on the blockchain are simple one-off events”. What OAK is aiming for is to create a DeFi hub to enable buying and selling transactions at certain prices or events as well as recurring transactions. In a nutshell, it is about creating tools for automated trading. Before offering itself as a parachain on Polkadot, OAK network tested its chain with the Turing Network project, a parachain on Kusama.

4. Bitgreen

The fourth new project that will be operational on Polkadot from October is Bitgreen. Already from its name, you can guess the distinct environmental vocation of this parachain. Bitgreen wants to offer itself to NGOs and Web3 projects to support important sustainability initiatives on topics such as renewable energy, forest conservation and the development and support of local communities. For example, Bitgreen enables the creation and trading of carbon credits.

Together with Sequester, another project that aims to provide tools to minimise the environmental impact of the Dotsama ecosystem, Bitgreen suggested to turn the parachains’ micro-fees into carbon credits. This initiative aims not only to make Polkadot’s ecosystem neutral but also positive in terms of its environmental footprint.

Bidding for the Polkadot No. 30 parachain auction is active from the 18th of October (17:53 UTC) for approximately five days. The winning project will win a slot on the Relay Chain usable from the 20th of November 2022 to the 25th of September 2024.

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Do Kwon maintains that the charges against him are invalid and that LUNA was never a scam but only a failure

Following the collapse of the Terra blockchain, its crypto LUNA and its algorithmic stablecoin UST ; the founder of the entire ecosystem, Do Kwon was charged by the South Korean government for violating the Financial Services Commission’s Capital Markets Act. An international arrest warrant has been issued in this regard and Do Kwon’s whereabouts remain unknown at the moment. What happened to the Terra founder after these accusations? Complaining about the misinformation and over-politicisation of the case, Kwon gave crypto journalist Laura Shin an interview on the 18th October 2022. He recounts his defence against the charges and explains his reasons.

What happened after the LUNA collapse: charges and arrest warrants

After Terraform Labs and Do Kwon were accused of violating South Korea’s financial markets law, the Seoul Southern District Prosecutor’s Office obtained an arrest warrant in September 2022 for Kwon, who had been living in Singapore since after the collapse of LUNA and UST. A few days later, the Singapore police stated that the crypto entrepreneur was no longer in the city-state and his whereabouts have since been untraceable. As a result, it was reported that Do Kwon was a fugitive. Subsequently, Kwon also received a ‘red notice’ from Interpol, i.e. an international arrest warrant asking local law enforcement agencies to locate and provisionally detain a person and make him available to the judicial authority that originally requested the arrest.

Do Kwon’s defence argues that the Financial Markets Act can only be applied to securities, and LUNA as a cryptocurrency is not legally a security. The accusation would therefore be unfounded, because Kwon and his company would not have done anything illegal. A spokesperson for Terraform Labs explained to the Wall Street Journal how South Korean prosecutors had broadened the definition of ‘security’ in response to public pressure over the bankruptcy of UST and LUNA, which has since been renamed ‘LUNA Classic‘: ‘We believe, as do most in the industry, that LUNA Classic is not, and never has been, a security, despite changes in interpretation that Korean financial officials may have adopted recently’.

What happened to Do Kwon, the founder of Terra?

To sum up, after the charges and various arrest warrants, Do Kwon:

1. Claims that the charges brought against him by South Korea are invalid since there is no real crypto regulation in the country;
2. Did not respond to the Interpol arrest warrant because he says he never received it in person;
3. Confirms that he is not a fugitive;
4. Reiterated that he had not set up any scam and that LUNA and UST were a failed market experiment;
5. Took full responsibility for the matter and apologised to the holders and supporters of the project.

Let’s look at these points specifically.

Where is Do Kwon?

In this delicate situation, Do Kwon unexpectedly gave an interview on the 18th of October with the aim of shedding light on the events and challenging some false information. This is the second time that Do Kwon has publicly exposed himself after the more than $40 billion collapse. The interviewer is Laura Shin, a crypto journalist who edits the podcast “Unchained” and recently published the book “The Cryptopians”, from which a TV series is to be made by producers Playground Entertainment.

