OpenSea, the world's largest encrypted digital collection market, was established in January 2018, covering the widest range of categories, the most transferable digital collections, and the best prices. OpenSea does this through a passionate community of users and developers. They work with game developers to create customizable online stores for users to automatically buy and sell their crypto collectibles.
Recently, OpenSea, a popular NFT market, announced the launch of a new Web3 market protocol "Seaport Protocol" to buy and sell NFT.
It is understood that bidders using Seaport can bundle different assets to trade NFTs, unlike today where only cryptocurrencies can trade NFTs. Assuming that the user has a Doodles worth 40 ETH and wishes to obtain an Ape worth 100 ETH through the transaction, he can choose to pay 1 Doodles + 60 ETH in the transaction.
In addition, OpenSea also provides the SudoSwap tool to facilitate users to trade NFT by barter. Seaport also now lets people bid on specific traits in collectibles, which is designed so that bidders don't care what kind of NFT they get, as long as it has the traits they're looking for. For example, users who collect smiling NFTs can bid on any smiling bored apes collected.
The marketplace now also allows tipping. "Fulfillers can include additional items for consideration when fulfilling listings, as long as their tip does not exceed the original offer," OpenSea said.
OpenSea stated that Seaport's core smart contract is open source, decentralized in nature, has no contract owner, has upgradeability, and other features. Will not control or operate the Seaport protocol himself, and partnered with code4rena to start a two-week protocol audit competition with a prize pool of $1 million.
In February 2021, the NFT market woke up from hibernation, and then became more and more crazy. In July 2021, the NFT transaction volume of the OpenSea platform reached 350 million US dollars. In the same month, in a round of financing led by well-known venture capital Andreessen Horowitz, OpenSea raised $100 million in venture capital at a valuation of $1.5 billion.
As the price of NFT becomes more and more eye-popping, ordinary people also want to take a share of it and become NFT creators, collectors or speculators, so they turn to OpenSea, because the concept of OpenSea fits their expectations very well, namely: Let anyone become an NFT artist.
As the undisputed monopoly in the current NFT market, OpenSea has been caught in the public opinion whirlpool of fake Web3 products one after another due to its centralized operation mode, and the dissatisfaction of users has also left behind the development of various competitors holding high the banner of decentralization. space. Under internal and external troubles, OpenSea recently launched Seaport, a Web3 market protocol for buying and selling NFTs, to accelerate its own Web3 development process. How will this product empower OpenSea's road to decentralization? How will it change the NFT market?
The Seaport protocol is not only for OpenSea, but also for all NFT builders, creators and collectors. Since the core smart contract of the Seaport protocol is open source and not controlled or operated by OpenSea, it is decentralized in nature, has no contract owner, has upgradeability and other features. In other words, anyone can build an NFT market based on the Seaport protocol, and before that, platforms including OpenSea have absolute rights to any changes to the code. At the same time, it is not easy for most developers to create an NFT project from scratch, but Seaport allows anyone to update or generate code, which means that everyone can use this protocol to issue and trade their own NFT. For the entire market, Seaport, an open source market protocol, may bring more innovative new use cases of NFT in a low-threshold way.
Not only that, Seaport also provides more diversified trading methods. On the one hand, most current NFT trading platforms only allow the use of Token to buy and sell NFT, including LooksRare, which effectively launched a "vampire attack" on OpenSea before, also uses mixed tokens (WETH + ETH) or uses ETH and WETH alone to buy and sell NFT, while With the support of the Seaport protocol, sellers can provide NFT including ETH, ERC20, ERC721 and ERC1155 for bidding. For example, when a user owns a Doodle NFT worth 40 ETH, but wants to trade a BAYC NFT worth 100 ETH, he can bid with the Doodle NFT he owns and 60 ETH; the user can exchange it with 1 Bored Ape Bundles containing CryptoPunk, Cryptoadz, Uniswap’s UNI token, and more.
On the other hand, the Seaport protocol provides users with a way of bartering transactions. In fact, in the process of NFT investment, many investors are more concerned about the characteristics and attributes than the specific appearance of these NFTs, and Seaport will allow users to specify a single NFT and specific characteristics. For example, if a user wants to use Bored Ape to trade an Azuki with a golden attribute, it can be set that only wallets with NFTs with this attribute can be traded. And this will greatly improve the transaction efficiency of NFT assets.
In addition, for most users, it is actually difficult to judge the specific market value of holding NFT. To this end, the Seaport protocol allows users to create a Dutch auction, set a start and end price, and auction duration, and then sell at a lower or higher price until a buyer is found or the auction expires.
Of course, OpenSea is one of the applications that consume the most gas fees, and the Seaport protocol has also been optimized, which will reduce the user's transaction costs to a certain extent. At the same time, Seaport has also enabled the tipping function, as long as the amount does not exceed the initial offer of the listed NFT.
值得一提的是，在NFT生态快速发展的同时，其安全问题却日益频出，包括此前OpenSea也因出现外部网络钓鱼攻击，导致用户部分NFT被盗。而为了保障安全性，Seaport协议在获得安全研究公司Trail of bits安全审计的同时，还发起了为期两周的协议审计竞赛，奖金总额为100万美元，任何开发人员都可以审核代码并提交发现的评审和错误以获得奖励。
“如同Uniswap用开源去中心化交易改变加密交易的游戏规则一样，OpenSea推出的Seaport可能具有同样的潜力，将从根本上改变NFT的购买、出售和交易方式，并吹响竞争开始的号角。未来的几个月和几年里，市场格局将发生天翻地覆的变化，许多项目会选择基于Seaport构建NFT市场，甚至该协议也许将成为NFT市场的标准。而由于代码是开源的，所有的市场都将参与到用户争夺中，届时谁将创造吸引用户的下一个杀手级功能？竞争对手又将以多快的速度赶上或超越？”名为“atareh”网友分析指出，NFT Summer也许很快就会出现。
总之，从此前收购NFT交易聚合器Gem，到如今推出Seaport协议，可以看出OpenSea对用户体验的日益重视以及巩固市场主导地位的决心。而Seaport协议的出现可以算是“NFT领域的UniSwap v3时刻”，在向Web3更进一步的同时，还提升了NFT交易的市场效率，促使该领域解锁更多创新用例并释放更大潜力。