Different collectible categories on OpenSea.
If you're going to buy NFT's, you should know the NFT marketplaces.
The biggest & baddest - the first, largest and most famous - is OpenSea.
It's the Bitcoin of NFT marketplaces. If you know one marketplace, it's going to be OpenSea. It still has incredible name recognition, and traction.
Of course, being that big has its downsides.
The main one is that, as the go-to place for most NFT projects, OpenSea's selection can be overwhelming. Tons of projects list there, including tons of mediocre ones, so you can feel 'at sea' among dozens of pages of uninspiring NFT projects.
To make things easier, OpenSea does divide their listings into categories; the screenshot above comes from OpenSea. That's probably a good way to get started, with their preselected categories.
But if that resonates with you - the marketplace does quality control, and you pick from what they curate - you can go to a marketplace that takes that approach.
These are two of the biggest, most name brand, premium marketplaces:
SuperRare has a very fine art feel to it. If OpenSea generally feels like pop culture, SuperRare feels like more of a museum. They emphasize the ART in digital art in their design, and it shows.
You can think of their typical user (to use a phrase from their website) as building a "collection of the world's must cutting-edge digital art."
SuperRare, the NFT museum.
Rarible isn't so artsy. It has more of a collectible, video game sensibility.
They also put their top sellers towards the top, so it's easy to see what's trending there.
Still, even with this curation, it's a lot of listings. Maybe you'd like a more exclusive approach: really great artists.
One great marketplace in that category is Foundation.
You can really get a strong sense of Foundation's artist-first approach from their blog. If you want to learn about the artist, get to know them, follow their work long-term, Foundation's your place.
Then again, maybe you want a really specific niche, more focused than the broad 'digital art'. There are marketplaces out there for you too.
Mirror has a very specific focus: writing NFT's. They also have a very specific focus. They describe themselves as being a platform, which you can join by owning their token, $WRITE.
In a sense, then, on Mirror, the gatekeeping isn't done by unknown curators - something that's arguably against the spirit of web3 and crypto. It's done by the people who own their token.
So on Mirror, you know in a sense who's doing the deciding, and how to join them. With Mirror you know exactly what they're about - they explain it all on their blog.
There's also one of the original legends, which deserves a lot of credit for making NFT's mainstream:
NBA Top Shots. If you love basketball and love NFT's, you've got to go here.
And on that note, we can't forget the other 'in real life' marketplaces, with a big offline component: Christie's and Sotheby's. They've done a lot to increase NFT name recognition, and had record-breaking sales.
Of course, we've been going in the direction of increasing prestige and prices here, so for balance, you could consider a less expensive marketplace, one that won't break the bank.
A great marketplace in this category, based off the inexpensive but fast Tezos blockchain, is objkt.com.
This should be enough to get you started. Stay curious, and good luck!