Written by: Babywhale, Glendon, Techub News

On the evening of February 13, OpenSea announced the launch on X OS2 public beta version and will launch platform token SEA, and hint that airdrops will be made. Although the specific timetable and details have not been released yet, the announcement has undoubtedly touched the hearts of many veteran players in the currency circle. In just one hour, the number of comments and retweets of the tweet has exceeded a thousand times, and the popularity of community discussions has soared.

OpenSea CEO Devin Finzer also tweeted, "The OS2 being launched is not just a new product, SEA is not just a token, and It is a brand new OpenSea built from scratch. "There were some rumors that the new version of OpenSea will refer to Blur's transaction-centric UI.

OpenSea Finally, if it were placed three years ago, it would definitely be It is a highly anticipated currency circle carnival, but now it is different from the past. The currency circle is now the world of MemeCoin, and NFTs have long been "out of date". What is even more sad is that even if we limit our focus to the NFT field, OpenSea is no longer brilliant. According to Dune data, OpenSea's transaction volume in January was only $195 million, a 96% plunge from its peak of $5 billion at the beginning of 2022, and annual revenue shrank to about $33.26 million.

According to nftpulse data, as of writing, Opensea's market share in the past 30 days has plummeted from 95% in December 2021 to 29%; On the other hand, OpenSea's valuation has also dropped from its peak of US$13.3 billion at the beginning of 2023 to around US$1.5 billion, and it even fell to the point of "selling it for sale".

So, why did OpenSea, which was once the overlord of the NFT trading market, come to this point?

Let's review a brief history of OpenSea's development to see how it rose rapidly and how it fell from the throne in the competition in the NFT market? mostLet’s talk about what impact will OpenSea decide to issue coins at this time, which may have on the entire NFT market structure?

The period of creation: hiding dormant in the NFT wasteland

Mu Yong questioned that among startups in the Web3 field, OpenSea is undoubtedly a legendary company that started from 0 , especially in the two years from 2021 to 2022, the company jumped from anonymous name to a super "unicorn" with a valuation of US$13.3 billion at an astonishing speed, and firmly ranked first in the NFT trading market. However, behind this glory is a dramatic history of market ups and downs. Therefore, the author believes that the rise and fall of OpenSea may also be regarded as a microcosm of the NFT industry's growth from wild growth to rational competition.

In September 2017, Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah received seed round financing from the well-known venture capital incubator Y Combinator with their innovative project "Wificoin", which was a project. The purpose of sharing WiFi using cryptocurrency payment is not related to the NFT track.

However, in November 2017, Dapper Labs officially launched the Ethereum-based crypto cat game CryptoKitties, which triggered a hype craze. The enthusiastic bidding once promoted CryptoKitties' The NFT collectibles sold for 247 ETH, which was about $118,000 at the time.

In the same year, Dieter Shirley, founder and CTO of CryptoKitties, proposed the concept of NFT (Non-Fungible Token) and promoted the definition of NFT. The launch of standard EIP-721. (Techub News Note, EIP-721 was later discussed and improved and was officially adopted in 2018, becoming the current ERC-721 protocol standard.)

It is exactly this The proposal of a standard changed the entrepreneurial direction of Devin Finzer and they decided to abandon the original "Wificoin" project and founded the NFT trading platform Opensea in February 2018.

According to The GeneralistDevin Finzer said, "I saw the potential of the NFT market because of a standard for digital projects, everything that appears after CryptoKitties will comply with this standard."

At that time, it was the early stage of development of blockchain and cryptocurrencies. The concept of NFT was not yet popular, and the entire NFT market was almost a wasteland.

Nevertheless, Opensea was not a unique NFT trading platform at the time. Rare Bits, which claims to be a "eBay-like zero-fee crypto asset market", is a competitor with an advantage over OpenSea. Interestingly, OpenSea also describes itself as " Ebay for crypto products”. (Techub News Note, Ebay is an online auction and shopping website that allows people around the world to buy and sell items online)

In May 2018, OpenSea raised $2 million from investors including 1confirmation, Founders Fund, Coinbase Ventures and Blockchain Capital. But Rare Bits received $6 million in funding a month ago, with investors including Spark, First Round and Craft.

