OpenSea Drops New Marketplace Protocol for NFTs

NFT developers just got a new tool to build with as the bear market rages on.

OpenSea, the leading NFT marketplace, has launched what the company bills as a “web3 marketplace protocol for safely and efficiently buying and selling NFTs.” 

The protocol, called Seaport, will allow for a more varied, but also more specific, NFT trading experience — users will be able to post offers for NFTs including ERC20, ERC721, and ETH, instead of just ETH trading like OpenSea facilitates currently. 

This means that instead of listing an NFT for a certain amount of ETH, users will be able to list a potential trade for specific NFTs. For example, a user could use Seaport to create an offer to trade a Bored Ape for a bundle including a CryptoPunk, a Cryptoadz, and a bit of Uniswap’s UNI token. 

Bartering

This brings NFT trading more into the realm of bartering, a dynamic that those who traded Pokémon cards or other collectibles may find familiar. 

The trades could get more granular — according to OpenSea’s blogpost on Seaport, individual NFTs could be specified in a trade, as well as specific traits. So a user could post an offer to trade their Bored Ape for a particular CryptoPunk using its ID number. Or they could post an offer to only trade an Ape for one of the nine Alien CryptoPunks.

“Basically the market liquidity just got way deeper because now all the standing offers and swaps are connected,”  Shegen, a Solidity developer, told The Defiant. “This is basically a Uniswap v3 moment for NFTs in terms of market efficiency and access to better tools for the general public.” 

Uniswap v3 was a major development for DeFi in May of last year, which increased the capital efficiency of the liquidity deployed on the automated market maker (AMM).

In its introductory blog post, OpenSea emphasized that, in true crypto fashion, the protocol isn’t owned by anyone — it’s open-source and has no contract owner, making it much closer to a public good than a proprietary product. 

Cheaper Transactions

Developers are impressed with the gas optimizations of the contract, which includes a “significant” amount of assembly code, according to OpenSea. Assembly code is more granular than high-level languages like Solidity, making it harder to write, but allows for a higher degree of control.

Shegen added that the OpenSea contract is one of Ethereum’s biggest gas guzzlers — the optimizations, some enabled by the use of assembly code, should help to make transactions cheaper for products using Seaport.

As the NFT market volumes continue to flatline, Seaport may enable developers to lay the foundation for another bull run in the fledgling industry looking to establish itself as mainstream. 

Building on the platform looks to have already commenced — the founder behind the play-to-earn game Worldwide Webb who goes by hack3r.eth has already unveiled plans to build a user interface on top of Seaport.