Coinbase trims functionality of its NFT marketplace

The Coinbase NFT marketplace team announced a pause in rolling out new collections on the platform.

We recently shared that we are pausing creator Drops on the NFT marketplace to focus on other features and tools that creators have asked for.

To be clear: We are not shutting down the Coinbase NFT marketplace.

— Coinbase NFT (@Coinbase_NFT) February 1, 2023

Coinbase NFT stressed that it is not winding down. The decision, it said, was necessary to allow staff to focus on other features and tools.

“Rest assured, our mission has not changed, and we remain optimistic about the platform’s future and continue building,” the statement said.

In a comment to Decrypt, a company spokesperson said that “the Coinbase NFT team has redeployed its resources to focus on the areas most important to users”.

In January the exchange carried out its third round of layoffs, cutting 950 employees or 20% of the workforce.

Coinbase launched a beta version of the NFT marketplace in April 2022. According to Dune Analytics, the platform’s total trading volume since inception stood at $7.34 million. About 10% of the figure was realized by September 9 — 447 ETH or about $721,000 at the time.

For comparison, the leader in the segment, OpenSea, recorded a trading volume of 7,077 ETH (~$11.2 million) on February 1 alone. In recent weeks, that has not been the platform’s highest daily figure.

Many Twitter users pointed to Coinbase NFT’s weak results. One doubted that the platform even had any creators of collections.

You could have directly called the 4 users of the platform — I don’t think a tweet was necessary.

— FameToClaim (@FameToClaim) February 1, 2023

“You could have called all four users directly. I don’t think a tweet was necessary,” wrote the owner of the FameToClaim account.

The user with the handle borovik.eth raised the figure for the platform to seven users.

In 2022, NFT trading volume on Ethereum reached $23.7 billion.