From VC investment, OpenSea is at a disadvantage, 1confirmation partner Richard Chen prefers OpenSea. He believes that "Rare Bits' NFT" Not as good as OpenSea, OpenSea’s team is more lean and combative, and Devin and Alex have done a great job of discovering new NFT projects and pushing them to go online. And, when we invested in April 2018, OpenSea’s deal The volume is already 4 times that of Rare Bits. ”

In addition, the sales strategies of the two companies are also different. OpenSea insists on charging a 1% transaction commission ( Then gradually increase to 2.5%),Stable revenues maintain operations. Rare Bits adopted a "zero fee" strategy in 2018 and promised to refund the Gas fees generated by user transactions, trying to attract traffic by reducing user costs. This strategy attracted some attention in the early stage. It seems to be more user-friendly, but it is actually not conducive to the long-term development of the platform. The high operating costs are also destined to be unsustainable, especially as the "2018 cryptocurrency winter" is approaching. At the moment.

In this period, in order to expand the user base and strive for platform transaction volume, Rare Bits also tried to expand its business from NFT to a wider range of virtual commodity transactions, such as Cooperate with the animation platform Crunchyroll to launch "digital stickers" and explore non-NFT asset trading such as game props.

Unlike Rare Bits' diversification, OpenSea remains focused and its focus is always on improving NFT trading business.

But on the long road before dawn, OpenSea's days were not easy. The platform's early transaction volume continued to be sluggish, and early projects were limited to CryptoKitties , CryptoPunks and other a few NFTs.

According to Titanium Media, in March 2020, the team had a size of only 5 people, with an average monthly transaction volume of around $1 million. Based on the 2.5% commission rate at the time, OpenSea's monthly revenue was only US$28,000. If it weren't for the $2.1 million "life-saving funds" injected by strategic investors such as Animoca Brands at the end of 2019, the startup might have long disappeared in the industry's cold winter. Among them. As for Rare Bits, it was in jeopardy as early as 2019, until 2020, the platform completely withdrew from the market.

In the aftermath, OpenSea's ability to rise and become the king of the NFT field is inseparable from its focus on core business and streamlined operational decisions. Devin Finzer once said in an interview, "We are willing to develop in this field for a long time, regardless of the current growth trajectory. We want to build a decentralized market for NFTs and hope it will last for 3-4 years." p>

Time will soon arrive in the second half of 2020, and dawn will be approaching. This year can be saidIt is the watershed of OpenSea's fate. With the gradual recovery of the Crypto market starting in the second half of the year, OpenSea took the lead in taking advantage of the NFT market pioneer, and its platform trading volume began to rise rapidly. Dune data shows that in October 2020, OpenSea's monthly transaction volume reached about $4.18 million, an increase of about 66% from $2.46 million in September.

In order to allow the platform to have more types of NFT assets and attract wider liquidity, OpenSea has begun to fully implement the "open market" product strategy.

In December 2020, OpenSea launched a new feature "Collection Manager", which allows users to cast NFTs without handling fees (the Gas fee is borne by the buyer), the official This feature is also called "Lazy Minting", which separates the on-chain distribution from metadata, and users can upload the metadata of the product to OpenSea for free, and will only be sold when the product is first sold. Cast as on-chain ERC-1155 NFT.

This feature significantly lowers the creator threshold and is available on the shelves based on OpenSea NFT without censorship With this feature, every user can directly cast and issue NFTs on OpenSea. Putting aside this advantage, OpenSea also covers the widest range of transactions among similar platforms, including digital avatars, music, domain names, virtual worlds, transaction cards, artworks and other NFT collections, and its strategy maximizes the creators. The supply of works has attracted more and more users in the primary and secondary markets.

Objectively speaking, the potential of the NFT market is ready to go has created OpenSea's later success, but the field can quickly usher in an explosive period, and OpenSea is absolutely indispensable. tile and brick.

In 2021, the Crypto market ushered in a comprehensive "bull market", and OpenSea, which had been dormant for two years, began to truly show its strength.

