IOI
This IOTA NFT marketplace, created by the IOTA community and launched on the IOTA 2.0 DevNet today, illustrates beyond question why digital assets, including NFTs, are a feeless, decentralized, and environment friendly asset class. This article explains why IOTA’s feeless protocol is the superior distributed ledger technology (DLT) solution for NFT infrastructures, and how our network will solve limitations currently associated with NFT marketplaces.
A brief introduction to non-fungible tokens (NFTs)
Among techies, industry experts, and art lovers alike, NFTs have been on everyone’s lips. A lot of media outlets outside of the financial industry have covered the feverish debate around digitally representing assets on a distributed ledger and trading them in so-called new financial tokens on dedicated platforms. Cryptographic tokens representing unique attributes (or things that can never be fetched) are non-fungible tokens.
A NFT can represent practically anything that can be digitized. In addition to physical assets such as real estate, paintings, or vintage cars, you can also trade digital assets such as artworks, video clips, music, or gaming items through NFTs. A NFT’s ownership is digitally verified with the underlying DLT, and cannot be changed (by transferring it or destroying it) except by its owner.
NFTs: why are they necessary?
Digital asset ownership can be represented digitally in many new ways, which opens up a variety of new use cases. Tokens can be programmed with a royalty function, for example, when a buyer buys an artist’s work, the buyer receives a predetermined royalty. In addition, NFTs are unique, which is why they are an excellent solution for digitizing the collectibles market, where ownership can be proved and copyright violations are protected.
Currently, there are a number of serious drawbacks to NFT solutions.
For instance, it is extremely expensive to have your NFT offered to a buyer at the present time. A minting fee is usually included in the process of creating the NFT, listing it on a platform costs an additional fee, and the NFT platform usually takes a commission on sales. Transactions on the blockchain are also subject to fees.
Fees have never been a priority for the IOTA Foundation, because we believe they severely impede the adoption and application of this technology by businesses. The NFT fees provide a good example of the absurdity of these fees when the underlying technology gains traction and the architectural design is unable to keep pace: in fee-based architectures, this often leads to skyrocketing fees. Artists selling their digital artworks on these new markets, such as the independent scene, cannot afford the high prices. They are thus excluded from participation and, ultimately, from selling their works. In addition to the NFT, Ethereum can easily cost more than 200 US dollars if you choose to sell it on one of the most popular NFT platforms, like Foundation. Additionally, the underlying blockchain technology of Ethereum wastes a significant amount of energy with each transaction.
NFTs, as well as the members of the IOTA community who built the first NFT marketplace based on IOTA, are seen differently by the IOTA Foundation.
Fast, futuristic, nearly feeless platform for NFT
The new, community-built NFT marketplace is still in test mode, but it has the potential to become more accessible in the future. With the IOTA network, all transactions are free, so this obstacle is already gone. Moreover, IOTA Digital Assets’ minimal mining fees result from its framework. In fact, nothing is left but the commission for IOTA’s NFT marketplace, because the infrastructure must be powered in some way. IOTA-based NFT generally comes in much cheaper than any other solution and is, thus, more attractive to all participants in the market.
Check it out now
Now, enough of future dreams! With IOTA NFT marketplace, users can test the IOTA NFT platform already. This test version of the IOTA NFT marketplace lets users manage their wallet directly from the site, similar to how wallets are managed on major exchanges like Binance, Bitfinex, and Bitpanda. IOTA NFT’s marketplace will fully decentralize once the browser wallet and smart contracts are added.
You can claim IOTA 2.0 DevNet tokens through the integrated faucet by creating a free user account and minting your first NFTs. You can complete the process quickly, easily, and for free.
For the first time, the IOTA NFT marketplace provides access to DevNet 2.0 decentralized by IOTA 2.0 for the general public.
This contribution to the IOTA ecosystem from the community is greatly appreciated. These results show that the ecosystem is eager to use the decentralized network to test their use cases – preparing for the decentralized version of our mainnet. IOTA’s NFT marketplace has come to fruition in an incredibly short timeframe. We have already seen an impressive test version of their product built a few weeks after the launch of our DevNet program. It’s an honor to be part of such an amazing ecosystem that is helping us to create an open, trusted, and accessible digital asset ecosystem..