The interview can be divided into two parts, the first focusing on the political and judicial events involving the founder of Terra, and the second on the technical aspects of the collapse of UST.

During the interview, Kwon reiterated the issue of ‘securities’, suggesting that the accusations by South Korea’s Financial Services Commission are not lawful and not even within their jurisdiction. In Kwon’s view, the case of the crypto LUNA is just a pretext to regulate the market by exploiting a moment of crisis. After all, he pointed out, there is no clarity among governments around the world on the issue: are cryptos securities?

Asked by Shin why he had not responded to the arrest warrant, Kwon explained that he had never personally seen this document and that news of his arrest warrant had only reached him through the media, and with contradictory reports. On the issue of ‘absconding’, Kwon repeated what he had already expressed in a tweet, namely that he is not hiding but does not want to reveal his whereabouts for security reasons. Since May 2022, Do Kwon received ‘visits’ and attempted break-ins at both his Singapore and Seoul residences from people embittered by the collapse of Terra. Therefore his whereabouts remain a mystery also to protect his family and associates. This is why Kwon has neither confirmed nor denied that he is in Singapore at the moment, while assuring that he is not a fugitive and is not making efforts to escape. Among other things, Kwon is not worried about losing his Singapore passport.

Do Kwon also denied reports that some of his funds (USD 67 million) had been blocked, claiming that the reports were untrue.

Do Kwon explains the causes of UST’s failure

Shin led the discussion on the reasons behind the failure of the UST algorithmic stablecoin, asking whether the algorithm was in fact insufficient to maintain the peg to the dollar. Do Kwon replied that the algorithm was fully functional and that in designing UST, the Luna Foundation Guard had never taken on the role of ‘market maker‘ to defend the stablecoin peg. However, its intervention had only been necessary on a few occasions. At one point Bitcoin reserves were used to bridge the volatility of UST. Kwon pointed out that Bitcoin (and Avalanche) purchases prior to the collapse had the sole purpose of making UST backed by all the large and promising cryptocurrencies.

For Kwon, the algorithmic stablecoin failed not because of the algorithm but because the economic system that supported it was not sufficiently robust.

Between the 7th and 8th of May 2022, when UST slowly started to lose its peg, Kwon didn’t think it was a big problem because stablecoins develop through cycles, and time would solve the problem. In the following days, he decided to use LFG funds to buy UST (buy-back) but in the meantime the price of LUNA dropped dramatically because people started to panic sell.

Kwon explained that, at the moment, the distribution of the LUNA 2.0 tokens is not proceeding as planned because the LFG is unable to dispose of its digital assets due to the ongoing process. He has no idea when the situation might be unblocked, Kwon is keen to emphasise that this is not a ‘refund’. Terra’s project has never been like a shop that provided goods in exchange for money and was ready to refund if it did not work out. Shin asked whether Kwon’s personal funds could help compensate for the losses and he replied that they would not be enough to make up the difference.

The intentions and regrets of Terra’s founder

Do Kwon, urged by his interviewer, took the opportunity to apologise to the people who lost money by believing in LUNA, saying that it is not at all easy to live with this responsibility. However, Kwon points out that LUNA was never a scam but only a market experiment gone wrong. He was the first to believe in the project and that he has always tried to build on the values of transparency and integrity. In short, failure does not necessarily mean scam. According to Kwon, it is his duty to provide a correct representation of the facts in order to put those who continue to work in the Terra ecosystem in the right light (he denies that he is still involved in the project).

Do Kwon concluded the interview by saying that his life is currently in a phase of reflection and that he will need a couple of years to humbly process and internalise what has happened: Terra, LUNA and UST ‘were never about money, fame, success’. Kwon continues to believe in the need for an algorithmic and decentralised stablecoin and is still keen to contribute being very young. Any regrets? Kwon would have liked to focus more on Terra’s technological development in the expansion phases rather than on the public relations part. He would also have liked to build a dialogue with people on social media instead of sounding a bit arrogant.

