As soon as the face of non-fungal tokens (NFTs), OpenSea is in the middle of a reinvention. The market that helped to turn digital collecting objects into a global craze now tries to position itself as a web3 house where users can not only exchange NFTs, but also tokens and ultimately a wider range of defi activities and other assets on the chains.
Earlier this year, OpenSea announced that it would come with a seapool, which would create a lot of expectations about what topping would be used for and where the platform would be. Little is known about the token, but OpenSea’s CMO Adam Hollander shared that the OpenSea Foundation would release more details at the beginning of October.
In this conversation with Coindesk, Hollander discusses how the platform is expanding further than NFTS, the long delayed marine approval and the challenge to keep both old users and newcomers busy with an ever-drizzly crypto market.
Coindesk: With the Rebrand of OpenSea, with whom you try to compete and where is this pivot point?
Adam Hollander: I would say that in broad lines we want people to consider OpenSea as their web3 house, which means that you must be able to easily exchange any type of activum in every chain or wallet extremely seamless and easy to exchange, regardless of your level of experience in crypto.
So if you are someone who gets in the trenches every day, then we have many very robust functions for you. And if you are someone who does not have much experience with crypto, then we are going to build seamless functions very easily to get you on board in crypto and to ensure that you can experience what it is like to exchange tokens, NFTs, NFTs, other types of assets in the chain.
So if you leave the NFT market and the trade on the platform, what are some of those functions you mentioned that will be available?
We are the world’s largest NFT marketplace. We expect that we will always be the world’s largest NFT marketplace, and we are very deeply care that customer base and makers and artists and so we do not leave NFTs. We evolve and expand our platform so that it can be a single place where you can come and exchange everything. Now the natural evolution of this has been the trade in token in recent months, so you can already come to OpenSea, and you can now exchange fungi to 22 chains extremely seamlessly for 22 chains
But we literally build new functions every day.
I would not say that our vision is limited to tokens and NFTs, there are several really interesting things that people now do in the chains with real assets and tokenization of things in the real world, everything from Pokemon cards to real estate.
And not to say that OpenSea immediately has plans in one of these specific places, but we consider this a single place that you can call your web3 home for almost everything you would do in the chain.
Given that the NFT volume is not near the highlights it was once, and given that the exchange market has become so saturated, are you planning to keep track of?
The volume today for NFTS is not what it was at the height then, literally, Jimmy Fallon and presidents and everyone talked about NFTs every day. That said, there were several billion dollars in volume in just this year in this year alone. And so it’s a lively market.
We actually see important revival in that market during the year. And when it comes to Tokenhandel and Memecoins, and everything else that happens in chains, outside of NFTs, there are hundreds of billions of dollars of volume that take place in the market, and OpenSea sees considerable growth.
Since we have launched our new reward program, we have seen almost 400% growth in volume only on OpenSea, and that is really exciting for us, because it means that we have built an incredible product.
The AirDrop announcement came from the OpenSea Foundation 10 months ago. It has not yet been released, so why did people wait so long?
The foundation releases token. I would probably mean the assumption that tokens should be released quickly from the day they are announced. There are many examples of tokens that have been indicated on or even formally announced and have not actually emerged for years and I would say that there is no correct or wrong way to do this, other than, of course, to validate that everyone wants it to happen immediately, because everyone is very enthusiastic about being rewarded for all the time and a site and volume.
I would just tell you that it is very important for the OpenSea Foundation that this is not a memecoin to be released and forgotten. If you look at the majority of the coins at your example, they tend to go to the right very quickly and then they immediately go to the right very quickly.
And most of them we are no longer talking about, and that’s because they don’t really serve a goal. They were not released for a different reason than the company decided, let’s launch a token. And people are always enthusiastic about the possibility of dropping free money on their heads, but at the end of the day it is important for us that Sea Token must be an integral part of the OpenSea ecosystem.
We are very intentionally in our creative discussions with the basics about ways that can affect that, and much of what we are trying to do is innovative, and much of what the foundation is planning, just takes time.
We believe that we will release token when the time is right to release it. That applies to what is good for OpenSea, which is good for the community, which is good for macro factors. There is a number of calculus on that. When we release it, we believe that the market will appreciate that the Foundation and OpenSea have been extremely attentive and deliberate about the way in which this token should exist as a part of our ecosystem, not a memecoin to be released and forgotten, and hopefully as something that has much more permanent power to see airdroped.
There has been some chatter online of OGs who may be angry with newcomers who come on the platform and find ways to get free money, while the OGs have been hanging for years, may not get their honest share.
How do you balance that you can take new users on the platform and encourage them to stay on AirDrop and at the same time keep your original users involved who may feel like the new people are looking for ways to make money quickly?
Of course we appreciate all historic users who have driven the volume through OpenSea in the past seven to eight years, and we have a plan where we see those individuals, and the foundation believes that it will be able to reward them in the right way.
As a company, we also have to constantly use the platform and use it today as one of their most important tools in Crypto, and we also believe that we can effectively reward and participate in people who participate with our platform today and participate in our different phases of rewards. And so I would just say that the OpenSea or the foundation is not to have entire cohorts customers, whether it is our most loyal customers in the long term, and it should not be good for us to have people who use the platform actively today.
And so we have a number of plans that we think we can do very well to reward everyone in an effective way. I can’t talk about the details, except to say, you know what we have said in our announcements, that if you have been on OpenSea for years and you have driven a lot of historical volume, we see you, you have not forgotten. And if you are using the platform today and you participate in our reward programs, you will be used sensibly by the foundation at TGE.
Read more: OpenSea teases sea smoking with the final phase of rewards in the midst of app launch