eBay already has a history with NFTs and has reiterated several times that it is planning to launch new products and increase its market share. It’s been more than a year since the company made such statements and allowed the trade of NFTs on its marketplace for the first time. Nobody really knew how this is going to improve since eBays platform has no native support for any blockchain or wallet.

It was today when eBay announced in a joint statement that it bought the NFT marketplace KnownOrigin. What to expect from this deal and how big is this going to be?

NFT marketplaces are the future

Not only eBay has started to take an interest in getting invloved with NFTs. This week Uniswap announced the acquisition of the NFT aggregation platform Genie. The worlds leading NFT marketplace OpenSea has been busy, too. OpenSea bought the NFT aggregator Gem in April.

The crypto market took a nose dive this year and so did NFTs but data shows that they created a volume of $12 billion in the first quarter this year. This supports the theory that non-fungible tokens are indeed a digital growth market that is going to expand once the time is ripe and the economic situation is changing again.

This might be the reason why eBay is engaging in this market even though it never embraced Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. Up until today millions of users are still waiting for the e-commerce giant to accept native crypto payments.

KnownOrigin has been there for a while

When eBay partnered with OneOf in May to release its first NFT collection it seemed that this might be the final form of NFTs on eBays platform. But today’s news is clearly showing that the company is aiming for something different.

KownOrigin is one of the oldest NFT marketplaces and has generated almost $8 million since it launched. That being said, the platform is quite small in volume when compared to OpenSea or LooksRare.

But that doesn’t seem to faze eBay one bit and statements on social media from the KnownOrigin team are hinting that both are planning to build a great product for the future. It remains unknown how much eBay paid to get the deal and it is still completely in the dark if some sort of blockchain integration is going to happen on eBay in the future. Things could get really interesting if eBay manages to bring crypto to its 142 million customers worldwide. With PayPal already integrating cryptos into their platform it is easy to see how one part could fit perfectly with the other.