Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, founders of crypto exchange Gemini, yesterday announced they were launching their marketplace for crypto collectibles of artists and brands.
The Winklevoss twins bought the marketplace, called Nifty Gateway—Nifties are another name for crypto collectibles, short-hand for NFT, or non-fungible tokens—in November 2019. It was founded in 2018 by Duncan and Griffin Cock Foster (who are also twin brothers). Its website went live yesterday.
The Winklevoss twins have invested heavily into Bitcoin and the wider crypto industry. Image: Shutterstock.
Crypto collectibles are tokenized artworks—each artwork is provably unique, and tokenized artworks can be traded like any other cryptocurrency.
The Winklevoss-led cryptocurrency exchange Gemini today announced its first acquisition: Nifty Gateway, a platform that facilitates the purchase of crypto collectibles, also known as non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
NFTs are digital tokens that represent unique crypto assets within blockchain-based games, such CryptoKitties and Gods Unchained. They are not interchangeable and cannot be traded like standard cryptocurrencies. Many of these tokens include skins, weapons and similar collectible items mad...
Upon launch of Nifty Gateway 2.0—the new, Gemini-backed version of the marketplace—are collections from two artists and one athlete: New York-based artist Michael Kagan; Los Angeles artist Lyle Owerko, whose collectors include Beyoncé and Jay Z; and Cris Cyborg, an MMA women’s featherweight world champion, who’s selling paintings of herself, “the must have for any Cris fan.”
I am excited to join the @niftygateway platform and become the first MMA Athlete to offer fans a digital collectible built on Blockchain technology. Click the link below to get your Digital Cyborg Card from the Explore Collection. 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾https://t.co/TJBY2NyszTpic.twitter.com/LlLuANcT0Q
— Grand Slam Champ Cris Cyborg (@criscyborg) March 17, 2020
The platform rivals existing marketplaces for crypto collectibles, like CryptoKitties and OpenSea.
Compared to OpenSea, a marketplace on which any artist can sell crypto collectibles (CryptoKitties only facilitates the sale of its eponymous crypto collectible, digital Tamagotchi-like cats), there are a few key differences.
First, Gemini is focusing on a few artists, rather a crypto collectibles free for all. New “exhibitions” will come out (roughly) every three weeks, on Thursdays. To have art exhibited is to be featured on the front page, or under “exhibitions.”
Second, Gemini handles “all of the difficult technology pieces for you, meaning that selling a Nifty with us is as easy as selling something on Ebay,” according to its site, and the marketplace is backed by Gemini’s security technology.
A graphical artist painted a still of a golden boombox at a live painting workshop in the Los Angeles offices of TikTok last week. Yesterday, he minted a single cryptocurrency token to represent the artwork.
Should anyone buy the painting, which is going for 250 ETH ($54,468), they’ll also receive the token as a certificate of authenticity, which contains metadata around the location, size, and materials used.
“I'm really trying to create scarcity in my work, so that the people that own one of m...
Third, NFTs are put up for sale in US dollars, rather than cryptocurrency. The art varies in price. Of those with price-tags, a picture of Cris Cyborg goes for $85,000 (it was last sold for $10), and a picture of a Boombox is going for $100 (it last sold for $20, bought by Tommy Kimmelman, a business development specialist at Nifty Gateway and self-described “King of the Nifties”).
It is, of course, possible to save the image on your computer for free. But what would be the fun in that?
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