The marketplace: How to buy and sell NFTs

By: Obinna Tony

July 19, 2022 9:29 AM

As many artists are making money from selling their NFTs, other artists and designers are wanting to make money from monetizing their art. They are at a crossroads about selling their NFTs. To ease yourself of the hiccup, the first step is researching the marketplace where you will sell your NFTs. You are an artist or designer and your art is available and ready in stock to be sold.

There are a lot of marketplaces to sell your NFTs and OpenSea is one of them. It’s the biggest platform for digital artists to sell their arts. You have probably been to an art gallery, a physical one. So, consider OpenSea as an online gallery where there are arrays of digital art, trading cards, and other creative art pieces. OpenSea operates like an auction house where you place bids on products, then someone else outbids and then, someone wins, but there are also options for, “buy now” with a specific price attached to it.

Non-fungible tokens are unique cryptographic digital assets that highlight objects in the real world as well as digital items which include art, music, virtual land, in-game collectibles, videos, photographs and others.

How do you buy NFTs?

In the NFT marketplace, there are still a lot of digital art lovers who are willing to spend a lot of money on art even though there is a school of thought who believes that buying portable network graphics (PNG) or graphics interchange format (GIF) for a huge sum of money is a waste of money but collectors persist.

When collectors buy an NFT, they are buying something unique and not available in the other market. The uniqueness and scarcity of NFT products are criteria for their originality. Buying NFTs allows collectors to own the original items that have been recorded on the blockchain which is proof of their originality. It doesn’t mean that you, as a collector, bought the original content and own its copyright.

There are a bunch of marketplaces to buy your NFTs. They mostly don’t operate identically, operate in the same linear pattern or offer exact types of NFTs. The majority of NFT platforms are based on the Ethereum blockchain. Then, there are non-Ethereum NFT services and they belong to blockchains like Cosmos, Polkadot, Binance Smart Chain etc.

As a collector, when you have chosen collections to buy, the next step is to fund a wallet. You can create an account on the marketplace, so you can buy your collections. Before that, you would have connected your cryptocurrency wallet to the chosen NFT platform to buy as well as sell.

How to sell NFTs?

You can either sell your NFTs by selling a minted NFT or selling an NFT that a collector had already bought and they are looking to trade it again to another collector. The first process is mostly done and this is by minting. Minting is the process whereby a work of art, collectibles, songs, memes etc, has become a part of a blockchain, with no damage done and very safe. The content then becomes NFT and tokenized. In the end, the digital items can be sold and traded as NFTs and also tracked for a purpose of reselling them.

A digital artist can easily mint their NFTs through mobile devices or systems, alone. With a cryptocurrency wallet that supports NFTs with crypto in it and an account on a marketplace focused on blockchain. With all this in place, everything is ready to go.

Also, to sell NFTs that you have bought is as easy as selling NFTs that were freshly minted in the marketplace. It’s almost the same as selling your freshly minted piece in the market place which is called the primary market place while the secondary marketplace refers to the subsequent resale of the work. The only difference is that when NFTs are resold, collectors cannot collect royalties for that resold art. Royalties will only be sent to the wallet of the original NFTs’ creator.

Daily, the NFTs marketplace is continuously growing even though doubts about it continue growing along side. Buying non-fungible tokens as a collector is still the best way to support artists, musicians, designers and other creatives who are trying to make ends meet by monetizing their digital assets on the blockchain.