eBay Acquired NFT Marketplace KnownOrigin For Undisclosed Sum

eBay acquired NFT marketplace KnownOrigin for an undisclosed sum while the marketplace generated up to $8 million since launching back in 2018 so let’s read more about it in today’s latest cryptocurrency news.

Ebay acquired NFT market KnownOrigin and announced in a joint statement that the e-commerce platform acquired the latter for an undisclosed sum. CEO Jamie Iannone said that the company was exploring crypto payments and looking at NFTs which became available on eBay in May 2021. The move came among the number of NFT marketplaces acquisitions as we saw already with Uniswap Labs which acquired the NFT platform Genie. OpenSea back in April as the biggest NFT market, acquired NFT aggregator Gem.

The NFT is a unique token linked to digital or physical content that provides proof of ownership and these tokens exploded in the art world. KnownOrigin is a Uk-based platform that allows for the buying and selling of NFT artwork and runs on the Ethereum blockchain, allowing artists to mint NFTs too:

“KnownOrigin has built up an impressive, passionate and loyal group of artists and collectors making them a perfect addition to our community of sellers and buyers.”

KnownOrigin’s co-founder David Moore added that eBay partnerships will help attract new waves of NFT creators and collectors. Founded in 2018, KnownOrigin is one of the first NFT markets and generated $7.8 million in sales the NFT sales took quite the hit in 2022 as market conditions got worse but the first quarter trading still surpassed $12 billion.

As recently reported, The CEO of eBay, Jamie Iannone started considering the idea of adding crypto payment options for the site for a while but then stopped short of announcing any moves during its 2022 investor’s day. Iannone reiterated that the company is exploring new forms of payments to add while the platform did present a slide of a digital wallet due in the second quarter. Ebay could launch digital wallet features which are a software program that holds payment information and some like Apple Pay and Google Pay are meant for credit and debit cards so rather than pulling out a physical wallet, users can pay by tapping a phone at the point of sale.

Digital wallets can also store private keys that will enable people to pay in BTC or other cryptos and recently, other crypto wallets expanded their functionality to allow people to see and trade their NFTs like unique tokens which act as a digital deed of ownership to other assets.