How the onchain art marketplace works

Collecting a primary mint means acquiring a moment directly from its creator. Depending on the creator’s terms, a primary collect is either free — you claim it for only the network fee — or priced, so you pay the amount the creator set.

You confirm the transaction in your Base wallet and the token transfers to you onchain, adding you to the work’s provenance.

Once a moment has been minted, its owner can list it for sale. Buying a listed piece is a secondary-market purchase, settled onchain in ETH or USDC depending on how the listing is priced.

Because settlement is onchain, the transfer of ownership and the payment happen together and are publicly verifiable — there is no platform holding the asset in escrow off-chain.

Any moment you own can be listed for sale at a price you choose. Listing makes the piece available on the market for other collectors to buy, and you can cancel or adjust a listing while you still hold the token.

This applies to work you created and work you collected — the marketplace is the same for primary drops and secondary resales.

Creators can earn royalties on secondary sales, meaning a share of the resale price returns to the artist each time their work changes hands. That aligns long-term incentives: an artist keeps benefiting as the market for their work grows.

Royalties are handled as part of the onchain sale, so they follow the work rather than depending on a platform to enforce them manually.

Throughout collecting, buying, and selling, you hold your assets in your own Base wallet. Kismet prepares transactions and surfaces listings, but you sign every action and retain custody.

That is the core difference from a traditional marketplace: the platform is an interface to the blockchain, not the custodian of your art or your funds.