DeFi Market
For most artists in 2026, the best place to start is OpenSea, minting through its own Studio tool. It takes 1% of each sale, it runs on more than 25 blockchains, and for collections made in Studio since April 2, 2024 it actually pays your royalties. If your work fits a gallery crowd and they'll have you, SuperRare is the curated step up. If you want to mint for pennies, look at Objkt on Tezos. And whichever you pick, think about owning your own contract, because this year showed what happens to artists when a marketplace shuts its doors.
Three art marketplaces closed this year
Foundation shut down on April 15, 2026. A buyer had agreed to take it over in January, then walked away, and the founder said there wasn't another buyer worth chasing. Over its life Foundation handled about $230 million in first sales of artists' work.
It wasn't alone. Nifty Gateway, owned by the Gemini exchange, closed on February 23. Exchange.art, an art marketplace on Solana, closed on August 1, saying it couldn't find a way to pay its bills. MakersPlace went in January 2025. Two more changed shape. Magic Eden shut its Ethereum and Bitcoin markets in March and kept only Solana. Zora stopped being an art NFT platform altogether in 2025. Every post there is now a tradable coin.
So if a "best marketplace" list still recommends Foundation, check when it was written.
The reason is money. Art NFT trading was worth $2.9 billion in 2021 and $197 million in 2024, according to the analytics firm DappRadar. That's a 93% fall. The wider art world isn't booming online either: the Art Basel and UBS report put 2025 online art sales at $9.2 billion, the lowest since 2019. Fewer buyers means fewer fees, and marketplaces live on fees.
Prefer to watch? The four marketplaces in 46 seconds.
The best NFT marketplaces for artists, compared
| Marketplace | Chain | What it takes | Royalties on resale | Who can sell |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| OpenSea | Ethereum, Base, Solana and 20+ more | 1% per sale, 10% on primary drops | Paid for Studio collections made since April 2024; optional on older contracts | Anyone |
| SuperRare | Ethereum | 15% of your first sale; buyers pay 3% | 10%, paid | Invited or accepted artists |
| Objkt | Tezos | 5% per sale | Paid first, before the fee | Anyone |
| Manifold | Your own contract on Ethereum | Free to set up; collectors pay a small fee per mint | You set the rules in your contract | Anyone |
These are the fees each marketplace published in 2026. They change, sometimes twice in a year, so read the fee page on the day you list.
OpenSea: the default, with one setting that matters
OpenSea is where most NFT buyers already are. Its fee has moved around: 2.5% for years, cut to 0.5% in February 2025, then raised to 1% that September. Opening an account is free. Listing your first NFT costs a little gas, so "free" isn't quite true.
The setting that matters is how you mint. OpenSea pays royalties, which it calls creator earnings, on collections made in OpenSea Studio after April 2, 2024, and on contracts built to enforce them. On older collections and other contracts the seller decides whether to pay you. The most you can set is 10%. So if you're new, mint in Studio. Don't bring an old contract and hope.
The downside is the crowd. Your piece sits next to millions of others, and nobody finds it by accident.
SuperRare: curated, and it costs you
SuperRare is Ethereum only, and you get in by invitation or by applying. It takes a limited number of new artists each month. On your first sale you keep 85% and SuperRare keeps 15%. Every resale after that pays you 10%, and the buyer pays a 3% fee on top.
In 2025 a SuperRare executive backed cutting that 15% to 5% and put it to a community vote. I couldn't find any sign it passed. Fifteen percent is a gallery's cut, and it's worth paying only if the curation brings you collectors you wouldn't reach on your own.
Objkt: cheap to mint on Tezos
Objkt is a marketplace on the Tezos blockchain. It takes 5% of each sale made through its own contracts, and your royalty comes out first. On a 100 tez sale with a 20% royalty, the seller ends up with 75 tez. The fee was 2.5% until January 2024, and plenty of reviews still quote the old number.
The draw is cost. The Tezos Foundation says you can mint for a few cents, which makes Tezos a sensible place to try things before you spend real money on Ethereum.
Manifold: own the contract, sell it anywhere
Manifold isn't really a marketplace. It's a tool for putting your art in a contract you own, under your name, and you can then list that collection wherever you like. Setting up the contract is free apart from gas. Manifold makes its money from a flat fee per mint that the collector pays, which was 0.00069 ETH, about a dollar, in 2023. Manifold's own gallery charges sellers nothing.
Ethereum isn't the toll road it was in 2021. In April 2026 gas averaged about 0.5 gwei, and at that rate deploying a token contract cost about $1.41.
If you're serious, this is the route I'd take. When a marketplace closes, the NFTs don't vanish. But if they were minted on the marketplace's shared contract, the collection's rules and royalty settings were set by a company that's gone. A contract in your own name doesn't care who closes. You list it somewhere else the next morning.
If you work on Solana
Solana artists lost Exchange.art in August, and Magic Eden has made royalties optional since October 2022. Rarible opened a Solana marketplace on August 6, 2026 that holds sales in escrow so royalties get paid, and OpenSea started listing Solana NFTs on August 31. Minting is cheap. Metaplex's documentation puts a basic Solana NFT mint at about 0.003 SOL.
What to check before you mint anywhere
- Is the fee page dated this year? Fees at OpenSea and Objkt have both changed since 2024.
- Does the contract enforce royalties, or just announce them? Most only announce. Our guide to NFT royalties explains the difference.
- Where does the image live? The NFT is a record on the blockchain. The picture usually sits on a storage network like IPFS. Foundation is paying to keep its artists' files stored for one year. After that it's up to the owners. Keep your own copies of every file, and pay to pin them if you can.
- Who brings the buyers? After 18 years in PR I'd put it plainly: a marketplace is a shelf. It doesn't sell anything. Your collectors come from your own list, your own posts and the people who already like your work.
If you've never minted anything, our guide to minting your first NFT collection goes step by step.
A disclosure, and one more option
I'm a partner in Liquid NFTs, so I've kept it out of the table above. You should know it exists, though, because it answers the royalty problem a different way. By default, half of every mint on Liquid is locked inside the NFT as backing, and every resale on the platform pays the creator 10%. Read our Liquid guides and judge it the way you'd judge the others: fees, royalties, and whether it will still be there in five years.
Questions people ask
Where can I sell NFT art for free?
Nowhere is completely free. Opening an account costs nothing on any of the big marketplaces, but you'll pay gas to mint or list, and a fee when you sell. On Tezos and Solana that gas is a few cents. On Ethereum it's a few dollars or less right now.
What's the best NFT marketplace for beginners?
OpenSea, minting in OpenSea Studio. It has the most buyers, a 1% fee, and it pays royalties on Studio collections. If you want to practice without spending much, try Objkt on Tezos first.
Is Foundation still open?
No. Foundation closed on April 15, 2026. NFTs minted there are still in their owners' wallets, and Foundation is paying for one year of storage for the files. Artists can list those pieces on other marketplaces.
