Objkt.com is Making BIG MOVES

On Thursday, March 16, 2023 the exciting news broke. Objkt.com now accepts payments for Tezos NFTs in TEZ, by credit card, or in ETH.

This is a major development for artists in the Tezos ecosystem. While up-and-coming chains, like Tezos, are making strides, ETH still reigns as the most popular cryptocurrency used by people who collect NFTs.

The biggest collectors in the web3 art space, with the most liquidity, tend to keep the majority of their crypto portfolio on the Ethereum blockchain and in ETH-based cryptocurrency wallets.

With this new development, ETH-maxis can now collect Tezos art on Objkt.com without having to set up a new Tezos wallet, or swapping ETH for Tez.

As a Tezos artist, this is exciting news. My platform of choice, Objkt.com, is making big moves and I am so here for it!

Read on to find out how to buy a Tezos NFT with ETH, and why this is so exciting for the Tezos blockchain.

Disclaimer

[caption id="attachment_746" align="alignright" width="150"]

A red stop sign against a blue sky, with a red rocks on either side

ⓒ Lauren McDonagh-Pereira Photography 2013[/caption]

Before we get into it, please consider a few quick DISCLAIMERS.

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How Did Objkt.com Integrate ETH Payments?

Objkt.com has partnered with Winter to allow ETH purchases of Tezos NFTs.

Winter is an embedded checkout service that allows customers to purchase NFTs with credit cards or cross-chain payments. Direct cross-chain payments saves NFT buyers the fees that are associated with trading one cryptocurrency for another.

The goal of cross-chain payments is to make it easier for NFT collectors to buy the NFTs that they like regardless of the chain that they are minted on.

A red male cardinal perches on a snow covered branch.

You can now collect this Tezos NFT with TEZ or ETH. Collector's Choice.

How Do Tezos Artists Feel About this Change?

As soon as word got out that Objkt.com was accepting cross-chain payments from ETH wallets, all of my Tezos Twitter DMs, Telegrams, and Discord channels blew up with excited conversation about what it all means.

The general consensus is that this move could create a smoother path of entry for formerly ETH-maxi art collectors into the Tezos ecosystem.

The biggest concern people had was wondering how the variable, and often high ETH gas fees would impact the pricing levels on Tezos NFTs. A common question I heard today was, "Who is going to pay $5 USD in ETH to mint an edition that costs $2 USD in TEZ?"

Overall, the mood was one of excitement. Web3 artists know that improved user interfaces and a push towards being chain agnostic are the only way the web3 art scene is going to continue to grow. The easier it is for an average consumer to say, "I like your art. I'll buy it", the healthier the NFT art economy will become.

You can now purchase Tezos NFTs on @objktcom using ETH.

How do you think this will impact the #Tezos ecosystem? pic.twitter.com/bQjsw6JTyK
— Lauren McDonagh-Pereira Photography TEZ/ETH (@LAMPphotography) March 16, 2023

What Does Objkt.com Allowing ETH Payments Mean?

When I first heard the news, I had a lot of follow-up questions.

Does buying a Tezos NFT with ETH move the NFT onto the ETH blockchain?

How much would gas fees be?

Would the collector be able to hold the Tezos NFT in their Metamask wallet?

Would Objkt.com start catering to ETH NFTs in addition to, or instead of, Tezos NFTs?

The answers to my questions turned out to be "no, not much, no, and probably not".

Objkt.com is still in the business of providing a sales platform for Tezos NFTs, collectors will still need a wallet coded for Tezos to hold their newly collected NFTs, and the NFTs minted on Tezos will remain on the blockchain no matter how they are paid for.

How to BUY Tezos NFTs with ETH

To learn the answers to my questions, I decided to give it a go myself.

I have minted and collected work on both the TEZ and ETH blockchains, so I already have wallets specific to each chain, and I am all too familiar with the process of collecting work from other artists on Objkt.com.

I sat down at my PC, fired up Objkt.com and had the not-so-difficult task of decided what to buy.

I decided to collect from Irina @Ambi_eth.

Irina is a talented multi-disciplinary artist and one of my very favorite people in web 3.

