The NFT sector has been around for ages, but it was only last year that it saw its revolution. With the crypto industry finally turning away from trading only, it started paying attention to the potential benefits of blockchain technology and its products.
This led to the rise of DeFi in 2020, as well as the rise of NFTs in 2021. However, neither of these two is just a passing trend, and both continue to grow in popularity and usage. The NFT trend, in particular, brought a major change in how artists create, share, and sell their art, while at the same time, it also brought a highly immersive new opportunity for art lovers and investors alike.
Of course, young as it is, the NFT sector still has some core issues to resolve, and that is what a social NFT app Artrade intends to address and fix.
What is Artrade?
Artrade is a new social NFT application that offers integrated social, marketplace and minting features. The project emerged to address a major concern of the NFT space. While the NFT ecosystem does provide artists to connect and trade directly with their fans, there is still a significant lack of clarity, cohesion and communication within the underdeveloped NFT sector.
The blockchain networks that are currently handling the NFT marketplaces remain inefficient, which leads to fragmentation within the marketplace itself. The fees are high, and NFT sales suffer because of these and other problems. So, Artrade emerged to close the gap between the social and marketplace elements of the NFT sector’s revolution. Its goal is to make creating, sharing and trading NFTs simpler and more accessible.
Another issue that Artrade aims to address is the difficulty of connecting to the world of NFTs. After all, the market is on the rise, and while it did see $27 billion in volume throughout 2021, it is still far from mass adoption simply because it remains too complex for an average user. There is a steep learning curve, and high costs of minting, buying and selling non-fungible tokens.
NFT Sector Remains Too Complex
The majority of social media discussions and artist discovery is conducted via centralized social media platforms, like Twitter. Artists are still doing everything in their power to attract art collectors and investors, but even if they do — they must still convince them to go to a third-party NFT platform in order to make their NFT purchases.
If the investor is new, they have to go to the NFT market, complete a registration process, complete a KYC procedure, create a crypto wallet, pay high fees and only then pay for the NFT itself. The process is overly complicated, lengthy and expensive, which is all quite off-putting for newcomers who were just interested in acquiring art they happened to like.
How Does Artrade Help?
Artrade’s way of resolving the situation is through the creation of the world’s first social NFT app. The app will allow anyone who uses it to instantly discover, create, buy or sell digital artwork. It doesn’t require any technical knowledge, coding or anything of the sort. It is easy to use, and it opens the way into the NFT art world to everyone.
In doing this, Artrade is trying to democratize access to NFTs and digital art, make its purchase cheaper by using Solana’s blockchain technology and make payments simpler than ever through the integration of Stripe payments. The app also provides instant conversion between fiat and crypto, allowing new NFT investors to buy their first non-fungible tokens directly with their credit or debit cards.
And, a direct connection between the artists and their community allows for direct interactions between the two parties, all within Artrade’s ecosystem, and via direct integration with some of the largest social networks, such as Instagram, Twitter and alike.
The app itself is powered by Artrade’s native cryptocurrency, ATR, which is a utility token that further reduces the fees within the app, and it can be staked to generate profit. At the time of writing, Artrade is in the middle of its second round of a token sale event, and it plans to use the funds to develop the Artrade app, which has generated more than $2 million in launch funds over a number of public and private rounds. The round is nearly over, as it started on December 20, 2021, and it will end on January 20, 2022.