Solana-Based NFT Marketplace Exchange.art to Expand Into Ethereum

Larisa Barbu, COO of Exchange.art, told CoinDesk that the marketplace had planned to expand beyond the Solana ecosystem since its launch in 2021.

(Exchange.art)

Exchange.art, the popular Solana-based digital art marketplace, is soon taking its platform multichain and integrating support for Ethereum.

The integration will go live on August 1 with more than 80 Ethereum-based artists including Sotheby’s “Glitch Art” sale artist Patrick Amadon and creator Amber Vittoria.

According to data from analytics platform CryptoSlam!, Ethereum's non-fungible token (NFT) trading volume takes first place at $10.2 million in the past 24 hours, while Solana trails behind in second place with just over $920,000. Larisa Barbu, COO of Exchange.art told CoinDesk that Exchange.art always had the plan to expand beyond Solana, and aims to onboarding new creators and collectors in doing so.

“The vision of Exchange.art is to be a hub for digital art and then slowly, build out solutions for traditional art as well,” said Barbu. “So because that's the vision, and that's where we aim to go…being multichain is just kind of the next step in this direction.”

She also added that many artists struggle to sell their work across different ecosystems and marketplaces, and doing so on Exchange.art helps them leverage the two largest NFT ecosystems in one place.

“[Artists] would very much prefer to actually maintain only one platform and one community, instead of [always] juggling between two or three platforms, two or three communities, always updating information between the three of them, communicating with people on all of those platforms, and so on.” said Barbu. “It was actually a decision that we took because we had demand for it, from an artist perspective – and it will help quite a lot of artists.”

After releasing in 2021, Exchange.art has onboarded 16,000 Solana-based artists, helping them earn a collective $13 million in sales. With a mission to stand by artists in a time of uncertainty around royalty payments, Exchange.art introduced a royalties protection standard to help creators earn a consistent percentage across marketplaces. In March, Exchange.art released Code Canvas, a derivative platform to help Solana-based creators mint generative art NFT collections.

Additionally, Exchange.art isn’t the first Solana-based NFT marketplace to introduce Ethereum. In August, Solana-based NFT marketplace Magic Eden integrated Ethereum to make its ecosystem multi-chain.

Edited by Toby Leah Bochan.