Marketplace

A marketplace, in the NFT context, is a platform where NFTs are listed, browsed, bought, and sold — the storefront layer of the NFT economy. Sellers list tokens at fixed prices or for auction, buyers pay with crypto from a connected wallet, and a smart contract swaps the token and the payment atomically, so neither side can take the other's asset without delivering their own.

OpenSea became the dominant general-purpose example, listing NFTs across many collections and chains; competitors such as Blur focused on professional traders with lower fees and incentives. For example, a collector can connect a wallet to a marketplace, list a token for 1 ETH, and the sale later executes entirely through the marketplace's contract — the platform facilitates the trade but never takes custody of the NFT.

Marketplaces typically earn a platform fee of a few percent per sale and may route creator royalties, which is why marketplace policy — not the blockchain — usually decides whether royalties get paid. A common misconception is that an NFT is "on" a particular marketplace; the token lives on the blockchain, and the same NFT can generally be listed on several marketplaces at once or sold with no marketplace at all. Fee levels, royalty enforcement, and support for particular chains are the main practical differences between platforms.