Is Known Origin the better platform for NFT artists now, since Foundation went public?
Known Origin is the next Foundation. I've seen many artists / non-artists mentioned this within twitter and discord communities, also taking into consideration the question is referring towards nft marketplaces utilizing ethereum network. If possible, please suggest better ones from other networks as well for comparison purposes(pros and cons).
To post an answer, please !
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Really great question! I'll give a quick tl;dr, and then dive into the details later:
In short - if you can get on SuperRare, that's by far the best platform for 1/1 art right now. If you can't, Foundation is the second best platform. KnownOrigin is actually one of the worst!
Okay, let's dive in! So there are a couple of ways to compare "better" - better in what sense?
If we're talking better in terms of strict exposure to collectors, Foundation still has massively the upper hand in terms of user traffic.
Foundation has 2.8 million estimated monthly visits as of May 2022, whereas KnownOrigin has less than 10% of that number - only 200,000 monthly visits in May:
So if you're trying to get your art in front of as many eyeballs as possible today, there's just far more traffic to Foundation.app still today. Perhaps someday this will change, but the two platforms aren't even close on this front today!
The other major platforms for 1/1 art on ethereum are SuperRare, NiftyGateway, and MakersPlace.
By far SuperRare is both the most difficult platform to get into and also the most valuable - SuperRare had 1.5 million monthly visits as of May, but the average price people are willing to pay for art far exceeds that on Foundation and KnownOrigin and other platforms - more on that in a second!
NiftyGateway is the runner up here, with 750,000 monthly visits. Speaking as a collector who's used the platform in the past though, this platform is surprisingly difficult to use and I'm personally convinced many art pieces sell for far less than they should just because the site is so difficult to use, so personally can't recommend it from my own experience as a collector :).
And in last place we have MakersPlace, with only 341,000 monthly visitors:
Even so, MakersPlace still has more than 1.5x the number of visits as KnownOrigin!
So on all fronts, KnownOrigin is by far the least popular platform in terms of visits.
The next thing to consider is the average selling price of art on each platform. Here, we can turn to NFT Stats to take a look at KnownOrigin numbers: https://www.nft-stats.com/collection/known-origin
From this chart, page, we can see literally only 15 NFTs total were sold in the last week, for a total of $8,000 - an average price of $533 per NFT.
15 NFTs total across the entire site for the past week!!!
More critically, while the average mean price is $533, the average median price was just $181, meaning that more than 50% of the NFTs sold in the last week sold for .1 ETH or less, with just a few high ticket sales dragging up the average mean price:
In contrast, from Foundation's official Dune Analytics dashboard, we can see volume is far higher: https://dune.com/foundation/foundation
In the month of May, there was $2.5 million in sales volume:
With 5,295 NFTs sold:
Coming out to an average mean price of $474 per NFT.
So while we can see the average mean price of NFTs across KnownOrigin and Foundation are pretty similar, Foundation literally does 90x more volume in terms of number of sales right now - so yeah, I'd bet on Foundation over KnownOrigin for the moment :). It's important to look at the hard numbers and not just the word on the street!
As a final note, SuperRare, if you can get on the platform, is unquestionably the clear market leader in terms of all sales metrics: https://dune.com/rchen8/superrare_4
These numbers are slightly different in their exact measurements from the numbers above, but in all cases, the picture is clear - the market right now for 1/1 NFTs is almost entirely dominated by just SuperRare and Foundation, with only a few percent of sales being done on KnownOrigin, MakersPlace, and Async.art:
In the past 30 days, this counter has SuperRare pegged at $ million in total sales volume:
And the average price of each artwork sold is far, far greater than Foundation, KnownOrigin, or any other platform. At times, the average price has been over 10 ETH ($30,000+ at the time!), and even now, at the super depressed market prices lately, the average artwork price remains 3.6 ETH, or ~$6,480 - more than 10x the average mean price on both Foundation and KnownOrigin!
There's a catch, of course, to how SuperRare is able to outperform Foundation, KnownOrigin, and other platforms by so much - they have by far the most selective curation process, and only approve a small fraction of artists to list their art on the platform. All artists that are listed must already have demonstrated strong signs of success independently before getting onto the platform.
So if you can get onto SuperRare, absolutely you should stick to minting there, but if you can't, Foundation is the next best place!
Okay, so there you have it! Hope all of that is helpful! Thanks for asking such a great question!
And thanks for asking such a great question Jeshua!!
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Thanks for such a thorough and great insight, Ben! This really helps :)