There is no denying that 2021 is the year of NFTs and everyone is realizing it, so much so that Coinbase Ventures has decided to invest in the Rarible marketplace.
Co-founder Lasse Clausen explained:
“NFTs are entering a phase of interesting experimentation beyond their basic use cases, becoming a platform for permissionless innovation and unlocking killer uses that we cannot even imagine yet. Rarible is one of the best-positioned platforms in the ecosystem to promote and accelerate the open experimentation of NFTs”.
The crypto startup has in fact raised $1.75 million in an early-stage fund in which Coinbase Ventures, as well as ParaFi Capital and CoinFund, participated.
These new investments will be used by Rarible to build a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) so that NFTs can be bought and sold in a decentralized way.
Rarible co-founder Alexei Falin stated:
“There’s no place to do that in a decentralised way. We are trying to build a decentralised approach, a Uniswap for NFTs”.
Coinbase, NFTs and the bull run
During this bull run in the Bitcoin market, Coinbase has seen its volumes soar and since mid-December 2020, the exchange has seen as much as $3.4 billion in BTC pass through its platform.
Not surprisingly, this US exchange ranks third in terms of 24-hour volumes according to data from CoinMarketCap, only behind Binance and Huobi.
For example, just a few minutes ago, Coinbase saw as many as 887 bitcoin, equivalent to $33 million, moved, as reported by Whale Alert on Twitter:
🚨 🚨 🚨 887 #BTC (33,268,129 USD) transferred from #Bitstamp to #Coinbase
— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) February 4, 2021
Furthermore, in terms of market cap, Coinbase beats even many famous banks around the world with $70 billion, a higher capitalization than the Spanish bank Santander, the English Barclays, the Swiss Credit Suisse and the German Deutsche Bank.