I opened up her profile on Objkt.com and tried to find something of hers that I hadn't already collected.

I settled on a piece of her photography titled "Persimmon and Fish" that was listed for 4.00 ꜩ,

[caption id="attachment_4935" align="aligncenter" width="768"]

Persimmon and Fish ©ambi_tez[/caption]

Once I had settled on an NFT to buy, I found the "Buy Now" button to the right of the image, as it normally would be.

The only difference was that there are now three options; "Buy Now, ETH, and Credit Card".

For the first time ever, on Objkt.com, I opted to purchase a Tezos NFT with ETH.

As soon as I selected the ETH option, a new integrated menu popped up.

I assume that this is the widget created by Winter to complete the cross-chain transaction.

This new pop up menu showed me the piece that I was planning to purchase along with its purchase price listed first in ETH, and then in XTZ (a unit of Tezos currency).

I was asked for my email address, a Tezos wallet to deliver my NFT to, and there was a button that read "Connect your ETH wallet".

Since, I was already logged into my Objkt.com account, the widget automatically populated the NFT delivery field with my Tezos wallet address.

This confirmed my suspicion that collectors would still need a Tezos wallet in order to collect the Tezos NFT.

With my Tezos-supported wallet address already set, I clicked on the button to connect my ETH wallet.

I was offered a choice of using Rainbow, Coinbase Wallet, MetaMask, or WalletConnect.

There was also a handy explainer on what a wallet is with a link to get a wallet for total web3 newbies.

I chose to use a MetaMask wallet to complete the transaction, so I clicked on the MetaMask icon.

MetaMask is a browser-based ETH wallet that works as a Chrome extension.

As soon as I selected MetaMask from the "Connect a Wallet" choices, my browser extension popped open and asked me to sign in as usual.

Once signed in, the "Connect a Wallet to Pay" field was populated with my ETH wallet of choice.

I was know ready to fill in my email address and complete the transaction.

My MetaMask wallet extension popped open again, informed me that I would need to pay $0.73 USD in ETH gas fees for the purchase and asked me to confirm the transaction.

For the sake of comparison, I opened a second browser and attempted to purchase the same NFT using my Tezos wallet. If I had completed that purchase, the gas fee on Tezos would have worked out out to $0.11 USD in TEZ.

Sure, using my ETH wallet to complete the transaction was $0.62 USD more expansive than using my native TEZ wallet. However, this fee is significantly cheaper than any fee I would have paid to trade ETH for TEZ using a crypto exchange. If I was a collector with limited TEZ and a lot of ETH, I would view this as a completely reasonable price to pay to save me from the extra steps of converting ETH into TEZ.

As soon as I confirmed the transaction, my MetaMask closed and the Winter widget gave me a confirmation screen.

Winter let me know that they had sent a confirmation to my provided email address and invited me to view my new NFT.

I decided to head over to my Gmail account to see what the Winter confirmation email looked like.

The email helpfully provided a link directly to where the NFT could be viewed on Objkt.com.

I was pleased to discover that my new NFT had been safely delivered to my TEZ wallet and was now proudly displayed on my Objkt.com Owned tab amongst the other NFTs that I have recently collected.

My experiment was complete! I had used my ETH wallet to make a cross-chain purchase of a Tezos NFT! Hooray!

What the LISTING Artist Noticed About the Cross-Chain Transaction

I reached out to Irina @Ambi_eth to let her know that I had purchased her Tezos NFT with ETH, and asked her if she saw anything different on her end, as the seller.

She reported no change. She received her normal alert on Telegram from the CryptoNoises bot to let her know that someone had purchased one of her NFTs.

She checked her wallet and saw that 4 XTZ had been deposited with no mention of the fact that I had paid in ETH.

Conclusion

The process of buying a Tezos NFT with ETH was straightforward and painless.

I am excited that Objkt.com has taken this huge step towards cross-chain compatibility.

Are you excited too?

Join my conversation on Twitter, and let me know what you think!

And if you are an ETH whale reading this post... I'm ready for you.

More to explore

Objkt.com Accepts ETH Payments for Tezos NFTs (March 16, 2023 News)