Paraphrasing, Kwon said ‘I think the hardest thing about the current situation is having to come to terms with an astronomical loss. It is difficult to put into words, but the magnitude of the financial, emotional and economic damage that has occurred is not easy to bear’.

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The Binance Smart Chain was attacked by a hacker, what happened? Here are the causes and price collapse of the BNB crypto

On the night between Thursday the 6th and Friday the 7th of October 2022, the Binance Smart Chain was attacked by a hacker. The perpetrator managed to steal around $100 million in different cryptocurrencies. Following the attack, the Binance team took prompt action, suspending transactions on the blockchain and thus severely limiting the amount of money that could have been stolen. Find out what happened to the Binance Smart Chain during the attack on Friday the 7th October 2022 and how the exploit affected the price of the BNB crypto.

What is the purpose of the Binance Smart Chain?

The Binance Smart Chain (BSC), is a blockchain created by Binance in 2019 that co-exists with the main Binance blockchain: the Binance Chain. What is the difference between the Binance Smart Chain and the Binance Chain? Unlike the Binance Chain, the BSC is compatible with Ethereum‘s virtual machine (EVM) and allows for the creation and use of smart contracts on its ecosystem ; hence the adjective smart within the name. Among the possibilities of an EVM-compatible blockchain is that of moving your tokens, fungible and non-fungible, to all blockchains of the same type almost instantaneously. A type of decentralised application (DApp) called a bridge is used for this purpose. Bridges have become very popular lately, mainly due to the tendency of Web3 projects to expand to other blockchains and thus become cross-chain. Friday’s attack took place on such a DApp, namely on the main bridge of the Binance Smart Chain: the Binance Bridge. Through this bridge, you can send your assets almost instantaneously to many other blockchains, including those of Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche, Cronos, and many others.

What happened to the Binance Smart Chain?

But what exactly happened to the Binance Smart Chain bridge? Someone managed to tamper with the smart contract that is responsible for calculating the amount of tokens that users possess. In doing so, he set his quantity of BNB, the Binance crypto, to 2 million units. Subsequently, the hacker sent the huge sum of money to his wallet in two transactions of 1 million BNB each, about 560 million dollars in total.

Once the hacker received the BNBs, he then moved some funds to different compatible EVM blockchains so that Binance could not block them and ‘borrowed’ stablecoins on Venus, a lending protocol on the Binance Smart Chain. Fortunately, Binance was very quick to intervene and ‘paused’ the Binance Smart Chain, freezing the hacker’s wallets. Tether, the company that created the USDT stablecoin also acted quickly by freezing the funds the hacker had borrowed on Venus. Thanks to the speed of action of the two companies, the hacker only managed to steal USDT 100 million (approximately), roughly five times less than he had initially managed to steal.

Following the event, a debate broke out among the Web3 community, especially on the Twitter social network. The debate focused on the pros and cons of centralising Binance’s chains. The crypto company in fact limited the damage by blacklisting the hacker This is nothing more than an IT action aimed at blocking the possibility of transactions on a particular wallet. And this was possible thanks to the small number of validators that the Binance Smart Chain uses to approve transactions on its network. In a more decentralised network, it would not have been so easy to freeze a user’s wallet.

The price of crypto BNB following the hacker attack

BNB is the native crypto of the Binance Smart Chain. BNB is used to pay fees for carrying out transactions and interacting with Binance’s EVM blockchain. Following the hacker, BNB lost about 5.5% of its value in just over two hours. The attack occurred just as BNB was approaching the $297 resistance. The event caused a dump for the Binance crypto, as was to be expected. This drop did not last just one day, but continued for several days, bringing BNB down to the lower end of the range in which it has been moving since early September 2022, around the $272 price area.

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On the Ethernity Chain, Web3 is reaching for the stars. Discover the 5 most interesting NFT collections, all purchasable with the crypto ERN!

