OpenSea plans comeback with 2.0 overhaul

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OpenSea dropped a cryptic tweet yesterday, hinting at a “new OpenSea” coming in December 2024.

What’s OpenSea cooking? No one knows, but a waitlist to the new version of OpenSea has racked up about 308k wallets sign-ups so far.

Initial speculation is pointing to an OpenSea airdrop token, despite the NFT platform’s strong hints historically at taking the IPO route.

Of all the major NFT marketplaces, OpenSea is the only player that has yet to launch a token. Blur, LooksRare, X2Y2, Tensor and Sudoswap all have a live token, while Magic Eden announced plans to launch one in August.

A user leaderboard that tracked rewards for usage was also spotted in OpenSea’s private beta, which the official OpenSea X account has retweeted.

If OpenSea is indeed launching a token, that’s cool, but it feels far too little, too late. NFT markets are down bad, with total NFT market caps down about 97% from their 2022 peaks.

The points meta was hot in early 2024, but it’s since faded off, so a points program built on NFT trading seems highly unlikely.

For these reasons, it’s hard to imagine OpenSea doubling down on an NFT-only strategy.

In Solana land, Magic Eden has already pivoted to fungible token trading of BTC and ETH with a mobile-centric strategy on its own Magic Eden wallet.

Based on its X account, Tensor seems to be persisting with an NFT product. The Solana NFT marketplace is still seeing an average of $3 to $6 million weekly trading volumes.

Blur’s last tweet was almost four months ago and Zora has pivoted to capitalize on memecoin trading with its new “ERC-20z” token standard that allows NFTs to be tokenized into fungible tokens.

Most other NFT trading marketplaces have negligible daily trading volumes of no more than $22k, and are pretty much dead.

OpenSea hasn’t had a great year. The once-dominant player was brutally outcompeted by Blur, laid off 50% of its staff in November 2023, and then received a Wells notice from the SEC in August that alleged its NFTs were securities.

Keep an eye out for details on OpenSea 2.0 at Devcon next week.

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