It's devastating. So much WAX saved by evading those fees which clipped off a chunk of every sale or forced you to pay more than the seller would receive. But no more. Never again. Not now that AtomicHub has removed the feature to back tokens to an NFT. Our way to dodge market fees... Gone.
Or is it?
Thankfully not.
I'm sure most users of the WAX blockchain are familiar with backed token trades. Many buyers (including myself at times) would, instead of selling on the market, directly message the person selling and ask to do the sale via backed tokens, essentially giving the seller the same amount of WAX while allowing the buyer to pay less (based on whatever the market fee is). For small sales, it might not seem significant but when dealing with sales which at times can reach thousands, if not tens of thousands of WAX, a 10% fee is taking off serious amounts and as much as I like supporting my favourite projects through market fees, I'm not always willing to sacrifice $100 USD on a $1000 NFT when I could be paying $900 instead.
As many of you probably realised, a few months ago, AtomicHub removed the ability to view the number of backed tokens on an NFT. For those who didn't know, you were still, however, able to go to the logs of the selected NFT to view how much WAX had been backed to it and when it was done. Unfortunately, this is no longer doable now that AtomicHub has essentially removed the backing feature from their platform so you are now unable to view the number of tokens backed to an NFT as well as being unable to back tokens. The only remaining feature is that when burning a backed NFT, you will still receive all of the backed tokens. But as useful as that is, it isn't much help if you can't back tokens in the first place. So what now?
Thankfully, AtomicHub is just one of many different platforms which supported at least some of the features of backed tokens. NeftyBlocks for one, allows you to not only see how many tokens are backed to a particular NFT, but also allows you to tick a box in your inventory 'Has Backed Tokens' to automatically filter to show which of your NFTs has backed tokens. However, this still doesn't help you to actually back the tokens to an NFT. So where do we go to do that?
Well, the simplest way in my opinion is to head to another platform that us WAX users should all be familiar with. Alcor Exchange. Now naturally we are all accustomed to using Alcor to trade and swap our tokens rather than our NFTs, however, Alcor also allows you to look at your owned NFTs, see how much WAX is backed to each one, and perhaps most importantly, back tokens to them. Here's how:
1. Go to this link, which takes you to the section of Alcor which displays your owned NFTs.
2. Find the NFT you wish to either back tokens to or wish to check how many are currently backed to it.
3. Click 'Details'.
4. You will then be able to see the properties of that NFT (including the number of WAX backed to it) as well as having the option to back tokens to it (or burn it if you wish to extract any currently backed tokens.
And that's it. Easy. Of course, while their motives are understandable, it's a shame that AtomicHub no longer supports backing tokens but thankfully, there are still ways to deal with this. I hope this comes in handy to you but please also remember that while they might result in you paying more, market fees help support both the platform you are buying/selling on as well as the collection to which the relevant NFT belongs to.
That's it for today and happy trading!