Ethernity Chain is an NFT marketplace built on Ethereum. It has been talked about quite a lot, mainly due to its NFT collections in collaboration with internationally renowned artists and sportsmen. Among the most famous personalities to whom NFT artworks have been dedicated are Lionel Messi, Bruce Lee and James Dean. The non-fungible tokens that can be purchased on Ethernity Chain come in many different types, from playing cards to digital collectibles to items that can be worn by your avatar in popular metaverses. The NFTs on Ethernity Chain are grouped into thematic categories, which can be easily found through hashtags. There are 22 categories in total, ranging from music and football to art, technology, journalism and martial arts.

On the Ethernity Chain, NFT collections built on different blockchains coexist. In fact, NFTs on the marketplace can be purchased through three cryptocurrencies: ETH, MATIC and with ERN, the platform’s native crypto. The project is gaining fame: thanks to the prestige of the iconic characters, it gives a new impulse to Web3. Let’s see the 5 most interesting NFTs on Ethernity Chain!

1.   The Messiverse, the NFT collection for Lionel Messi

The most famous character you can ‘meet’ while navigating the Etherenity Chain ecosystem is surely the Argentinian footballer Lionel Messi. Messi’s original NFTs were released in August 2021 on the occasion of the player’s transfer from his long-standing club F.C. Barcelona to the French team Paris Saint Germain.

The collection in collaboration with ‘the flea’ consists of four NFTs designed by Australian artist BossLogic, who has worked for Marvel and Disney in the past. The rarest NFT, of which only one copy exists, is titled ‘Lionel Messi: The Golden One’. This digital artwork depicts the Argentinian footballer on top of a meteorite fragment as he is about to kick a completely golden ball.

The NFT was sold at auction with a starting price of $50,000 in the ERN crypto. The auction lasted 72 hours and reached $1 million. ‘Lionel Messi: The Golden One’, however, is not the only NFT collection of the Argentinian player created on Ethernity Chain.

The other collections are ‘Man Of The Past’ and ‘Man From Tomorrow’ which were released at the same time and depict a ‘robot’ Lionel Messi in two versions: one in which the champion wears the Barcelona jersey with the number 10 on his shoulders and one in which the PSG jersey is number 30 (the one he still wears at the French club). The cost for these two NFTs was $10,000 in ERN crypto per piece and 75 NFTs were available per version. The last two collections, ‘The King Piece’ and ‘The Magician’ cost respectively $99 in ETH on the Ethereum network and $50 in WETH on the Polygon network.

2.   ‘Hollywood Icon’ the NFT collection in honour of James Dean

Among the five most interesting NFTs on Ethernity Chain that can be purchased via the ERN crypto are those created in honour of the late actor James Dean. The collection is called ‘Hollywood Icon’ and was created through a collaboration between digital agency Worldwide XR and augmented and virtual reality software company VueXR. There are five of the NFTs in question and they depict iconic objects and moments from the actor’s life. The first NFT to be launched is a 3D reproduction of the metallic silver Porsche TYP 550 Spyder owned by Dean. The Porsche is the most iconic object in the collection mainly because it is the vehicle in which the actor was involved in the fatal accident that led to his death. The Porsche was James Dean’s favourite car and he even found an ironic nickname for it: ‘Little B*stard’.

The other works in the collection that will launch on the 16th of December 2022 are: a 3D bust of the actor with a gold signature, a gold medallion, the star of the Hollywood Walk of Fame and the last photograph in which the legendary actor was immortalised.

3.   Bruce Lee, an icon, even in the digital arts

The third NFT collection is dedicated to the actor, director and martial arts expert Bruce Lee. The six NFTs in honour of Bruce Lee were designed by three different artists : Raf Grassetti, one of the most famous digital sculptors in the world, Anthony Francisco, Senior Visual Development Artist at Marvel Studio and the artist we already presented at the beginning of this article: BossLogic.

