ApeCoin DAO launches bespoke NFT marketplace

ApeCoin DAO launches a new NFT marketplace on Nov.23 that will sell NFTs from Bored Ape Yacht Club, Mutant Ape Yacht Club, Bored Ape Kennel Club, and Otherdeed collections. The marketplace will honor creator royalties and pass half the seller fees for each transaction back to the ApeCoin DAO community.

Back in August, the community propositioned to create a bespoke marketplace. Among several companies interested in building it, Magic Eden’s proposal was rejected, and Rarible withdrew its proposal. Another contender, X Marketplace, also was unsuccessful.

Lastly, a team of Zach Heerwagen and Jason Jong, the founders of Snag Solutions, gained enough traction to win over the support of the community.

Launched in July, the startup builds white-label marketplaces for NFT collections and is currently closing its pre-seed funding round. Bespoke marketplaces, often called white-label or white-glove marketplaces, are becoming popular among NFT collections looking for more control over how their NFTs are traded. Alongside an ability to offer lower transaction fees than many traditional NFT marketplaces and enforce royalties, they offer collections of social and data tooling, as well as help prevent buyers from being scammed by fake NFTs.

In September, Snag Solutions created a marketplace for Goblintown makers Truth Labs. Also, the startup worked with the Crypto Chicks and Pirates of the Metaverse NFT collections. So far, Heerwagen said Snag Solutions has worked on ten white-label marketplaces.

The new marketplace will honor creator royalties and pass half the seller fees for each transaction back to the ApeCoin DAO community. For listings, it aggregates from non-royalty enforcing marketplaces, and it will add royalties fees payable to creators.

Whether royalties should be enforced continues to be a massive debate in the NFT space. They are a major source of income for creators, but platforms, where royalties are optional, have increased their marketplace share over the past few months.

As a white-label marketplace built specifically for the DAO, it also features integrated NFT metadata on its dashboard and soon-to-be-launched ApeCoin staking.

Lately, a series of famed crypto projects have launched their own NFT marketplaces. Among them, Find Satoshi Lab, the company behind the move-to-earn application STEPN, released the membership-based, multi-chain NFT marketplace MOOAR, aiming to establish a self-sustaining ecosystem for its product lineup.

Also, the video game stores’ firm GameStop has officially launched its NFT marketplace on layer-2 Ethereum scaling protocol Immutable X that will offer digital assets from major Web3 games. Thus, GameStop became a major player in the NFT gaming industry, rivaling crypto-native NFT gaming platforms like Fractal, founded by Twitch’s Justin Kan.

Moreover, the British auction giant Christie’s launched on September its own dedicated NFT on-chain auction platform,” allowing auctions to be carried out fully on-chain on the Ethereum network. Titled Christie’s 3.0, the new platform was created in partnership with blockchain data firm Chainalysis, NFT minting platform Manifold, and metaverse builder Spatial.