Andre Cronje, the creator of Yearn Finance, has launched a new project. A marketplace for non-fungible tokens (NFT) is now online on Fantom (FTM), and it competes directly with OpenSea.
Yearn Finance creator launches OpenSea clone
The Fantom Foundation (FTM), which manages the blockchain on which this new marketplace is based, announced the launch of Artion over the weekend. The release highlights the paltry transaction fees, the lack of commission on sales as well as particularly low NFT production costs. Beyond these differences, Artion is remarkably similar to OpenSea.
Artion will soon support ERC-721 tokens, an Ethereum standard. The platform also indicates that it wants to launch on new blockchains at a high frequency. The next ones should be Ethereum (ETH), Arbitrum (ARB), Avalanche (AVAX) and Polygon (MATIC).
Artion will have to attract large NFTs
Artion’s challenge will of course be to attract NFT projects of sufficient size to take off. Today, all the 50,000 non-fungible tokens available on the platform are based on Fantom: it is therefore not the most dynamic market of the moment. Like Solana (SOL), there are also the now classic copies of Ethereum’s NFTs, including “Cryptopunks”, here called “Ftmpunks”.
Another difference of Artion is that the project is entirely open source. A choice that corresponds well to the ideology defended by Andre Cronje. On this subject, he said to our colleagues of Coindesk:
“We encourage teams to make forks [of Artion]. I like building protocols and seeing what people can do with them. I like starting fires.”
A real competitor?
Artion’s launch comes as the giant OpenSea has stumbled in recent weeks. In the middle of the month, it was learned that the head of the platform’s products had engaged in insider trading. He would have used confidential information to profit from NFT before they were made available on the platform. In addition, a bug had destroyed NFTs worth $100,000 earlier this month.
But for now, OpenSea is largely the master of the sector: at the end of August, it gathered 98% of the total volume of NFTs. Artion’s paltry fees could attract a new breed of users, however. Ethereum’s fees don’t seem to be going down any time soon, and that makes the alternatives attractive to investors.