Each artist interpreted the subject in a highly personal manner. For example Raf Grassetti, in the work “The Dragon”, sculpted the karateka with a Chinese dragon twisted around his body. Anthony Francesco & Ryan Moore placed him within cosmic settings trying to convey to the viewer also the actor’s philosophical wisdom as well as power and strength. The artworks were sold through two types of auctions depending on the quantity of versions produced. Each artist produced a single NFT, a single copy, and a piece with multiple copies. The three single works all started from an auction floor price of $1 and were purchased in the Ethernity Chain crypto ERN.

The other three works, those produced in multiple copies, were sold in ETH at different prices. Raf Grassetti’s artwork, ‘Bruce Lee: Formless’, of which 60 copies were available, was sold at $2,000 apiece, Boss Logic’s 100 copies of the artwork ‘Bruce Lee: Vortex’ were sold at $100 each while Anthony Francisco & Ryan Moore’s NFTs, of which there were 200, were sold at $500 in ETH each.

4.   Wearing Luka Modric’s shirt in The Sandbox

The list of the five most interesting NFT collections on Ethernity continues with another footballer, Luka Modric, the best Croatian footballer of all time. The collection was created by Visual Lab, an animation studio based in the Netherlands. As with the previous collection, there are six NFTs created on Ethernity Chain, of which three are digital artworks and three are wearable objects in the metaverse. All three virtual artworks have the Croatian footballer as their subject, either performing a perfect backhand underwater or dribbling through rubble in a post-apocalyptic scenario.

On the other hand, the three wearable items are two shirts, one of the Croatian national football team and one with the Ethernity logo and the iconic hair band that the Croatian champion can never do without when he takes to the pitch. These items will be wearable in the metaverse of The Sandbox, thanks to the implementation carried out by Ethernity, which has made it possible to bring its licensing library into the virtual world. In addition, the NFT marketplace has acquired some land in The Sandbox metaverse that will house a gallery and an NFT shop.

5.   Shaquille O’Neal and Justin Maller: NBA domination

15-time NBA All-Star Shaquille O’Neal is also among the most interesting NFT projects on the Ethernity chain. The basketball player collaborated with digital artist Justin Maller on the NFT ‘Eras of Dominance’ collection to commemorate his National Basketball Association (NBA) career. The NFT collection consists of five digital artworks depicting Shaquille O’Neal dunking and cheering. Each NFT relates a specific period of the player’s career to the three teams where he made his mark the most: the Los Angeles Lakers, the Orlando Magic and the Miami Heat.

The style of the NFTs, which appear dynamic and disruptive, is reminiscent of Shaq’s style of play. The ‘cracks’ with which the digital artwork is studded can be traced back to the NBA player’s tendency to break the ‘backboards’ of glass baskets due to the vehemence of his dunks. All the most interesting NFTs on Ethernity Chain featured in this article were sold differently. The unique work ‘Shaquille O’Neal: Peak Dominance’ was sold at auction, with a floor price of $20,000 in the crypto ERN.

Is it still possible to buy the 5 most interesting NFTs on the Ethernity Chain, and if so, where can you buy them? All the collections we have listed in this article can be bought either on Ethernity‘s platform or on the popular OpenSea marketplace. If you are wondering instead how much NFTs cost on Ethernity Chain, well, the answer is it depends. Some, like the wearables in the metaverse, are very cheap (even a few dozen dollars), others less so, like the digital artwork ‘Messi: The Golden One’.

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Which NFT marketplace should you choose? This list guides you through the top 10 platforms where you can buy non-fungible tokens!

By ‘NFT marketplace’ we mean a platform where you can buy and sell non-fungible tokens. If you have done your research and are ready to buy your first NFT, you can find a list of the top 10 marketplaces here. The marketplaces on this list are secondary resellers of NFTs, i.e. they offer tokens for sale by other users and not directly by the creators. However, in most cases these marketplaces offer tools to create and sell NFTs. 