NFT is a phenomenal hot topic, OpenSea has reached the throne with billions of dollars in monthly transaction volume

According to Dune data, OpenSea's data first in February 2021 Second-rateExplosive growth has come. On February 2, OpenSea's single-day trading volume exceeded $5 million, while OpenSea's trading volume exceeded $7.5 million throughout January. Ultimately, OpenSea's trading volume was close to $95 million throughout February, an increase of more than 10 times month-on-month.

It was also starting from the beginning of 2021 that a large number of commemorative NFTs began to be released on OpenSea, and bands, entertainment stars, sports stars and well-known artists began to launch them. With its own NFTs, a large number of well-known brands have also begun to launch commemorative NFTs or use NFTs to launch user loyalty activities. It can be said that the NFT that started with CryptoKitties combined Web3 with traditional industries for the first time, and also made many people who didn’t know Crypto come into contact with a brand new "species" for the first time.

NFT series launched by Budweiser

As the largest NFT trading platform, OpenSea finally waited for the arrival of the trend. Data shows that in March 2021, the transaction volume on OpenSea exceeded the $100 million mark for the first time, surpassing $300 million in July, while in August this figure increased by more than 10 times month-on-month, reaching $3.44 billion. It was also in March that OpenSea completed a $23 million round of financing led by a16z, and many angel investors, including Mark Cuban, also participated in this round.

Although NFTs actually started to develop rapidly since the beginning of 2021, the floor price of CryptoPunks series NFTs has also come from single-digit ETH at the beginning of the year to mid-100. What's to twenty ETH. But the main narrative of the market throughout the first half of 2021 was still around DeFi, and everyone's attention had not completely shifted to NFT at that time. The reason is that, in addition to the rising popularity of DeFi, there are no targets and concepts that can be hyped in the NFT field.

After entering the second half of the year, the emergence of a series of PFPs represented by BAYC has been completely ignited With the passion of the market, NFTs have also been recognizedIt is another phenomenon-level concept after DeFi. With the rise in NFT trading, monthly trading volume on OpenSea has also remained at a multi-billion dollar high, with the figure even exceeding $5 billion in January 2022. Nate Chastain, product manager of OpenSea, tweeted at the end of August 21 that the company had only 37 people, and that month, OpenSea's handling fee revenue alone exceeded US$80 million, and the per capita contribution of more than US$2 million is extremely high in any industry. A terrifying existence.

Before the end of 2021, OpenSea will be sprinting continuously for most of the time, and during the period, except for the just mentioned Nate Chastain due to the insider trading scandal Apart from resigning, OpenSea has almost no other negative news. Even if other NFT trading platforms have obtained large amounts of financing, they have no way to shake OpenSea's status. Even almost all products of NFT trading platforms have more or less referenced OpenSea.

The challengers are eyeing each other, but OpenSea "betrayed" Web3 and intends to go public?

Amid a prosperous era, the turning point quietly came, and all this started with the rumors of OpenSea's listing...

In early December 2021, Bloomberg reported that American online ride-hailing company Lyft CFO Brian Roberts will join OpenSea and serve as CFO. At the same time, Roberts said he is planning an IPO plan for OpenSea. This was originally a very ordinary news, but it caused some discussion in the Web3 industry. Many people believe that OpenSea should issue tokens to give back to OpenSea users, and this is what the Web3 project should do.

Perhaps because I felt some pressure, two days later, Brian Roberts personally came out to clarify that there is currently no IPO plan and said that he is "thinking about what the IPO will eventually be There is a big gap between looking and actively planning an IPO, we have no plans to do an IPO, and if we have one, we will seek community participation. ”

This A slightly ambiguous statement not only did not dispel the community's concerns, but instead strengthened everyone's choice to go public for OpenSea, because he did not mention the issuance of coins at all.

If OpenSea decided to issue coins at that time, there might not be any exciting stories in the NFT trading platform track, but it was the "selfish" decision to choose IPO, which made A hole was torn apart from the originally unbreakable city wall.

At that time, OpenSea occupied more than 90% of the NFT trading market on Ethereum, and after its attitude of not issuing coins spread, some entrepreneurs came from it. Found an opportunity and quickly launched an NFT trading platform for issuing tokens. LooksRare is one of them. Although it was not the first project to launch a "vampire attack" on OpenSea, it obviously had a great influence after OpenSea was ready to go public.

