Shopify Adds Support for Avalanche NFTs

Shopify merchants can now mint and list their NFTs through their storefronts using one of the platform’s blockchain apps – Venly. Merchants do not need to refer clients to popular, dedicated NFT marketplaces like OpenSea, Rarible, or Magic Eden. They can instead use Venly to mint NFTs on Avalanche.

Layer-1 blockchain platform Venly announced the addition of Avalanche support on Thursday via its Shopify NFT minting app. The service was previously only accessible to select Shopify users but is now open to all merchants. According to Venly, shoppers will not need to have an Avalanche wallet to buy NFTs. They will not have to handle crypto either but can make fiat payments following which they will receive a link to a newly-created Avalanche wallet holding the freshly-minted NFT, which they are free to transfer to another wallet.

Using Venly, sellers on Shopify can sell NFTs, offer NFT-gated experiences or use NFTs for authentication by tying them to physical products. CEO and co-founder Tim Dierckxsens believes creators and artists could potentially sell NFTs through social media channels that can integrate or link to Shopify stores.

“Our growing blockchain ecosystem demonstrates our commitment to supporting merchants as they sell NFTs directly through their storefronts, helping to further grow participation in Web3 and expand what’s possible in commerce,” said Shopify Blockchain Ecosystem Lead Christina Lomazzo in a release.

Venly offers blockchain wallet solutions and was founded in 2018 and is one of the blockchain app partners integrated within the Shopify platform. It first launched its Shopify minting tool on the Polygon network late in 2021, with Avalanche now being the second network to be supported. The startup plans to add support for Hedera and Ethereum scaling network Immutable X in the future.

The decision to focus on layer-1 platforms and Ethereum layer-2 networks was motivated by the goal of providing low gas fees to users as mainnet gas fees can be costly and hard to predict.

Dierckxsens says the blockchain startup started off offering NFT minting tools to brands and artists on the e-commerce platform but noted that there was an increasing demand for an easy-to-use, no-code tool that any merchant could use to create NFTs. Venly was then asked by Shopify to create an app for sellers that would help streamline the process of selling NFTs to mainstream users.

“I believe it’s one of the biggest evolutions [for NFTs] where this can be taken to a mass market and you don’t need to understand the necessity of crypto to make the purchase,” Dierckxsens said in a Decrypt interview.

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Mercy Mutanya is a Tech enthusiast, Digital Marketer, Writer and IT Business Management Student.
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