NFT marketplaces are not all the same. Each one differs from the others, firstly according to the type of blockchain they support. For example, the Tezos blockchain has the reputation of hosting NFTs of the most indie artists on the scene, while on Flow you can find tokens for crypto video games or sports-themed ones. The marketplaces are also differentiated by their target sector (gaming, digital art, PFP…) and the ‘level’ of decentralisation based on the presence of DAOs. Here are the top 10 NFT marketplaces where you can buy digital art (and more)!

1. OpenSea

OpenSea is the first and most popular NFT marketplace in the industry. At the time of writing this article, sales on the platform had a volume of $31.74 billion. OpenSea is the Amazon of NFTs, an e-commerce giant where you can buy many different non-fungible tokens, according to type, style and topic. You can find PFP collections, play-to-earn game items, collectibles and digital art on the platform. There is also a large space on OpenSea for music NFTs and NFT domains. This NFT marketplace is the most widely used and it aims to bring this technology to the general public. Therefore, it aims to be as user-friendly as possible. OpenSea was founded in 2017 by Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah, who were fascinated by the success of CryptoKitties and the movement that NFTs have sparked within crypto communities.

In the OpenSea marketplace, there are NFTs built on Arbitrum, Ethereum, Klaytn, Polygon, Optimism and Solana. As a payment method, you can use ETH, WETH and MATIC, APE and SOL. To buy NFTs on OpenSea, you will therefore need a crypto wallet, but in some cases you can also use credit cards (and fiat currencies). When choosing a crypto wallet, make sure it supports NFTs and the blockchain on which you intend to buy them. OpenSea recommends using Metamask for ETH transactions and Phantom wallets for Solana. On OpenSea, tokens can be purchased via the ‘buy now’ function or through auctions or bids. During the purchase process, you may see a higher amount than initially presented, the difference being the gas fees, i.e. the fees for processing the purchase transaction on the blockchain. 

2. X2Y2

In second place among the most used NFT marketplaces is X2Y2, with a volume of USD 849 million. As in the case of OpenSea, X2Y2 is also a platform with a broad NFT offering. You can really find everything there! Purchases on X2Y2 are made with WETH, the ERC-20 token called Wrapped Ether. A WETH is equivalent to an ETH. They are used on this NFT marketplace to “reduce the cost of gas fees and to make the entire purchase process simple, quick and secure”. The X2Y2 marketplace also has an eponymous utility token that is distributed to sellers and buyers for each purchase as well as providing benefits. For instance, by staking X2Y2, you can receive commission discounts on purchases.

3. Magic Eden

Magic Eden is an NFT marketplace on Ethereum and Solana that is also available as an app (android and iOS)! Magic Eden has reached a volume of $1.79 billion and it offers more than 8,000 collections of non-fungible tokens. These include some of the best NFT projects on Solana: y00ts, Critters Cult and DeGods. Magic Eden was founded by four friends with different work experiences in the crypto and DeFi industry: Sidney Zhang, Jack Lu, Zhuoxun Yin and Zhuojie Zhou. For the founders, the name of the NFT marketplace is reminiscent of a garden full of endless possibilities just like the garden of Eden in the bible. Although a wide variety of projects can be found on Magic Eden, one of the main focuses is play-to-earn NFTs. Magic Eden has a community-driven approach and is run by a DAO, MagicDAO, in which the owners of 30,000 NFT Magic Tickets participate.

To buy NFTs on Magic Eden you need a Solana wallet. For those new to the platform the marketplace team suggests the Phantom wallet.

4. LooksRare

LooksRare is an NFT marketplace reminiscent of play-to-earn dynamics. Those who buy, sell and participate in the platform’s activities receive rewards in the form of LOOKS tokens. LOOKS tokens can be used to stake and obtain fee discounts. LooksRare has a volume of USD 1.62 billion and it accepts ETH and WETH for payments.