On January 10, 2022, LooksRare was officially launched. The team said that only users with transaction volume of more than or equal to 3 ETH on OpenSea will hang a single piece on LooksRare NFT can obtain airdrops. In addition, users can pledge the obtained LOOKS airdrop to share all transaction fees on the platform. LooksRare has exceeded OpenSea's single-day trading volume 2 days after it went online, and LooksRare is more than three times that of OpenSea in the 7-day trading volume data as of January 19, 2022.

When the crack is torn open and the market finds that OpenSea is not completely invincible, everyone will Each of them began to show their magical powers. X2Y2, which was launched in February 2022, Element focused on BNB Chain, Zora focused on art NFTs, and Magic Eden focused on Solana NFT market are constantly eroding OpenSea's existing market and the possible expansion. market. Perhaps it is a bit extreme to say that arrogance is a bit extreme, but at least it is not preventing problems before they happen at its peak, which is indeed a major mistake in OpenSea's strategy.

Nevertheless, OpenSea's market influence is still hard to shake. Time has entered the second quarter of 2022. On the one hand, Yuga Labs will soon issue APE tokens, and on the other hand, trading of "blue chip NFTs" such as Moonbirds and Doodles is still active, as the NFT with the best liquidityIn trading market, OpenSea still controls the lifeblood of the NFT market.

The main person responsible for changing the entire track or NFT collapse was quietly born at this time. Its appearance fundamentally changed everyone's attitude towards the NFT market. stereotype of the look.

Blur emerged suddenly, and the "first" in the NFT market changed hands

At the end of March 2022, Blur announced that it had completed a US$11 million financing. At that time, I believe many people still I wonder why a new NFT trading platform came out at this point, but after Blur went online at the end of October, it gave everyone a blow.

A completely different UI, which clearly states that there will be airdrops for orders, Bids, and transactions, and the airdrop is just a "treasure chest" of unknown how many tokens will be opened . Blur has achieved the ultimate in product and gameplay design with a UI designed for transactions and a clear but unclear airdrop. Although many people criticized Blur's UI as very difficult to use, after getting used to it, everyone found that such a design is indeed much easier to use than OpenSea in simple trading. To make an analogy, if OpenSea is an e-commerce platform for NFTs, then Blur is an exchange for NFTs.

Price are listed from low to high, and real-time transactions and transactions are displayed on the right. Price distribution. With such a convenient trading UI design and airdrop expectations, a large amount of funds began to rush into Blur. Previously, many NFT trading platforms rely on tokens to attract traffic in the short term, but OpenSea's market share in transaction volume was not challenged in monthly or quarterly data. However, the emergence of Blur made OpenSea's transaction volume until a week ago The proportion returned to more than 50%.

But it is precisely because of this that large funds have gained the ability to manipulate the market and bought and sold frantically. At that time, the Crypto market had entered the deep bear market. Look The large funds have to brush airdrops regardless of cost, causing the price of a large number of NFTs to be almost smashed, and retail investors have lost interest in NFTs. After Bitcoin has fallen to around $20,000, the "last goalkeeper" of crypto assets also left the market in disgrace. The collapse of the NFT market coupled with the ascension of the new king Blur, OpenSea became cannon fodder.

At the beginning of 2022, it completed a US$300 million Series C financing with a valuation of US$13.3 billion. Two years later, at the beginning of 2024, the CEO of OpenSea has admitted that he is considering being acquired. In this round of Bitcoin "one-person bull market" In addition to Pudgy Penguins, which has expected airdrops, the floor prices of a large number of former blue-chip NFTs have fallen to a terrible decline. For OpenSea, if you don’t make any changes, you may be reduced to giving up years of hard work, which is definitely not what they want to see. Therefore, OpenSea's decision to launch the platform token SEA is a self-rescue move to cope with the continuous decline of the platform business; on the other hand, this former king Perhaps there is also a little unwillingness and ambition to return to the top. So the question is, is it possible for OpenSea to change the competitive landscape of the NFT market after issuing coins?

The recent surge in trading volume, is OpenSea expected to reshape the competitive landscape of the NFT market?

