If any of Shopify’s millions of merchants want to sell NFTs, you don’t need to refer your customers to a place like OpenSea or Magic Eden. Instead, they can issue and list NFTs through their existing store using one of Shopify’s blockchain applications. Thanks to Venly, those NFTs can now be produced in Avalanche.
Venly, a blockchain technology startup, today announced extended support for Avalanche on Shopify via the NFT Issuance plugin. As a faster and cheaper alternative to Ethereum, the Tier 1 blockchain platform was previously only available to select Shopify users, but is now offered to any seller on the platform.
According to the company, Shopify is a leading e-commerce platform that provides online storefronts to millions of sellers worldwide. Its CEO, Toby Luttke, is a Web3 advocate who also sits on the board of cryptocurrency platform Coinbase.
According to Venly, buyers will not need to own an Avalanche wallet to buy NFTs, nor will they need to work with cryptocurrencies. Instead, they can pay with fiat money (such as a credit card) and then receive a link to a newly created Avalanche wallet containing the newly generated NFT, which they can then transfer elsewhere if they wish.
Founded in 2018 and also offering blockchain wallet solutions, Venly is one of several blockchain app partners integrated into the Shopify ecosystem. Other partners have previously provided tools for users to trade NFTs on blockchain platforms such as Ethereum and Flow.
Venly co-founder and CEO Tim Diercksens said Decode who first offered NFT mining tools to brands and artists on Shopify, but saw a growing demand for a simple, no-code tool that any merchant could use to generate NFTs. He said that Shopify asked Venly to develop a program so that its sellers could simplify NFT sales to regular users.
“I think that’s one of the biggest evolutions [para NFT] where this can be brought to the mass market,” Dierckxsens tells Decrypt, “and you don’t need to understand the need for cryptocurrency to make purchases.
Shopify merchants can sell NFT collections through Venly, as well as offer experiences with NFT tokens or link NFTs to physical products for identification, among other potential use cases. Dierckxsens also believes there is significant potential for creators and artists to sell NFTs through social media channels that can integrate with or target Shopify stores.
“Our growing blockchain ecosystem demonstrates our commitment to supporting merchants who sell NFTs directly through their stores, helping to further increase participation on Web3 and expand what’s possible in commerce,” said Shopify Blockchain Ecosystem Head Christina Lomazzo.
Venly first launched its Shopify NFT mining tool on Polygon, the Ethereum scaling network, in late 2021. Avalanche is the second supported network, and Dierckxsens said Venly plans to add support for article NFTs via Hedera and the Ethereum Immutable X scale network. the future.
Focusing on Layer 1 platforms and Layer 2 Ethereum networks with low gas fees for customers is intentional, he told Decrypt. Ethereum mainnet gas fees can vary widely and be expensive, even if they don’t seem to fluctuate as wildly as they did during the original 2021 NFT buying frenzy.
“You can’t sell mass-market products and expect end users to pay about $20 to $100 in transaction fees,” Dierckxsens said.
While the volume of NFT transactions on the platform is relatively low at around $1.2 million in December, Avalanche has seen an increase in NFT adoption over the past year, according to data from CryptoSlam. Leading NFT marketplace OpenSea added support for Avalanche NFTs in October amid growth in the Web3 gaming industry on the platform until 2022.