5. Rarible

With a volume of $299.83 million, Rarible offers NFTs developed on Ethereum, Solana, Tezos, Immutable X, Flow and Polygon. The platform is, to all intents and purposes, a multichain marketplace ; again offering a wide and diverse range of non-fungible tokens. Rarible collaborates with Rarity Sniper, a tool that evaluates and ranks NFT PFPs based on their rarity. This functionality is particularly useful because rarity is one of the main aspects that are considered when people choose to purchase an NFT. How does Rarity Sniper work on Rarible? By taking a single piece, the tool checks “the nature and quantity of the NFT’s traits and automatically compares them to other NFTs in the same collection, calculating its ranking”. On Rarible you can also use “rarity” as a filter in the drop-down menu. This function is currently available for all Ethereum-based PFP collections. On Rarible, just like in a real social network, you can explore the profiles of collectors and all their tokens (in the ‘Users’ section).

Another interesting feature on Rarible is the Multi-Wallet Profile, which allows NFT accounts built on different blockchains to be managed in a single account. The Multi-Wallet Profile supports 20 crypto wallets linked to all blockchains available on Rarible. By purchasing NFTs on Rarible, you receive a share of RARI, the Rarible Protocol governance token that provides different blockchain infrastructures to build NFT projects. The governance of this NFT marketplace is managed by the Rarible Protocol DAO.

6. SuperRare

Continuing down the list of the top 10 NFT marketplaces, we come across SuperRare with a volume of $235, 965 million! If you are an art enthusiast and are wondering which NFT marketplace to choose, SuperRare might be the one for you. SuperRare is built like a real digital art gallery. There are thematic exhibitions and focus on artists of the moment such as FEWOCiOUS, Otherworld with the motto ‘dark art with bright colours’ or DirtyRobot (Daniel Isle) the illustrator who started RENGA NFT. From a technical point of view, SuperRare is a peer-to-peer marketplace on Ethereum and has its own token: RARE. This is called a ‘curation token’ because holders can curate the marketplace’s exhibitions and artistic choices through voting.

On SuperRare, NFTs are bought in Ether and sales commissions are fixed at 3% (for buyers).

7. Objkt

On the Tezos blockchain, we can find Objkt, the NFT marketplace that focuses on sustainability. The non-fungible tokens on Objkt are called ‘Clean NFTs’ because the blockchain on which they are built is very careful about its environmental impact. Objkt has a tight roadmap that seeks to respect the wishes of the community. It proposes initiatives to improve the platform such as ‘separating NFTs into categories between PFPs, art and hot collections’ or ‘accepting offers made only by verified accounts’.

8. KnownOrigin

KnowOrigin also offers a fine selection of digital art. The NFT marketplace is built on Ethereum and has a volume of $7.81 million. More than 1,000 artists and more than 11,000 pieces are displayed on KnowOrigin. The marketplace aims to make it easier for artists to experience the Web3: “KnowOrigin is an artist-driven platform that makes it easy for digital creators to create, display and sell the art they produce. With this in mind, the price of a first sale NFT is distributed 85% to the artist who made it and 15% to the platform (for commissions).  

9. Nifty Gateway

Nifty Gateway’s mission is clear: to make NFTs accessible to everyone, from beginners to experienced collectors. Nifty Gateway is a ‘custodial platform’. This means that NFTs are kept in a wallet secured by Gemini. In practice, if you lose your account credentials, they can easily be recovered by the platform itself. In this sense, the risks are minimal. On Nifty Gateway you can buy NFTs in crypto (ETH) as well as cash for no gas fee: “the custodial nature of Nifty Gateway allows you to operate without having to process a transaction on the blockchain, which means there are no gas fees. This saves our collectors a lot of hassle and money.” Nifty Gateway is also available for mobile devices.

10. ItalyNFT

To conclude the list of the top 10 NFT marketplaces where you can buy digital art, we dedicate some space to a platform ‘made in Italy’. ItaliaNFT is a marketplace where you can buy non-fungible tokens of Italian excellence, including local artists such as Mart Signed and iconic brands such as ‘Giro d’Italia‘. It is precisely the vocation to enhance Italian digital art that distinguishes ItaliaNFT from the arts marketplace. On the platform it is possible to buy works in ETH.

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