There is no doubt that the most likely impact of OpenSea’s coin issuance and launching the OS2 public beta version is Blur. As a powerful enemy to subvert OpenSea's position, although Blur has shown a decline in Crypto market trend in the future, as of writing, its trading market share in the past 30 days has exceeded 44%, firmly ranking first in the NFT market Take the seat.

In addition to the unique product UI and gameplay design mentioned above, Blur also attracted the Bid Airdrop (bid reward token) and zero-fee model. A large number of users, who have made airdrops many times in 2023 to seize market share, can be seen from the data:

On February 15, 2023, Blur conducted the The first quarter saw an airdrop of 360 million BLUR, with airdropping tokens accounting for 12% of the initial total supply and released immediately. According to Glassnode, Blur's market share surged after the airdrop of BLUR tokens, with its NFT trading volume jumping from 48% to 78%, while OpenSea fell 21%.

On February 23, 2023, Blur launched its second season of 300 million BLUR airdrops. This airdrop directly pushed Blur to significantly surpass OpenSea, DappRadar data shows, 23 years 2BLUR trading volume reached about $108 million on the 22nd of the month, compared with OpenSea’s only $19.27 million during the same period.

To a certain extent, Blur's two large token airdrops made indestructible contributions to breaking OpenSea's "moat". As the saying goes, if the NFT market has not yet recovered, if OpenSea's SEA token attracts users through airdrop or pledge rewards, it is very likely to copy this strategy and even follow the looksRare and x2y2 of that year. Wait for the "OpenSea Killer" to launch a "vampire attack" on Blur to compete for its core users.

In fact, since OpenSea confirmed that it would take airdrops, it has aroused the expectations and heated discussions of many Twitter netizens, and many people believe that this will be the year. One of the largest airdrops.

In addition, in terms of handling fees, the OS2 beta version launched by OpenSea recently will be Market fees dropped to 0.5% and transaction fees were 0%, which directly benchmarked Blur's zero-fee model. When SEA went online, OS2 was very likely to build a very good deal with the combination of "low fee + token incentives" punch. Flexible competitive strategy.

Objectively speaking, most users are profit-seeking in nature, if the reward mechanism of SEA tokens is more attractive, plus there are currently Blur users Some of them are originally from OpenSea, and it may not cause these users to flow back to OpenSea. However, Blur's "moat" is that its transaction speed is faster than OpenSea and Gas is more efficient, and it still has technical advantages in the short term.

The market has already reacted due to the information of issuing coins. According to nftpulse data, as of writing, OpenSea's single-day trading volume has reached about $29.8 million, and the transaction share has soared to 70.6% of the total single-day trading volume.

For the entire NFT market, OpenSea's launch of SEA tokens is undoubtedly a good thing, except In the short termStimulating the sharp rise in NFT transaction volume. OpenSea also tweeted that OS2 has supported cross-chain transactions on 14 chains such as Flow, ApeChain, Soneium, etc. So, will SEA tokens become a universal token for the multi-chain NFT ecosystem, thereby promoting What is the development of the NFT market for Ethereum external links (such as Solana)? This is worth looking forward to.

However, from another perspective, the upcoming fierce competition between OpenSea and Blur will once again squeeze the living space of second-tier platforms such as LooksRare and X2Y2, and Blur probably won’t watch his former rival make a comeback. Blur may launch more token application scenarios, or token rewards will further inspire user loyalty. In addition, Magic Eden, also a late-stage star, should not be underestimated. With its dominance in Bitcoin and Solana's chain, its trading volume on the entire platform once reached US$3.2 billion in the past year, accounting for more than 30% of the market , second only to Blur's $3.8 billion (about 36%), while OpenSea's trading volume in the past year was only $1.2 billion, accounting for less than 12%.

In short, the author believes that OpenSea's SEA token is not only the key to the platform's self-rescue, but may also become the driving force that drives the NFT market out of a sluggish market. In the long run, the competition between OpenSea and Blur will also prompt the NFT field to develop towards more complex financialization and multi-chainization. As for whether OpenSea can regain its dominance, whether the future situation will be a two-strong fight, or whether Blur will continue to be the king, it depends on the performance of the SEA tokens after they are launched. Let us let the bullets fly for a while!