Sotheby’s Auction House Launches Marketplace for Secondary NFT Sales
On May 1, Sotheby’s, the renowned auction house, announced the addition of a new marketplace to its Metaverse, providing a dynamic destination for the collection, purchase, and sale of digital artwork. This blockchain-based NFT marketplace will focus primarily on secondary sales of digital art, featuring a curated selection of renowned artists hand-picked by Sotheby’s specialists. The platform will be powered by Mojito, an NFT commerce suite developed by Web3 venture studio Serotonin.
Sotheby’s Secondary Market
The Metaverse platform was initially launched in 2021 to host art auctions. Now, it has been expanded to handle secondary resales. Sotheby’s Metaverse supports NFTs minted on Ethereum and Polygon, the layer-2 scaling network. The secondary sales process will be governed by automated smart contracts, enabling buyers and sellers to send and receive payments in ETH or MATIC, the Polygon native token. The company has announced a 2.5% fee for sellers.
The marketplace will have a more exclusive selection of artworks than industry leader OpenSea since only Sotheby’s experts will choose the artwork. The featured artists will be rotated every few months, starting with renowned digital artists such as Tyler Hobbs, Claire Silver, Hackatao, Sam Spratt, and Refik Anadol. Sotheby’s Vice President and Head of NFTs and Digital Art, Michael Bouhanna, has emphasized the significance of this move in the auction house’s evolution within the Web3 space.
NFT Markets Remain Flat
The NFT markets have experienced a decline this year, with trading volumes and prices plummeting. The Nonfungible market tracker reports that the number of daily sales has plunged from around 40,000 in October to roughly 5,000 in mid-April. However, the platform has stopped recording NFT metrics since the middle of last month. Additionally, Cryptoslam reported that there have been more sellers than buyers over the past couple of weeks.
Despite the slowdown in the NFT market, Sotheby’s continues to embrace Web3 and expand its offerings, now venturing into the secondary market for digital art sales.
- Sotheby’s auction house has launched a new marketplace for secondary sales of digital artwork on its Metaverse platform.
- The marketplace will feature a curated selection of leading artists hand-picked by Sotheby’s specialists.
- The platform will be powered by Mojito, an NFT commerce suite developed by Web3 venture studio Serotonin.
- The marketplace will support NFTs minted on Ethereum and Polygon.
- Automated smart contracts will govern the secondary sales process, with a 2.5% fee for sellers.
