5 Reasons OpenSea is in NFT Beast Mode
Table of Contents
- OpenSea background
- Solana Adoption
- Drop Pages and Sea Drop
- Arbitrum Support
- Market Dominance
- Wrapping up
- FAQs
OpenSea background
OpenSea is a US-based NFT marketplace founded in 2017. Since its founding, OpenSea has become the world’s largest NFT marketplace. At its peak, OpenSea saw over $4.8 billion in trading volume in a 30-day span.
OpenSea has been funded by celebrity investors such as Mark Cuban, Alex Ohanian, Kevin Durant, and Ashton Kutcher. Before its meteoric rise, OpenSea was created by two computer science graduates, David Finzer and Alex Atallah, back in 2017.
OpenSea was not the duo’s first venture into web3 as they founded WiFi Coin, which lets users earn crypto by allowing access to their router. However, due to the success of CryptoKitties, they decided to pivot and focus solely on building an NFT Marketplace.
While we all know OpenSea to be the largest NFT Marketplace, it did not rise to fame overnight. By March 2020, the company had expanded to a total of five employees, including the founders. By June 2020, the entire NFT market only received 13.7 million in total volume, but it closed the year with an additional 81 million in volume.
Before the turnaround, the founders were considering either selling or shutting down OpenSea. Thankfully, they held on to the dream and gave us the biggest NFT marketplace yet.
Here are 5 ways OpenSea continues to thrive and maintain its beast mode status in the NFT space.
Solana Adoption
As many are aware, Ethereum isn’t the most budget friendly network to operate on, with gas fees easily running users anywhere from $30 to $150 per transaction. Due to these rates, the market witnessed other L1 cryptocurrencies like Solana begin to pick up steam.
While ETH continues to be the largest NFT Market, Solana comes in second place with billions of dollars in volume per year. This is largely due to the fast network speeds and low gas costs (aka fractions of a penny). Many individual users interacted with Solana NFTs on Magic Eden more so than ETH NFTs on OpenSea. This happened multiple times both in 2021 and 2022.
OpenSea was quick to realize Solana’s potential and in Q2 2022, they began to accept Solana on their platform. This was a wise move by the NFT Marketplace, noticing a change in the winds and making sure they didn’t miss out on the party.
User Interface
It doesn’t take a bachelors in Computer Science to tell a good website from a bad one. Luckily, the UI and UX team at OpenSea crossed their T’s and dotted their I’s to make one of the cleanest websites in web3.
Designed to look like an Ebay or Amazon, the OpenSea website gives users a familiar feel, with incredibly user friendly features.
From the front page, to the trait tabs on a collection, the web developers ensured the user experience on OpenSea was second to none. Especially when compared to other large marketplaces like Magic Eden.
Drop Pages and Sea Drop
New to the platform, the Drop Page is a win for creatives and NFT collectors alike! Similar to Magic Eden’s Launchpad, the OpenSea Drop Page is a showcase for upcoming projects.
The Drop Page gives users an immersive description of a showcased project including but not limited to: WL Info, Mint Date, Roadmap, FAQ, Team, and Utilities among other features. Projects will also be able to cut out the time and money associated with a smart contract and mint directly on the Sea Drop page on OpenSea.
This is a win for consumers as fake minting pages are rampant in web3, making the endeavor a potentially wallet-draining risk. Soon users can feel safe, minting a verified collection directly on the OpenSea frontpage.
Arbitrum Support
Even though Ethereum is now a proof-of-stake blockchain, it still faces the same high transaction cost dilemma. This is due to Ethereum not yet achieving the scalability of other networks like Solana.
Due to this issue in scalability, Layer-2 protocols like Polygon and Arbitrum were created to alleviate the congestion on the main network.
While OpenSea has long supported Polygon, they just recently brought on Arbitrum NFTs! Now, users can purchase low fee Arbitrum NFTs like Smol Brains and Legions, on the world’s largest NFT Marketplace.
Crypto and NFT volume are far from their bull run highs. We have seen the volume shrink into fractions from its former glory. OpenSea came in with around 503 Million USD worth of volume in August 2021, a mountain-length away from a nearly 4 Billion USD month in January 2022.
The silver lining is that in August 2022, OpenSea recorded $502,093,181.84 in volume (Dune Analytics) while Ethereum NFTs as a whole recorded $502,729,502.38 in total NFT volume (CryptoSlam.io), meaning, only 636K out of the 502 Million in volume took place outside of OpenSea.
OpenSea is responsible for over 99.9% of all Ethereum NFT volume.
Wrapping up
While OpenSea and NFTs as a whole may not be seeing the volume of a Bull Market, their continued success and innovation in the NFT space stands strong in the face of bear market fears. While the space is silent and many investors from the bull run are nowhere to be found, OpenSea continues to build, and they’re primed to remain the top dog for years to come.
Thank you for tuning in and as always.. Keep your fingers on the Pulse!
FAQs
What is OpenSea?
OpenSea is the world’s largest NFT Marketplace!
Why Use OpenSea?
OpenSea offers a number of world class features making your NFT shopping experience seamless and secure. Using large marketplaces like OpenSea helps ensure you are not failing victim to scam marketplaces and malicious smart contracts.
Does OpenSea offer more than NFTs?
No, OpenSea specializes in NFTs.
What is OpenSea Arbitrum?
OpenSea Arbitrum is a collection of NFTs that were built utilizing the layer-2 Ethereum scaling protocol, Arbitrum. On the collections page, OpenSea users can view stats on NFT volume, floor prices, sales, and percentages of unique owners among others.
Will NFTs rise in popularity / value?
While its impossible to ensure that they will, the future of NFT’s is bright as there are numerous untapped use cases that have yet to pick up mass adoption. Such examples include gaming, membership passes, and tickets.
What are the most popular NFTs on OpenSea?
Some of the most popular NFTs on OpenSea include but are not limited to Bored Ape Yacht Club/Yuga Labs, CryptoPunks, MoonBirds, Okay Bears, among other high profile NFT collections.
The following video demonstrates what this article articulated regarding OpenSea...
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Author: Ken Melendez
✍️ Head of Content @ Cindicator
📊 Certified Bitcoin Professional
🔐 Blockchain Chamber - Chapter President
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Cindicator is a world-wide team of individuals with expertise in math, data science, quant trading, and finances, working together with one collective mind. Founded in 2015, Cindicator builds predictive analytics by merging collective intelligence and machine learning models. Stoic AI is the company’s flagship product that offers automated trading strategies for cryptocurrency investors. Join us on Telegram or Twitter to stay in touch.
Disclaimer
Information in the article does not, nor does it purport to, constitute any form of professional investment advice, recommendation, or independent analysis.
Sources
https://cointelegraph.com/news/opensea-implements-a-new-protocol-that-ranks-nft-rarity
https://cointelegraph.com/news/opensea-to-allow-creators-to-host-token-sales-directly-through-its-homepage
https://dune.com/rchen8/opensea
http://cryptoslam.io/blockchains/ethereum