Amazon will launch its NFT marketplace

The e-commerce giant Amazon is ready to launch its NFT marketplace next month, precisely on 24 April.

Amazon and the launch of its NFT marketplace in April

According to a report by TheBigWhale, Amazon says it is ready to launch its NFT marketplace precisely on 24 April. 

The e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming and artificial intelligence giant will also make room for Non-Fungible Tokens.

From what emerges, it appears that initially about fifteen collections will be available on the website through a tab called “Amazon Digital Marketplace.” This tab will initially be available only in the United States. The platform will gradually be opened to the rest of the world, including Europe.

In fact, it appears that the launch of Amazon Digital Marketplace has been postponed twice in recent weeks because of the FTX crypto-exchange failure that shook the entire industry.

At the moment, it appears that the date 24 April has been set, barring any new emergency events. However, it is still unclear if the platform will accept crypto payments or if only credit card payments will be available.

Amazon follows eBay for the sale of NFTs

Amazon’s marketplace was somewhat predicted back in January this year. But the American giant, is not the first to have decided to add NFTs to its ecommerce, or to want to launch a dedicated NFT marketplace.

As early as May 2021, eBay had added NFTs to its marketplace, purchasable via auction much like it happens on more “traditional” crypto art platforms.

However, eBay has not added crypto payments, but only in fiat currency via PayPal and credit card, without special KYC, but only via login to the marketplace.

This is a basic way of selling NFTs, as opposed to the other platforms that have some barriers to entry instead. Not only that, the fact that Ethereum is not used as payment, frees one from the large gas fees of this blockchain.

NFT industry data for February 2023

Amazon leaked its news just as the Non-Fungible Token market seems to have started breathing again, touching $2 billion in trading volumes for the first time since May 2022.

This is a 117% increase over the month of January 2023. The star of this growth is Blur‘s NFT marketplace, which appears to have surpassed the famous OpenSea in terms of trading volume.

And indeed, while Blur touched $1.3 billion, OpenSea remained at $587 million. This is 64.8% of the entire NFT market trading volume for Blur, compared to 28.7% for OpenSea.

Despite this performance, OpenSea still has a much larger user base than Blur. It is nearly 317K traders compared to not even 97K for Blur.