In early 2021, Mike Winkelmann, a.k.a Beeple, sold his NFT artwork, The First 5000 Days, for an astounding $69.3 million. Besides propelling Beeple into the ranks of the world's most valued artists, this achievement solidified NFT's status as a digital asset. And then, while popular asset classes plummetted in value following COVID-19, digital assets, particularly non-fungible tokens (NFTs), rallied in the opposite direction.
Some Bored Ape NFTs sold for over $2 million, although the average price is closer to $150,000. Similarly, CryptoPunks, a compilation of ten thousand unique NFTs, fetched an average of $350,000 to $500,000, with the collection's most valuable item costing approximately $23.7 million.
What's Behind the Numbers
Seeing these astonishing figures, one might wonder what makes NFTs so valuable. Here, the foremost factor is that NFTs define the ownership of underlying assets and give users the sense of owning something unique. The digital creative industry, among others, immensely from this opportunity. Artists worldwide, especially the budding ons, can now easily create and sell digital art as NFTs, reaching a much wider audience than ever before.
Simultaneously, investors also have access to novel investment instruments and asset classes. And as the combined effect of these factors, NFTs have emerged as the foundation for the new virtual economy, attracting global investments worth $17.7 billion by 2021.
So much for NFTs' monumental success. It's unfair, however, to overlook the pivotal contributions of NFT marketplaces in this regard. Much of the accessibility NFTs have today is due to existing marketplaces, such as OpenSea. But these centralized platforms have their flaws and limitations.
Despite their popularity, they are struggling to adequately serve the increasing market demand. Most of all, they cannot reach out to the masses as much as necessary. Thus, Friendly Market was launched on the Casper Network to remedy these issues while making it easier and more secure to explore, mint, and trade NFTs.
Friendly Market, Casper, and Creativity
Friendly Market is the first-ever NFT marketplace built on the Casper Network. Thanks to the underlying Casper Network, it allows users to mint, buy, sell, and trade NFTs in a user-friendly, affordable, and convenient manner.
For the uninitiated, Casper is a proof-of-stake (PoS) enterprise blockchain network. It helps enterprises build and deploy decentralized applications to power their blockchain-based products and services. The network is famous for its upgradable smart contracts, developer-friendly features, and low transaction costs vis-à-vis its competitors.
Thus, as Casper's only NFT marketplace, Friendly Market is uniquely positioned to benefit from the blockchain's signature features. For example, Casper's high throughput and scalability will help process transactions faster than most other Layer-1 blockchains. This'll allow Friendly Market users to rapidly and easily buy, sell, and trade NFTs. They will, moreover, face minimal network congestion, if at all, without paying hefty transaction fees, unlike, say, Ethereum.
Casper is also pretty energy-efficient due to its PoS consensus mechanism, reducing the overall carbon footprint of minting NFTs. And besides these, Friendly Market's intuitive user interface makes NFT minting super convenient for beginners and veterans. It also lowers entry barriers since users only need an active internet connection and a web browser to buy NFTs. The bidding process is as simple as clicking 'Bid' and entering the amount.
To mint an NFT, however, users need to have CSPR tokens. They can then simply click on create and upload their NFT file. There are two types of listing available on the marketplace, giving creators flexibility and control. With such flexibility and easy-to-use features, the Friendly Market NFT marketplace is a cut above the rest, allowing people to easily enter the world of NFTs and make the most of it.
It's Time for Creators to Shine
Artists, musicians, writers, and other content creators have been in the shadows for decades, with only a handful of celebrities breaking the silence in each industry. However, thanks to NFTs and NFT marketplaces, a renewed optimism arose for all these creators.
They can now present their work to the world and earn their full dues without involving value-sucking intermediaries. A user-friendly marketplace like Friendly Market can thus drive mainstream adoption by making it easy to create and access NFTs in the form of exciting content that users want to consume or own..
Lastly, with exciting features and integrations coming up, Friendly Market is poised to become the go-to NFT marketplace on the Casper Network, bringing in a new wave of artists and investors into this realm.
