The Opensea is one of the if not the most well-known NFT marketplace of our time. It is often the first choice of NFT marketplace for both buying and selling of digital assets due to its wide popularity among the community. However, it is also mentioned in some scam reports over time which helps to question the legitimacy of the website.
What Is NFT Marketplace?
NFTs have taken the world by storm in the recent past and have made millions for investors and artists both. NFTs are nothing but certificates stating the ownership of the digital asset and marketplaces are responsible for trading them from one user to other in exchange for cryptocurrency.
There are many NFT marketplaces today, some of which are theme-based while some don’t follow a particular theme. A popular example of NFT marketplaces are,
What is Opensea?
Opensea was founded in the year 2017 and has the first-mover advantage in the ecosystem. It is a non-theme-based marketplace and hence doesn’t list NFTs of only sports or art or music. It has a wide range of NFT types in its marketplace. It has earned quite a name for itself over the years as can be indicated by millions of daily visitors to their site. It’s only for this short period of 2 months, it has been toppled by a new marketplace named LooksRare.
However, it still manages to witness transactions worth millions of dollars every day.
The reason can be attributed to its having compatibility with a wide range of wallets. Wallets, which are responsible for storing virtual assets like cryptocurrency and NFTs play a vital role in an investor’s journey online. Due to this wide range of wallets in the opensea marketplace, it proves to have fewer barriers for investors than other marketplaces. This allows interoperability of assets and hence can easily be transmitted from one crypto wallet to other and hence is user friendly.
Source: Cryptomaniaks.
The second reason for the wide success of this marketplace is the ease of trading. Many NFT marketplaces charge an upfront fee to create an account on their marketplace. Some even have restrictions on who can join the platform which depends on the follower count. There are no such conditions for creating an account on opensea.
Opensea doesn’t charge any fee upfront. It also doesn’t charge any fee for listing an NFT on its marketplace. What it charges is a gas fee (more on this later) and a certain percentage of the sell amount of the NFT as its hosting fees. It charges 2.5% of the sale amount and no service fee for buyers. Whereas some of the other well-known marketplaces charge and a hefty sum of 7.5 % and 3% respectively.
Source: NFTX- NFT Art Exhibition.
Advantages of Opensea:
Including the low overall cost of hosting on the opensea and the ease of transaction on the marketplace, there are some other advantages as well to this NFT marketplace.
Ethereum And Polygon:
Opensea has based on the Ethereum blockchain and hence it’s no wonder it accepted wrapped Ether as a cryptocurrency for choice. However, it also supports the Polygon blockchain. It allows instant transactions for Ethereum base cryptocurrencies like ETH and DAI. There is also a huge advantage of using Polygon over Ethereum, which is that transaction involves no gas fees.
No Gas Fees With Polygon Network:
Ethereum is one of the oldest cryptocurrencies in existence and works on the principle of Proof of work and not on much-improved Proof of stake. Hence the transaction on the blockchain is exposed to “Gas Fees” which can be regarded as transaction fees on the blockchain. However, these gas fees can prove to be horrendous and can vary from $10 to $130. This fee depends on how much the network is congested.
However, if you use the Polygon network to carry the same transactions, you will be charged $0. The only charge which you will be inclined to pay is to transfer the assets from Ethereum Blockchain to Polygon Network.
Clean User Experience:
Some forums are continuously bashed on the user experience of opensea. The problem they say is that it is too simplistic for the times. I agree it’s very simplistic and hence I put it in the list of the advantages. It is very easy to navigate through the website as it has a very clean user experience.
- Variable Modes of Selling:
It has 3 methods of selling an NFT on its marketplace and hence provides a lot of flexibility for the seller. It has 3 modes,
- Fixed Price Listing
- Declining Price Listing
- Highest Bid Auctions.
Along with these advantages you have an added advantage of bundling different NFT assets together to sell them in one go. This is also one of the unique features which opensea has. Learn more about the advantages here.
Disadvantages of NFTs:
There are some disadvantages to the most popular marketplace. One of them is what I mentioned earlier of it being too simplistic. It’s personal preference though, so I wouldn’t say it to be disadvantageous. However, Opensea has witnessed some scams in the recent past in their organization.
One of the most well-known incidents is when an employee used internal knowledge and practiced insider trading. What the employee used to do is learn what art is going to get featured on the main website page before it got featured. The employee used to buy it and then profit out of it once it get featured on the main page. After the organization got the knowledge of it, the employee was fired.
After that Opensea has taken appropriate measures in prohibiting employees from using inside knowledge to stop malpractices like Insider trading, scams, etc.
The other disadvantage that artists or sellers report is that Opensea only allows them to hold 10% royalties in their assets and not more than that. However, this is advantageous for buyers and hence can profit out of it more in the secondary marketplaces.
Can It Be Trusted?
Yes In my view it can be trusted. There haven’t been major hacks reported over the wide network of opensea. All the transactions are protected with their in-built security. User credentials as well and their wallet ID have also been protected till now and not compromised yet. It has been able to grant much value for the users it is serving.
