Secondary NFT Sales Marketplace with Sotheby’s Auction House
With the launch of its secondary NFT marketplace, the world-famous auction house Sotheby’s has taken another step in the world of digital art.
On May 1, the company said that it was adding a “dynamic place to collect, buy, and sell remarkable digital works” to Sotheby’s Metaverse.
The blockchain-based NFT store will mostly be used to sell digital art that has already been bought and sold. Sotheby’s experts will hand-pick a rotating group of top artists to show in the marketplace, according to the announcement.
They will give “expert guidance and context for each work, from thematic presentations to artist spotlights, for an easy-to-navigate experience designed for discovery.”
The next evolution of #SothebysMetaverse is here! The most trusted and dynamic destination to collect, buy and sell remarkable digital works.
— Sotheby's Metaverse (@Sothebysverse) May 1, 2023
Sotheby’s Secondary Market
Sotheby’s started using the Metaverse platform for its art auctions in 2021, but it has since been expanded to include resales. It works with NFTs made on Ethereum and the Polygon layer-2 scaling network.
The process of secondary sales will be run by automated smart contracts that let buyers and sellers send and receive funds in ETH or MATIC, the native token of Polygon. It said that buyers have to pay a 2.5% fee.
Since only Sotheby’s experts will choose the art, it will be a little more exclusive than OpenSea, which is the market winner. It was said that the featured artists will change every few months, and it was also said that Tyler Hobbs, Claire Silver, Hackatao, Sam Spratt, and Refik Anadol will be among the first group.
The platform is run by the Web3 venture studio Serotonin’s NFT commerce app Mojito. In November 2021, Sotheby’s joined the $20 million investment round for Mojito.
Michael Bouhanna, who is the Vice President and Head of NFTs and Digital Art at Sotheby’s, said that the move was a big step forward for the auction house in the Web3 space.
In January, the auction house said it would accept cryptocurrency in a sale for a rare black diamond.
Stable NFT Markets
This year, both the number of trades and the prices on NFT markets have dropped. Only six of the top 20 NFT collections by market capitalization saw their trade volumes go up over the past month.
Also, the Nonfungible market tracker says that daily sales have dropped from about 40,000 in October to about 5,000 in the middle of April. But since the middle of last month, the platform has stopped keeping track of NFT data.
Also, Cryptoslam said that over the past couple of weeks, there have been more sellers than buyers.
